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.