Trees and threats in Umm Salamona

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After a week in Egypt, I`ve been back to Umm Salamona (see the blog "The hills are alive" for background). A lot has happened since last time! As much as 450 trees have been planted, almond and olive trees, as well as pines, which have strong roots that will protect the soil. Still the trees are only children, tender little plants hard to spot unless you come close. In spite of this they will be a strong defense for the land they are planted in, hopefully.


People removing weed. One of the planted trees in front.

450 trees. 2550 to go. It seems like a tremendous task as we tear away the weed, plant by plant. But Awad is working to enlarge support and resources. Next week he will have a meeting with the Palestinian minister of agriculture to ask him to provide a bulldozer. UN has promised to pay workers to help out, and the authorities of Bethlehem are also involved.

Others are not so happy about tree planting in Umm Salamone. Israeli authorities seem to be especially upset by all the internationals involved. The land owner, Ra'ed Taqatqa, has been threatened on several occasions. The civil administration manager of the settlement Azyon has warned him that the internationals are not good for him. He has a permit to travel to Israel in connection with his work which will now perhaps be withdrawn. A soldier told him that he would be kidnapped and that he would make Ra'ed press the thorns of the weed into his hand.

How can a hilltop be so important? Of course it is part of a bigger picture. The settlements are a way of making the West Bank part of Israel, by claiming Israeli sovereignty on Palestinian land (as the settlers are still Israeli citizens and protected by Israeli soldiers), taking nature resources from Palestinians and justifying the military presence deep into Palestinian territories, with the check points and closures that go with it.

It is part of a bigger picture, but still it is also just this: A man who is not allowed to do whatever he wants with his land, who is not allowed to take whoever he wants there. Someone who tries to steal something, steal it by way of law (as they use the old Ottoman law about uncultivated land), steal it by way of power (as they can withdraw the permit), steal it by way of brutality and threats, steal it by whatever means they have. It is the ways of the strong, but maybe, maybe the child trees in Umm Salamona will be stronger still.

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.