Qalqiliya

A visit to a walled city in ancient Palestine should be the subject for awe and amazement  of the  kind that leaves fond memories; in occupied Palestine it just drains you, yet somehow, there is hope. The 45,000 inhabitants of this once busy town are surrounded by a wall, the  25 foot high apartheid wall, and where it isn’t quite finished, an electrified fence marks the final stages of the noose that will seal off besieged city from the settlements beyond.

Our guide, Shuhad, who works for the Medical Relief Society, an NGO which started up in 1979, took us anti clockwise around the Wall. It always shocks, the sight of this concrete barrier, where trees shoot up on the other side to hide its ugliness from the sensitive eyes of passing Israeli motorists. No such joy for us this side where graffiti provides light relief from the stench of the sewage that drains through the wall – the debris piles up this side of the iron grille, and in torrential rain, the Palestinian land is backed up with sewage, covering the newly planted vegetables, destroying the hundreds of olive saplings waiting to go to Palestinian fields.

Building work disturbed Shuhad’s impassioned talk about her homeland;  behind us a new building is under construction, but the one in front of it has to go, an old beautiful villa behind which stands a terracotta house. It is too close to the wall by a few yards. The top floor of the house behind is out of bounds, simply because the owner can see over the Wall from the rooftop. If the owner  goes up there with friends – they will destroy that floor.  To our left and at the the end of the wall, by the electric fence which continues the illegal stranglehold of Qalqiliya we can see the greenhouses and fertile land of the man whose only means of entering it is at the one and only gate at the other side of town. There, he and hundreds of others gather at 2 in the morning, to reach their land or to work in Israel, it takes a long time to process each individual.

Cameras are placed every 50 yards on the Wall, a discreet green, but highly invasive – one camera even looks into the path of the sewage, a fine sight for the observer on the other side.   The camera will also observe evidence of the optimistic spirit of Palestine where row upon row of small olive trees testifies to the indomitable spirit of the people of Qalqiliya. We move onto the eastern part of the fence where Shuhad points through it to a field of trees and scrub. ‘That is my land. That is our family land. I wanted to take my father there before he died, but I couldn’t…’ Her voice fades away. There is only birdsong, and a terrible heaviness in the air.

We return to her office to meet the Director, Mohammed; we listen to his tales of deprivation in the town , 19 wells confiscated and the people of Qalqiliya are forced to buy their own water back at twice the price of the Israelis. The Ariel settlement has doubled in size since the Oslo agreement and the ratio of water used by Palestinians and Israelis is 1:40! Worse, the demographic of the region has changed and the Israelis in the area comprise 52% of the population. Qalqiliyans are leaving, businesses are closing, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people happens bit by bit.

“We do what we can”, he says,  ”providing essential services, for women, for children, the disabled and all those living in the difficult conditions surrounding Qalqiliya. Every day the occupation takes its toll on our health, things are not improving. We want a right to live in an independent state yet more and more of our basic rights are taken away. The world must know about this suffering and international organizations must act to implement UN Resolution 194 and our right to return.”

 
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