Despotism in the West Bank: Palestinians Are Denied Ability to Plan Their Towns

On my way to the Brooklyn Friends' meeting house last night for a presentation on a Palestinian village in the West Bank that has lost its land to the Israeli army, I talked by phone with a friend who sighed when he heard my plans. "I don't know how you can bring yourself to these meetings, myself I would find it exhausting and I'd be hopelessly radicalized." After that I started thinking that I really am some kind of idiot, I keep needing the same information over and over again. My wife calls it my 511 problem–too much information. When I did a book on a Peace Corps murder in Tonga, I went to the tiny island country ten times. Nuts. When does the accumulation of  facts get in the way of  actual judgment? Then I thought, This is my way, I like to try and understand something in my bones before I say stuff, I don't get my understanding so much from reading books. Also I am thinking of writing a book on American Jewish identity in the context of the apartheid conditions on the West Bank and want to at least attempt to pass the literacy tests that are imposed on anyone who dares to speak out here. Look at Jimmy Carter–what right did he have to even open his mouth, being so misinformed!

There were only about 35 people in the room, and at the head of the table were the mayor of the town of Al Aqaba in the Jordan Valley, a beefy guy in a wheelchair named Haj Sami Sadiq, and the head of the town's threatened kindergarten, Rawhiya Sbeih, about 35, slender, wearing Arab fashion of the sort I've seen on the street in Damascus: tight black headcovering, a silver sequined belt and tight pants. On the table in front of them were countless pinwheels made by the students at the kindergarten, on which they'd written about their dreams of peace.

This speaking tour, led by the Rebuilding Alliance of Palo Alto (which has a connection with the Corrie family that lost its beautiful daughter to Israeli thuggery) is intended chiefly for Congress and the State Department and editorial boards. But it didn't make all that much sense to the Brooklyn lefty audience. The emphasis of the mayor's speech was that the people of Aqaba are peace-loving. Yes the Israeli army took most of the town years ago because the terrain is so similar to Lebanon's that it was the perfect place to do war training. Yes Israel had put three camps where the shepherds used to graze goats. Yes, 750 people have been "internally displaced," whatever that means, and the beautiful kindergarten, built by the Norwegians, Belgians and Japanese, is under threat of being demolished at any second because it doesn't fit the Israelis' plans. But we are a peaceful people. We try to work with the Israelis.

I suppose this is the sort of message that they want to hear in editorial boards. Any sensible person would be shaking their head, reduced to tears, or determined to make a vigil outside an American synagogue till his feet were blistered, as Henry Herskovitz did when he got back from the West Bank. Any sensible person would go screaming from the room. We sat there. For we are up against powerful forces of public relations, which can hear no wrong from Disneyland, so the Rebuilding Alliance must be creative, and at the end of the thing they made us hold up pinwheels for a photographer, with idiotic grins on our faces, to be shown to congressmen.

The best presentation was from Shmuel Groag, an Israeli architect with Bimkom, an Israeli nonprofit that is waging a battle for "planning rights" for  Palestinians. From him I finally got some understanding of both the nobility and the Kafkaesque character of the situation. And he was able to offer a bit of irony, and suggest in a winking rubber-faced way (he reminded me a little of Harpo Marx) that not everything we were seeing was hunkydory, but in fact was tyrannical, and that there is an actual path of resistance, which he was taking. 

Groag had a computer out and showed us a number of pictures. The first was of the pretty village. The second was of Haj Sadiq's city council meeting under an oak tree. They do so because they cannot even build a town hall. They cannot build a town hall because they are in Area C, the 60 percent of Palestine that under the Oslo Accords is subject to Israeli governance, and under the conditions of that governance, a planning process that even under the British more than 60 years ago or under the Jordanians after that had three levels of scrutiny–local, regional, national–has been collapsed by the Israelis to one level, the "national," and therefore a Palestinian must go to a faroff military facility to apply for a building permit, and this is a frightening and bureaucratic situation for him.

Groag was trying to show the enormity of the situation. "Planning and politics go together. The Palestinians have no representation on the planning committee. They can't vote. Oftentimes they don't know what is being planned for them."

He showed us pictures of Area C, rural Palestine, in which so many Palestinians live under Israeli control, comparing it to a "swiss cheese" in which there are tiny pockets of Palestinian society. He said that there are about 150 Palestinian villages in this area, but only 15 are recognized as "legal." The other 130 are described under Israeli governance as illegal. They are under a constant threat of demolition. The threat, says Groag, is actually more powerful than the demolition, because it stymies all growth in that village, and fills people with dread. Al Aqaba is one such village. "Even though it is a normal village, it is considered as non-existent. The mayor is keeping the policy of peace. He will deal with anybody who will help him."

Groag then did overlays of Area C with other maps to show the "physical obstacles" to Palestinian society, and growth. The separation wall takes up 10 percent of the land. There are 221 Israeli settlements, some of them official, some not. But they are "facts on the ground." That is just 1.5 percent of the area, but if you look at the Israelis' plans for future development of these settlements, it covers much more of Area C. The "forbidden roads" take up even more of the land in Area C.

And on and on. Groag showed us maps of the Palestinian village of Kharbata and of the Israeli settlement built on some of Kharbata's land, Modi'in. In Kharbata there is a highly-circumscribed zone where Palestinians are legally allowed to live. They can seek building permits through the Kafkaesque process for that area. But there is no planning whatsoever for Kharbata. Compare that to Modi'in. It has a sophisticated plan for its development, and two different levels of planning boards and procedure. A lot like where I live.

As I sat there, I kept thinking about the several building permits that I have gotten in villages and townships in the Hudson Valley in order to make improvements on the three houses I've owned. Right now there is a preliminary approval on my door, having to do with electrical work. My friend Andrew Pidala, an electrical contractor, brought the electrical inspector in to show him his work. Now and then I walk into an old wooden building, the town offices, with a little sketch of a deck or my architectural drawing of a bathroom where a closet once was. It is a homely procedure. Occasionally I have had to go to the county level–but rarely. And the idea, the idea that I would have to go to a U.S. government facility to do such a thing, and not to my local board, people whom I know or have the ability to talk to… It boggles the mind. It is Orwellian. Oh but we are a peaceful people. We would never take up arms against such an authority!

Groag never used the words "tyranny," "despotism," "totalitarian," or "racist." No, those were just the words forming in the thought bubbles over the heads of everyone in the room. He said that no community can grow without planning and zoning. "It is the duty of any government to do planning, not the duty of the community…. The Palestinians are willing do do planning. But all the Palestinians' plans are rejected based on technical reasons." Or these approvals take forever.

Still, Groag's group has submitted to this Kafkaesque administration in the case of the village of Al Tuwani, surrounded by religious settlements near Hebron–actually submitting plans for the village, so that they can gain "access to the court system." And because of international pressure, and court rulings, he says, in some instances the Israeli civil administration of Area C has actually come forward and said, We are not going to destroy this illegal village at this time. "They can build for a little while." Still a Palestinian who builds faces the dilemma that Sami Sadiq faces when he wants to put in a water tank to serve the kindergarten. "The higher I build it the higher the water pressure," Groag said. But no one is telling him what he is allowed to do, whether he can go up 5 meters more, or 10, and in the end he must assume the risk himself, knowing that the tank might soon be destroyed.

The tremendous cognitive dissonance that the presentation created in the room–between the formal realities that the people at the head of the table all claimed to respect and the rage that was building in the minds of an American audience bred on civil rights–ruptured a little during the Q-and-A. A man asked about the "demographic" picture for Palestinians in the West Bank and suggested that these policies are a form of administrative ethnic cleansing, aimed at pushing Palestinians to clear out. Lubna Hammad, the Arabic translator and a member of Adalah N.Y., said, "It's very hard for the time being to solve the bigger problem. This entails changing whole policies that are in place for decades. It's very hard to say, we are going to fight back right now." So one of the answers is to take Palestinian villagers' sides in local bureaucratic struggles against Israeli control, from the Ni'lin protests against the confiscatory wall to Hebron's fight against the sprawling religious settlements.

Another questioner held up a card with three maps of the West Bank over time and said that the steady diminution of Palestinian holdings during occupation and the complete infiltration in the remaining lands of Israeli settlers and administration suggested to him that the two-state solution is a dead issue. "There's hardly anything left of Palestine."

Donna Baranski-Walker, the head of the Rebuilding Alliance, a very diplomatic person, said, "I think a lot of us share your feelings." But per Hammad's program, "Al Aqaba represents a set of steps that we ask you to take with us." She had met with the State Department over Al Aqaba. The State Department people are appalled by the confiscation and demolition, why Prem Kumar formerly of the State Department (now CFR) had stood there and stopped the Israelis from demolishing houses in Al Aqaba on one occasion. But notwithstanding the fact that this group will be meeting with the Vice President of the European Parliament, this is an American political problem. The State Department needs to hear from senators and congressmen. "How can we get numbers?" she said plaintively.

After the session was over, I went up to talk to Groag. I was thinking of something Steve F. says to me, that Israelis are reasonable people who can't wait to get rid of the West Bank. They are willing to abandon the settlements for a peaceful solution of the problem. Groag is not allowed by Bimkom's rules to get into politics, but when I told him this he raised an eyebrow. He said, Of course the polls show this, 80 percent of the Israeli public is for giving up the settlements. But then 60 percent of the Israeli public also support the transfer of Israeli Arabs from the Jewish state! So what can you say about attitudes? He directed the conversation to the actual administration of the Occupied Territories. Look at the convulsion in Israeli society when Gaza was evacuated. For 6,000 settlers. Here we are dealing with 200,000 of them, and when the Kadima-led government even mentioned the idea that West Bank settlers should be compensated for moving back to Israel, the Shas part of the coalition rose up in anger, and Olmert's people shut up about the proposal. And settlements continue to be built. The implication was: It's an impossible situation, the two-state solution has made zero progress in Israeli discourse. And what about Jerusalem? I said. Groag's rubber face took on a manic absurd gleam.

A girl came up, in her 20s, with short dark hair and glasses, to ask Groag about the right of return. "Hi my name's Hannah."

"Where'd you get your Arabic?" Groag said. I guess he'd heard her talking to the Palestinians.

"I spend a lot of time in Palestine, I work for a group called birthright unplugged."

The face was familiar. I said, "Wait– are you Hannah Mermelstein?"

Hannah brightened. "Yes." This is the girl who brings American Jews to Palestine, and non-Jews too, she doesn't discriminate, to show them what's going on there.This is her life, when she's not supporting herself by giving kids in Brooklyn SAT lessons.

I gave Hannah a big hug before I left. And that's why I'd come there: to hug Hannah Mermelstein, to believe in being Jewish for one beautiful moment in the face of tyranny.

Related posts:

1. Israel planning a ‘mass expansion’ of settlements in the West Bank. Your response Sec. Clinton?
2. Gathering Storm on West Bank: Italian Judge Struck, Yeshiva Settlers Fire Rocket at Palestinian Village
3. Israel cracks down on center of non-violent resistance in West Bank
4. ‘JPost’ Insists on Jewish Biblical Right to West Bank
5. While the world looks the other way, the colonization of the West Bank continues