These days, Bethlehem is virtually enclosed by a 'Security Wall' which snakes across the West Bank, keeping the Palestinian Territories separate from Israel. The wall is constantly being extended – we saw a new stretch being built to protect one of the roads that is for Israeli use. There's actually such a road from Israel to Bethlehem – along which all the Israeli tour buses travel – but instead of using that, our tour instead crossed through a check-point in the wall.
Everybody in Israel and the Palestinian Territories must keep an ID card with them, and those Palestinians who were born in Israeli territory had a different ID card (and their cars had differently coloured number plates) from those who were born in Palestinian territory. The former group could pass freely through the border between the two parts, but the unlucky majority couldn't.
Our guide was waiting for us on the other side of the check-point. He was one of the majority of Palestinians who are not permitted to visit Israel without advance permission; he'd only been able to visit his family in East Jerusalem once in the years since the wall had gone up, and he certainly couldn't travel there to meet us for the start of our tour. Those Palestinians with jobs in Israel (and permission to cross the border) might often need to queue from 2 or 3 each morning so that they can clear all the security checks in time to start. There are stories of Palestinians dying at checkpoints, waiting to get through a check-point in need of urgent medical care.
There are thee categories of territory in the West Bank. Palestinians have varying degrees of control over each: the A areas are governed autonomously by the Palestinian Authority, and its soldiers and police could patrol freely. The B areas are IDF military installations and are off limits to Palestinians, and the C territories - close to the security wall, to the Israeli roads, or to Jewish settlements are also controlled by the IDF.
The roads carved across the countryside in great sweeps - as a result, more and more Palestinian homes were requisitioned. We also saw that Jewish settlements are still being built in the West Bank, and as a result that land is being forcefully recategorised from A to C – reducing the territory that Palestinians can call their own. This road sign used to mark the start of Area A - but you can see how settlers have redesignated it as "Shdema" - the name of the settlement they were building down the road.
I'm not sure how many Israelis know themselves exactly what's going on. They're discouraged from entering the West Bank at all, and are totally prohibited from visiting Area A (as the sign makes clear).
This grafitti - from inside one of the refugee camps (so you might not want to take it as completely accurate, but it gives you an idea) - shows how Palestinian territory (in green) has progressively shrunken, and Jewish territory (in black) has steadily grown over the years:
In Bethlehem we walked along the Palestinian side of the security wall, which had been extensively graffiti-ed, mainly by Western tourists who could do so without too much hassle from the IDF who manned the CCTV camera and watchtowers dotted along its length. The wall was a riot of colours – with expressions of solidarity, poignant dedications to friends or family on the other side of the wall, and towering statements of hope. One local bar had cheekily painted a section white so that they could project World Cup matches onto it, with the menu painted nearby!
We visited a couple of the refugee camps which had been set up to house some of the Palestinians who were displaced when the State of Israel was established . Sixty years on, the tents have grown into a maze of multi-story bullet-pocked houses on narrow lanes. Nobody wants to invest their money into improving their houses – ever hopeful that one day they'll be able to return to the land they'd been forced to evacuate. Nevertheless because Israel controls the supply of water and electricity, most people have installed their own water tanks on the roof. Sadly these tanks became a favourite target for IDF snipers during the last Intifada (Palestinian 'Uprising'). You can see one of the camps with all the water tanks in the photo below...
In one of the camps we met a local guy (named Jihad Ramadan - !) who spoke angrily of “the land they call Israel”. He told us about his life in the camps, about the forced curfews and the collective punishments, about the feeling of helplessness at not being able to freely move around a land that he felt should be his. Having recently visited Soweto, the similarities with apartheid South Africa were far too obvious. It's hard to comprehend how are group of people who were oppressed throughout their history could decide to treat others so callously. No matter what you think about the need for a Jewish homeland, I can't believe that such cruelty is necessary.
I'm a pretty active follower of current events, but I had no idea of what was going on in the West Bank. Although the blockade of Gaza has been in the news recently, it is only half the story – the situation is not much better in the other Palestinian territories. As we left the Dheisheh Refugee Camp, Jihad asked us to tell everyone we could about what we'd seen, and that's partly what this post is about.
That was one advantage of having a local guide - he knew all the security staff. At the Church we saw all the busloads of tourists, on their package trips from Jerusalem. Our guide was upset as a few years ago those tourists would have employed Palestinian guides, and bought from Palestinian shops.
Instead, the shops and restaurants were largely empty. Which was a shame. We had some spectacular falafel, and I bought a keffiyeh (although I should admit that I'll stop referring to them as a terrorist scarves)...
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