The hills are alive

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Umm Salamona is a village south of Bethlehem. In Umm Salamona there is a hilltop lying close to the big settlement of Efrata. The inhabitants of Efrata and two other settlements in the area want to use this hilltop for a cemetery. The Palestinian family owning the hilltop has taken the case to court, and the supreme court ruled that the land had to be cultivated within three years, otherwise it would be confiscated (and beyond doubt given to the settlements). This is according to an Ottoman law that Israel often uses to take land from Palestinians.

The land owner, Ra'ed Taqatqa, with the local TV team in the background.

Some kind of apathy seems to have stricken the owner family at this point. For two years and ten months, nothing happened. Then Awad Abu-Swai discovered what was going on, and mobilized people in order to start cultivating the land. Awad is the same person as I wrote about in my September blog about the village Artas, which is also threatened by land confiscation, and where he has initiated a similar project. Every day people come to remove weed and stone and prepare the land for planting trees. Next week almond trees are coming, and in December olive trees. The plan is to plant a total of 3000 trees at the hilltop in Umm Salamona.

Lars, Gjermund, Christine and I came there on Monday because we had received an SMS from a friend, saying that Israeli authorities were coming to inspect. It was necessary to have as many internationals there as possible, to show the support that the project had. We were around thirty internationals there that morning, and local TV had also come. "Don't talk to the soldiers", Awad warned us. "Don't throw stones or burn weed"(we were carrying stones to build walls) . It was important not to give the Israeli authorities anything to complain about. But the authorities never showed up. They didn't want to with so many internationals present, I was told. They only wanted to speak to the land owner alone.

Removing weeds. The houses with the red roofs in the background belong to Efrata.

So we spent the morning carrying stones and building walls. It is a battle against time in Umm Salamona. Two months to prepare the whole hilltop and plant 3000 trees. Will they make it? I don't know. The theft and the injustices in this place makes my heart heavy. But it leaped when Awad mentioned the almond trees. It reminded me of a poem by Nikos Kazantzakis:

I said to the almond tree
"Sister, speak to me of God".

And the almond tree blossomed.

The wall we built that morning.

A Bedouin suburb

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This week I joined a tour to a Bedouin village. It was arranged by an Israeli peace activist, Rotem. I had imagined something remote and exotic, but Rotem took us to what I would describe as a suburb of Jerusalem. The village, Anata, is actually within the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem, as they were defined when Israel unilaterally annexed East Jerusalem in 1967. But it is going to be outside the wall that is separating Jerusalem and Israel from the West Bank. All in all the wall is going to separate 55 000 Palestinians from the city that they are now residents of, while it will include three Israeli settlements that are now outside the city line. The wall is thus a good example of Israel's policy when it comes to Jerusalem: As many Jews and as few Palestinians as possible.

The Bedouins in Anata used to live in the Negev desert in the south of today's Israel. Today around 160 000 Bedouins are still living in this area, where they are suffering under Israeli discrimination, many of them denied such basic services as water and electricity. As far as I could understand, the Bedouins in Anata had been forcibly displaced by Israel. It seemed to me that their life in Anata was a mere shadow of what it used to be in the desert, because the space was so limited. For instance, the sheep were kept in small sheds, and could very seldom go out, because there were not enough plants for grazing. Instead the farmers had to buy food for them.



A shack for sheep. I forgot my camera at home, so Gjermund has taken the photos. Thank you, Gjermund!

Some of the bedouins still lived in tents or shacks, while others had moved into houses. However, building permits are hard to obtain for Bedouins as for other non-Israeli citizens of Jerusalem. The story of Salim Shawamreh and his family is an illustration of this. For ten years he tried to get a permit from Israeli authorities to build a house on his land. He was given different reasons why he couldn't build: that the land is sloping (hasn't been a problem for construction other places in Jerusalem), that the land is agricultural land (which it is not). In the end they just told him that they had lost his documents. Salim got the picture and built the house without a permit. It was demolished. The Israeli Committe Against House Demolition (ICAHD) built it up again, and three more times it was demolished, every time rebuilt by ICAHD. When we were there, the house was still standing, but Salim and his family are not living there. The experience has been too traumatic for them.



Salim's house. Rotem to the right, and Yusif, our host, to the left.

Between 2000 and 2008 673 Palestinian homes were demolished. More than 60 000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem are living with the risk of having their homes demolished. If you want to read more about this topic, see this UN report.

We did have a good time with the bedouins. We had a wonderful meal together, and then the women and men split and drank tea in two different rooms. We chatted together, watched Turkish soap operas on TV and then slept on matrasses on the floor. Was it exotic? It was both different and familiar. Islam, for instance, one of the women, married fifteen years old, and now, at my age, she has four children. But her favourite actress is Angelina Jolie.

A Geography lesson

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Last Sunday I had a lesson in Geography. My lesson consisted in a visit to one of the three shepherds' fields in Beit Sahour, namely the Catholic one. As I have mentioned previously, Beit Sahour is known to be the place where shepherds received the news about the birth of Jesus. There are three different compounds held to be the place of this event in Beit Sahour, belonging to the Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Protestant churches respectively.

I have lived in Beit Sahour for a while, but as we walked through the gate and passed the rosary sellers, a whole new world opened up. Tourists whom I so far only had seen through the windows of their buses, strolled around the area. They were from all parts of the world, it seemed. Many of the groups had brought their own priest and were holding services. The air was humming with prayers and singing. For me, coming from a Lutheran context, witnessing the phenomenon of pilgrimage was something quite special. Religion isn´t much about geography in Norway, even though some people have started walking to our cathedral in Trondheim the previous years, reviving an old tradition from our Catholic period.

I guess you can call the shepherds the first pilgrims, as they made a travel in order to witness and worship. The word pilgrim comes from latin peregrinus, meaning foreigner. Still the shepherds were not foreigners in Bethlehem, they were travelling within their own neighbourhood. And these pilgrims in today's Beit Sahour seemed to feel quite at home as well. So maybe pilgrimage can be about being at home in the world, about seeing the religious significance of the geography surrounding us.

Since I have studied Church History and the history of Christian art, I was thrilled to see that there was not only a quite new chapel at the compound, but excavations of a church and monastery from the fourth to sixth century. The remains even included an olive press! I was especially fascinated by all the (according to my lay judgement) well preserved mosaic floors. Almost all the colours were gone, but I kept gazing at all the little pieces, trying to imagine the patterns and writings. Maybe they also said something about geography, about the significance of the ground beneath our feet?



Looking out from the monastery ruins, we could see the settlement Har Homa in the horyzon. Har Homa is maybe the most visible presence of Israeli occupation in Beit Sahour. Does this geography have anything to do with religion? The World Council of Churches think so. In the beginning of September, they issued a declaration calling the settlements illegal, unjust and incompatible with peace. The declaration ends with a prayer:

Jesus Christ, our brother and Saviour,who walked the roads of the Holy Land and lived as one of her people,

walk with those who find their roads blocked and their families divided through illegal actions in an occupied land.

Jesus Christ, our brother and Saviour,

who challenged injustice and offered new definitions of power,

challenge us to express non-violent support to all who suffer and to speak out on the injustice they experience.

Jesus Christ, our brother and Saviour,

who embraced encounters with people from different faith and cultural communities,

embrace and uphold all who seek a just peace and reconciliation between divided peoples in the land of your human experience.

Talking about water

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Since we're on the theme, I thought I could mention the newly published report from Amnesty International this week. It shows how water is distributed very unevenly between Israelis and Palestinians. On average Israelis consume four times as more water than Palestinians do. Israel controls the main sources of water at the West Bank, and spends most of it on Israelis. The average Palestinian uses 70 liters a day, while The World Health Organization recommends 100 liters.

In Gaza Amnesty describes the situation as critical. The only source of fresh water is polluted to the degree that it is unsuitable for human consume. The blockade and the war in December and January are the reasons for this.

To me what this report talks about is something that I have already heard about and seen myself. Driving through the West Bank, it is easy to tell settler houses from Palestinian houses. The latter all have black water tanks on their roofs, because the water supplies -as said in the report controlled by Israel- are sometimes cut off for weeks at a time, so Palestinians have to buy water to use in these cases. The empty roofs of the settlers speak their own language about whose needs are put first. So do the lawns and swimming pools that the Amnesty report mentions.

I have heard representatives of the UN and CARE International talk about the salty drinking water in Gaza and the severe consequences this has for the health of the people in Gaza. "Imagine to make your tea from salty water", the CARE worker asked. Israeli water authorities apparently don't have this imagination. They have already rejected the report as partial and false.

Here you can read what the Norwegian newspaper Dagsavisen writes about the report. Gjermund also has a comment there. You can find more information on Amnesty´s own website.

The bottom of the bucket

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In Norwegian we have the expression "bånn i bøtta" - the bottom of the bucket. It means that something is really miserable. I thought it was the right way to describe the olive harvest this year. We were told that it was fifteen percent of an average year. It wasn`t hard to understand as we walked from tree to tree in search of some olives to pick.

I asked why there were so few olives this year. The answer was that it had been too little rain. Someone also mentioned an unusually warm period in May. Olive seasons vary a lot from year to year, and it very well be that this year is part of this pattern. Still it got me thinking about the vulnerable balance on this earth of ours.

Some months ago I started reading a book about the climate changes by a Norwegian journalist, Klima - hva skjer?. There it said that not only are some parts of the world going to be wetter, but the dry areas are actually going to even dryer, because a higher temperature will make more of the moist stay in the atmosphere. After some weeks at the West Bank I have started to realize what an abundance of water we have in Norway, and I see how dependant people are on this resource. It`s hard to imagine how life will be in the Middle East with even less water, and trying to picture life at the bottom of the bucket makes me a bit worried.



If you speak Norwegian, and want to read more about the climate changes, try this website.

Why is it hard to pick olives?

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In two days 96 people are coming to Beit Sahour to take part in the Olive Picking Program, arranged by Joint Advocacy Initiative, where I work, and Alternative Tourism Group. The hope is that the participation of foreigners will make it easier for Palestinian farmers to harvest their olives.

Why is that difficult? One of the reasons is that farmers are being attacked by Israeli settlers as they try to work on their field. Often Israeli soldiers passively stand by as this happens, even though they are obliged by law to intervene, and at other times soldiers expel Palestinians from their own land. Another reason is that some Palestinians simply cannot reach their land. Sometimes it is unreachable because of the separation barrier, other times access to land surrounding settlements is made impossible by for instance patrol roads or barbed wire.

In some cases land is being closed off by Israeli authorities. They sometimes give the reason that this is to protect settlers from Palestinian attacks. However, settlers do not stay away from this area, but steal the crops that grow there or even live on and grow the land themselves. In other cases land is closed off by settlers on their private initiative. The Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem estimates that settlers have blocked Palestinian entry to tens of thousands of dunums (one dunum is 1000 square metres). Farmers who try to gain access to closed off land face a complex and little forthcoming buraucracy.

Agriculture is the main sector of the Palestinian economy.

An olive tree in Beit Sahour. If you want to read more about the situation of Palestinian farmers, try these two reports from B'Tselem: Access and settler violence

Oh love, aren`t you tired yet?

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What has kept me so busy the last weeks is the Witness Visit, a delegation from different YMCAs and YWCAs all over the world who visited the West Bank and their brother and sister organizations here. I had so many impressions during those days.

Some were impressions of brutality. In Hebron, we walked under metal nets that the Palestinian inhabitants of the old city have put up to protect themselves from stones and rubbish thrown at them by the Israeli settlers living in the floors above. In Jalazone refugee camp outside Ramallah a woman told us about her seventeen year old son who had been shot by Israeli soldiers. They kept the ambulance away until they knew he was dead. Another of her sons had been put in jail for walking too close to a settlement. In a checkpoint between Bethlehem and Jerusalem a child was crying because he had to walk through the security check without his mother. He was maybe five years old.

And still the greatest impression from the witness visit was the love. In Beit Sahour Nidal, my boss, gave a beautiful speech where he asked the international community to support Palestinians. I thought it was beautiful because I know that he has been committed to this cause for more than thirty years. What a faithfulness! In Jerusalem we met a young man from Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). He wasn`t advocating his own rights, but the rights of his neighbours. Do I have the awareness and courage to see the wrongs of my own government like he does? Nyaradzay, the general secretary of the World YWCA, wanted to talk to each and everyone we met, the women at the food production centre, the young people at the vocational training centre. Everywhere she praised people for their hospitality, their good work and the care they showed for others. And she was right. In the middle of brutality and dire outlooks, mothers were still loving, young people still learning and hoping for the future, and children still trusting, smiling and playing. In his song "The Faith" Leonard Cohen sings: "Oh love, aren`t you tired yet?" It is not.



Nyaradzay and women working at the food production centre at YWCA, Jericho.



Children in the YWCA kindergarden in Jalazone.