قفص الضفة الغربية

بقلم : أتش دي جرينوي

بوسطن جلوب - 5/6/2007

لقد أصبحت المناطق المحتلة ما كانت توصف به أيام الانتداب البريطاني بأنها "حديقة حيوانات مشددة الحراسة"

The West Bank cage

By H. D. S. Greenway The Boston Globe

Published: June 5, 2007

'Welcome to the Allenby Bridge crossing point," says the sign flanked by Israeli flags as you leave Jordan and enter the occupied West Bank .

The Jordanians call it the King Hussein Bridge, after the present king's father; the Israelis have kept to the old name for Field Marshall Sir Edmund Allenby, the British general who drove out the Ottoman Turks during the First World War - thus becoming, his officers liked to say, the first Christian to capture Jerusalem since the Crusader knight Godfrey de Bouillon in 1099.

But the British left in 1948, leaving Arabs and Jews to fight over Palestine . Forty years ago, an Israel army captured it all, but the struggle still continues.

The River Jordan looks less significant than I had remembered it, but the security is considerably more. An armed Israeli soldier, M16 rifle at the ready, boards the shuttle bus that takes you to Israeli passport control. There are endless and inexplicable delays, but Palestinians have learned to be patient during 40 years of occupation.

When I used to travel this road often in the 1970s, Palestinians did not like the Israeli occupation, but there was more freedom of movement. Israelis often came to occupied Jericho for lunch, and Palestinians from the West Bank were able to work in and visit Israel .

Intifadas and an ever-tightening Israeli grip have changed all that. People from the West Bank find it difficult to enter Jerusalem and Israel proper now. Old Israeli friends who used to accompany me to West Bank towns find it shocking that I go there now.

There are many new and better roads, but some are for Israelis only, and Palestinians tell me they have to get a hard-to-acquire pass to drive on them. And then there are the checkpoints, nightmares for Palestinians who sometime have to wait for hours. Their lives are full of fear.

When you first catch sight of the Israeli settlements, they look like crusader fortresses on the hilltops. The settler movement may have lost some of its invincibility in Israel after Ariel Sharon had settlers forcibly removed from Gaza , but they are sure of themselves in the West Bank . Settlement building never ceases. Israelis say these are not new settlements, but natural expansion due to population growth. For Palestinians there is little difference, as their once-biblical landscape is transformed into armed Israeli suburbs.

In Hebron you can see Israeli settlers armed to the teeth and full of swagger. A number of them are from America , playing out frontier fantasies. Settlers and Arabs sometimes kill each other, and another cycle of revenge is entered into. Both sides have their martyrs and murderers. In many Hebron shops, a picture of a smiling Saddam Hussein beams down from walls. Palestinians say he is admired for standing up to America and to Israel - a martyr to what is seen as the increasing lost cause of Arab pride and greatness.

There is a feeling that the high hopes brought by the Oslo accords of the 1990s are over, and that the Palestinian dream of statehood may never be reached. The violence of the second intifada brought them nothing, and the continuing violence in Gaza against Israelis and against each other is futile.

Studies have shown that when mice are put in overcrowded conditions they attack each other, and Gaza is sometimes described by Palestinians as a vast cage. Seventy-six percent of the population is under 30. Most are jobless. So effective have Israelis been in destroying their institutions, Palestinians say, that no one should be surprised when anarchy reigns and militant, Islamist Hamas fills the vacuum.

Hamas and the Jewish settlers have one thing in common. They are well organized, and the most pious among them believe that God wants them to have these rocky hills. History has shown that when God becomes involved in politics, guns are brought in while tolerance and compromise are left outside.

The irony, for someone who remembers the wall that divided Jerusalem when Jordan ruled the West Bank , is to see the new wall snaking dragon-like over the hills, dividing even parts of Jerusalem again as well as the West Bank . Israelis call it a separation fence to protect them from suicide bombers. But the occupied territories have become what Palestine was once described in the tense days of the British Mandate: "A well-guarded zoo."

H. D. S. Greenway's column appears regularly in The Boston Globe.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/05/opinion/edgreenway.php

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نشرنا لهذه المقالات لا يعني أنها تعبر عن وجهة نظر المركز كلياً أو جزئياً

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من حق الزائر الكريم أن ينقل وأن ينشر كل ما يعجبه من موقعنا . معزواً إلينا ، أو غير معزو .ـ