The settlement near my home has about forty or fifty settlers. Then there’s a handful of soldiers or private security guards that patrol the area in four or five jeeps. They have a tower set up nearby so they can watch everything. We can’t move off our property without them seeing us. There are maybe ten to twelve of us Palestinian men who work in the settlement next door. Me personally, I’m not afraid of the settlers. They know me, I’ve worked in the settlements, so they go easy on me. But with my kids, some of my other family, some of my neighbors, the settlers can be rough. My family and many of my neighbors feel like they’re trapped at home, trapped in the limits of our own land. The settlements are all around us, and they have private security. If you leave your land, security guards will see you and come hassle you. We are like prisoners here in this area.
Sometimes, tourists will come onto this land to have picnics, especially in the springtime. Settlement soldiers will come and surround them and tell them the area’s closed off. And for a long time, some settlers would come to our house maybe twice a month and shout at us, tell us to go away. They’d have guns with them, and they’d scare my children. They’d say things like, “If we see you in the street, we will shoot you. If we see you with the sheep over in those fields, we’ll shoot you, we’ll take you to jail. If you don’t stay in the house, we’ll shoot.” They’d tell the children they couldn’t go outside our fence. Now I don’t really let my kids leave the property, except to go to school. And my kids have nightmares—they dream of being shot.
But it’s actually gotten better. When the settlers first arrived, they were much rougher. Some of those people left, and some of the new people are a lot less threatening. But I remember an episode a while back where some settlers caught a man near the settlement. He was in the fields picking nettles, and some settlers spotted him. They took all of his clothes, and they made him walk home naked. Everyone in the village saw him, and he just kept his head down and walked all the way home. The settlers are nicer now, but they say the settlement is going to expand. It makes me feel like I’m choking. We already feel afraid all the time. I think it’ll get worse when they get bigger.
THE BIGGEST PROBLEM IS WATER
We have electricity sometimes through our generator. But gas is expensive. We usually only turn it on around once a week to wash clothes in our washing machine. It’s hot now, and we have no electricity for fans. In the winter, we have no heat to keep us warm. When it gets cold, we stay in bed all day under the blankets to stay warm.
The biggest problem for us is water. The pipes run through the settlement, and we’re the last in line in the village. During parts of the summer, we hardly ever have water come through the pipes. We have to ask the soldiers at the nearby military base to turn on the water. We have to ask a lot—for days—before they’ll turn it on, and then they might turn it on for only a day or two.
We have to buy some water in tanks, and then we get some from a well on the property. The well doesn’t have enough water in the summer, so we’re buying a lot. Each tank is about 60 shekels and holds a few hundred gallons of water.6 We also save water as much as we can. The water we bathe with, we’ll save and use to flush our toilets. The children all wash using the same bucket of water. There’s very little waste.
At the moment there are about thirty of us in the family living on the property, and about ten in the family who are temporarily living elsewhere for work. Then there are the animals and the olive trees. We have to make priorities. We make sure the children have enough water first, then the adults, then the animals. I don’t think there will be enough water this year for our olive trees. We won’t see any olives from them this year.
At the nearby settlements there’s no problem with water. People living there don’t have to have tanks on their roofs or anything, they get enough from the pipes. The settlements look like heaven to us. They even have swimming pools there.
And we still can’t build on our property. My father has paperwork that goes back to 1943 that proves ownership of twelve acres, all the land we live on, and three of the structures on the property. They won’t demolish those. But anything else we try to build on the property, they’ll demolish if we don’t have a building permit. Five years ago my father was going to build a small house for just him and my mother. He tried to do it without a permit, since it’s so hard to get one. He got a demolition order immediately. So he turned the foundation he’d started into a small chicken coop. Next we tried to build another floor on the house he’d been living in. We built it, but we got a demolition order. The army gave us the order three years ago but haven’t showed up with bulldozers yet. We don’t know when they might come, but we expect it all the time.
WE LOVE THIS LIFE
We have two boys and three girls, our youngest is one and a half. We have one room where we all sleep, and then we have the kitchen. Still, it isn’t enough, and we can’t build. The kids, they need a place to run around and play. There’s no electricity, so they can’t even watch TV. They spend a lot of time fighting each other.
There are things I love about living here. It’s not the city. It’s not overcrowded. It’s simple to make a life here—we raise animals, live off the land. We love this life. It’s normal for me. We are coping with the situation, we are coping with the settlements. We have lived through hardships from the beginning. I’d like to move, but I can’t leave my land here. So if I go, what is the nature of my life? I work in the settlement, so it is very difficult for me to move and find work. My land, my family, my father and mother are all here on this land. Even if I move, my parents will not go.
But still, we feel like we are suffocating. If the settlements keep growing and surround our property, our lives will be hell. Right now, we are depressed from being worried all the time. I can’t describe my feelings. We feel inferior, and no one helps. The settlements will only grow, and so will my family. Right now I’m just trying to make money, so that we can have a better life. For my children, I hope they live in safety, that they are not hurt or attacked, that they study and are good at school. Knowledge is the last thing that remains for us to achieve, and I want them to study at university. People we know in Bethlehem, they have water, electricity, it’s a much better life. A number of villagers have moved already—they’ve gone out looking for something better. Someday we might move. Here, there’s no room to build and grow.
1 Following the Oslo Accords in 1993, the West Bank was carved up into three fragmented administrative areas. Area A is made up primarily of large cities and is fully controlled by the Palestinian Authority. Area B comprises some 440 villages and is under Palestinian civil control and Israeli security control. Area C includes mostly rural areas and numerous Israeli settlements. Area C is fully controlled by the Israeli military. For more on administrative Areas A, B, and C in the West Bank, see the Glossary, page 304.
2 We have changed names and obscured details about this narrator’s location out of concern for the safety of his family.
3 At the time, 60,000 shekels equaled approximately US$15,000.
4 Palestinians in the West Bank need special permits to enter Jerusalem. Some permits are granted on a one time only basis for special reasons, and some are granted for access to work in Israel. The application process can be difficult and expensive, so many Palestinians risk imprisonment by entering the city illegally.
5 100 shekels equals approximately US$29. 175 shekels equals approximately US$51.
6 60 shekels equals approximately US$17.
GUARD TOWER AT DAMUN PRISON, ISRAEL
ABDELRAHMAN AL-AHMAR
Lawyer, 46
Born in Deheisheh refugee camp, West Bank
Interviewed in Bethlehem, West Bank
Abdelrahman Al-Ahmar lives with his wife and four children in a small apartment complex on the edge of the refugee camp where he grew up. The complex is surrounded by trees and garden greenery and is also home to four of his brothers and their families, as well as rabbits, birds, puppies, and even a horse. During the course of several interviews, the house is full of the sounds of his children playing. Sometimes they come to sit and listen to their father’s story, interjecting parts of the narrative they know by heart.
Abdelrahman’s comfortable house is a retreat from the harsh conditions he has faced his entire life. He was born in the Deheisheh refugee camp, where his family struggled against extreme poverty and regular attacks from soldiers and settlers. He later spent nearly twenty years in prison, most of it in administrative detention, where he was interrogated using torture techniques that have now been outlawed by the Israeli High Court.1 In 1999, the court ruled that the Israeli Security Agency (Shin Bet) does not have legal authority to use physical means of interrogation. It found tactics must be “fair and reasonable” and not cause the detainee to suffer. According to the Supreme Court case, a common practice during questioning was shaking prisoners violently enough to lead to unconsciousness, brain damage, or even death (in at least one reported case). However, in a society where 40 percent of men have spent time in prison, thousands of people still bear the physical and psychological marks of these methods.
Abdelrahman seems reserved at first during our initial meeting—he speaks little and watches us carefully as we ask questions. But as he relaxes, his dark humor and natural gift for storytelling begin to emerge. He switches between English, Arabic, and Hebrew as he speaks, and the only time he becomes quiet again is when talking about the most extreme forms of torture he endured. However, he also tells us about how the most difficult moments in his life have inspired him to become a leader in his community.
WE DIDN’T EVEN HAVE COCA COLA
I’m the same age as the occupation. The war of ’67 started in June, and my mother was pregnant with me at the time.2 She and my father were living in the Deheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem.3 They’d been pushed out of their homes in Ramla during the war in ’48, and that’s when they’d moved to the camp.4 They lived in tents in camp for over ten years, and then my father was able to build a small house in camp in the fifties. Then during the war in ’67, a lot of people fled the camp and ended up living in Jordan, especially in Amman.5 But my father said, “We’re not leaving again.” He didn’t want to lose his home again. So during the war in ’67, my father stayed to protect the house while my mother went up in the woods and hid for a few days. She gave birth to me a few months later in the camp, with the help of a midwife.6
I remember the camp of my childhood was a neighborhood of shacks made of cinder blocks and aluminum roofs. Most people in the camp built their own houses, like my father had. We all had leaky ceilings, no plumbing, no bathrooms. There were just a few public restrooms we would all share, and the toilets would flush into the gutters in the streets. We didn’t have showers. We’d heat up water in a basin and wash with that. We depended on UNRWA for clothes.7 I remember getting clothes twice a year, and they were often the wrong size, and sometimes all that was available were girl clothes. We were so cold in the winter. For heat, we had fires in old oil barrels outside our homes, and families would gather around them to warm up. I remember the fires would get so high, we couldn’t see the faces of the people on the other side of the barrel. And there was so much disease—cholera, infections of all sorts.
Growing up, we could hear our next-door neighbors every day. We knew their fights, conversations, everything. And there were so many places that you couldn’t get to by car because the spaces between buildings were too narrow. You had to walk between the houses.
As children from the camp, we’d feel different from other kids when we went out into Bethlehem, the city. We would see kids who had bicycles, but we didn’t have any. They had good clothes, but we didn’t have them. They even had Coca Cola! My parents weren’t accustomed to the kind of poverty we were living in. They were born in villages with homes on large pieces of land. When I was a kid, my father used to work in Israel. He was a stonecutter. But he wasn’t making enough money for the family—he had four boys and two girls to support. There was no one in Deheisheh with money. So everybody was struggling financially, but at least it gave us this feeling of being equal.
OUR WINDOWS WERE ALWAYS OPEN, SO WE GOT USED TO THE SMELL OF TEARGAS
I felt pressure from the Israeli army and Israeli settlers at an early age. The most difficult issue that we had to deal with was the settlers. I was only six years old when the settlers started coming through the camp in the early seventies, so I grew up seeing them. The main road from the settlements in the south runs through Bethlehem to Jerusalem, and it goes right through the camp. I think the settlers who passed through saw Deheisheh as something they needed to control.
The settlers were led by a man named Rabbi Moshe Levinger, who saw all of the West Bank as part of Israel.8 They wanted Israel to claim the land around the camp, and they found ways to make life miserable for us. They would come in buses maybe once a week. They’d get off and start shooting randomly in the refugee camp with live bullets. They’d shout, throw stones, provoke fights. Whenever anyone tried to fight back, the settlers would alert Israeli soldiers who would chase us through the streets and fire tear-gas canisters. Our windows were always open, so we got used to the smell of teargas.
I remember settlers entering my UNRWA school and smashing desks, doors, windows. The teachers couldn’t protect us. There was always a sense of fear and insecurity. When I was younger, these things affected me tremendously. They affected my relationship with my teachers and the way I looked at them. I kind of lost respect for them because I’d seen them degraded. And after some time, other students and I stopped listening to them because we knew they were powerless.
Then in the early eighties, the military built a fence around the camp. It was twenty feet high, and the only way in and out was a gate leading to the Hebron–Jerusalem Road, the one that the settlers passed through. I once heard that some tourists who came to Bethlehem saw the fence and wondered if it was the wall of a city zoo! In the camp, we had a curfew—we had to be in by seven p.m., or the soldiers guarding the entryway wouldn’t let us back in through the gate. And we couldn’t leave after curfew under any circumstances. Some people died because they couldn’t go to the hospital after the gate closed at seven.
Around the same time, settlers brought trailers across from the camp and tried to establish an outpost there. I remember being stuck in the camp after curfew and hearing the patriotic music of the settlers blaring through the night.
