life under occupation

The circumstances and rules change from day to day. You'll see concrete blocks and other barriers by the roadside at intersections with roads leading to Palestinian villages. These barriers can be put in place within a matter of hours so that a few soldiers can effectively seal off access for as long as they wish. Imagine what that's like, in your own country, to be denied freedom of movement to go to work, to take your produce to market, to go to school or to go to hospital. And it happens all the time. Then there are the checkpoints where your papers are scrutinised and if you're lucky, you go through relatively quickly. The brewery at Taybeh for instance told us they used to get their bottles from Portugal but they had such hassles from the Israelis that they now have to buy from them. Hops and grain for making the beer are also imported and secure delivery for meeting orders cannot be guaranteed. This does not make for a healthy economy.

The whole situation is in fact very edgy and paranoid. A young foreign journalist told us an instructive story. He'd bought a sim card shortly after arriving in Palestine, paying cash and not registering name or details. Nor did he give the new number out to anyone. A few days later he gets a call from someone high up in military security questioning him as to what he was doing there. So how did they get the number? You figure it out.

I've already described life in East Jerusalem. You might have heard on the news that a settler family has been murdered. This was near where we stayed the first night and we've now learned that about 20 of the men of this village have been rounded up (reports of people being maltreated) and the whole area closed off. Reminds one of German and Vichy reprisals in WWII. That occupation lasted only four years, this has gone on for forty four! Armed settlers can attack or bully Palestinians at will, with soldiers there to protect them.

We saw many memorials on walls and public places and in private homes to martyrs and we're not talking of suicide bombers but people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. On our path in even some rugged and isolated areas we found spent military cartridges and a tear gas grenade.