Living as prisoners in their own home

ELKANA, WEST BANK -- Munira Amer is ecstatic to see visitors. The 41-year-old mother of six is so keen to have a conversation with someone outside of her immediate family that she almost bounds across her family's muddy plot of land to meet a trio of strangers.

It's rare that the Amers see guests any more, and it's easy to see why. The family home has the appearance of a medium-security prison, surrounded on three sides by tall, wire fencing and on the fourth by an eight-metre-high concrete wall.

There's no way for Ms. Amer to invite the visitors in today, either. By following an out-of-date map, they arrived at one of the sides with no gate. She apologizes that she must speak to them through the fence.

The Amers' four-room concrete bungalow has been sealed off from the rest of the West Bank village of Mas-ha by a concrete wall since 2003, when the controversial security barrier Israel is building was erected between Mas-ha's 2,000 Palestinian residents and the neighbouring Jewish settlement of Elkana.
Only the Amer home was left on the Israeli side of the eight-metre-high wall. Then, under pressure from settlers who were nervous about having a Palestinian family living in their midst, Israel fenced the family in on the other three sides.

Consequently, their house has become a lonely island unto itself that is neither in Israel nor the West Bank.

“We live in a state by ourselves. We've been cut off totally from our people,” Ms. Amer said. Her five-year-old son Shaddad stood beside her with his face pressed glumly against the chain-link enclosure, watching a pair of Israeli joggers go by on the other side.

The Israeli army gave the family keys to a gate that opens toward Mas-ha, but not to a second gate beyond that one that the army controls. Ms. Amer said her husband goes to work each day in Mas-ha not knowing whether he'll be allowed to return home that night.

Shaddad, meanwhile, is too small to open the iron gate himself, so if no one hears his cries for someone to open it for him when he returns home from school, he's trapped on the other side until someone notices. Ms. Amer said she once found him sleeping in the dirt outside the gate, his head on his school bag.

Their proximity to the Israeli security apparatus — the house near a road constantly patrolled by army jeeps — means few of their friends and former neighbours from Mas-ha ever visit. The Muslim holy month of Ramadan was particularly lonely, she said.

“My children are always upset, always angry. They're constantly hitting the ball against the wall. But at least they go to school. I'm in prison. I can't leave the house. I feel like I have to be here all the time or they'll take it.”
Her neighbours on the other side in Elkana, a gated Jewish settlement ensconced about four kilometres inside the West Bank, acknowledge having some sympathy for the Amers' plight, though they insist the harsh measures are necessary.

“Some people might use this house to attack the settlement,” said Moshe Raik, a 62-year-old restaurateur. Although he acknowledges there's no suggestion that the Amers themselves have any ties to Palestinian militant groups, he sees the family's situation as something that was brought on them by other Palestinians. “The terror that they created among the Jews forced us to make these walls.”

The Amers' situation is the most extreme example of a phenomenon that the security barrier's route has created in other parts of the West Bank as well. Thousands of Palestinians near the barrier have been cut off from their historic lands and long-time neighbours — in some cases, as with Qalqilya in the north, entire cities of them.

On a hill near Bethlehem, the 200 residents of the hamlet of Nu'man are caught in a similarly absurd and hopeless situation.

The barrier's planned route would see Nu'man and the surrounding area, considered by Israel to be part of metropolitan Jerusalem, which it annexed in 1967, enclosed on the Israeli side of the barrier. But none of those who live in the 25 homes that make up Nu'man have Jerusalem identification cards, meaning that under Israeli law they're considered to be living illegally within the city's boundaries.

They only have West Bank Palestinian ID cards, meaning that unless they get Israeli-issued permits, they can be arrested for travelling in Jerusalem, the same city that Israeli maps say they live in.

Reinforcing their isolation, the road linking Nu'man with the communities north and west of it has been blocked, forcing residents who have to travel that direction to do so on mule back. When the barrier is completed, the only drivable road out of Nu'man — south to Bethlehem and the West Bank beyond it — will also be severed.

“We're cutting them off from their natural environs, but not offering them equality or citizenship,” said Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli human-rights lawyer who is fighting to have the route of the wall radically changed to cause less hardship to Palestinians. “We're basically creating a Paris-like situation of a national, religious underclass. It's an extremely volatile mix.”

There's little question that anger is growing in Nu'man, an area that previously posed little security concern to Israel. Residents feel they're being slowly driven out, forced into situations where the only rational choice for them and their families is to abandon their homes and move into the parts of the West Bank that Israel seems willing to concede to the Palestinians. The Israeli human-rights group B'Tselem alleges that the route of the wall is designed specifically to allow Jewish settlements such as Har Homa, visible from Nu'man on a neighbouring hill, to expand into land currently occupied and used by Palestinians.

“They want this land, but they don't want the people who live here,” said Ali Ibrahim Abdullah, a 50-year-old unemployed construction worker. Even as he spoke, Israeli military jeeps had closed the route to Bethlehem and were interrogating a dozen men trying to cross between the two communities. “They're trying their best to make us move out, but I will die here before I decide to leave this land. This is my home.”

It's the same answer that Ms. Amer gives when asked why the family doesn't leave their lonely existence and join their family and friends on the Palestinian side of the barrier, which many suspect Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon wants to make into an international border.

“Where can we go? This is our land. This is our house,” she says defiantly. “I keep thinking that one day, this wall will go.”

The Globe and Mail; 4 January 2006