Gates of Hope?

By Haim Hanegbi

Everybody is talking of the dying peace process. Nearly nobody is doing something to save it. Last Saturday afternoon, with the sun still high on the western sky, I went to see the patient in his deathbed.

You travel half an hour from Tel-Aviv, cross the Green Line into the West Bank near Qafr Quasem, and then travel a few more minutes by a winding road in the foothills until you reach the twin villages of Azun Atmeh and Beit Amin, a bit east of the settlement of Oranit. On the Oslo Agreement maps, these are marked as an irregular yellow blotch -- which means that the Palestinians have civil authority, but the Israeli Army can (and does) still interfere occasionally.

When the interim agreement was signed on September 25, 1995, the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators were in an optimistic mood, shaking hands and embracing in front of the world's TV cameras. They have painted the whole map of the Occupied Territories into a quilt of innumerable coloured areas, with crazily meandering demarcation lines -- brown for "A" areas, handed over completely to the Palestinians with their civil and military institutions; white for "C," which remained fully Israeli-controlled for the time being; and the hybrid "B," marked yellow. There was no intention that this arrangement would have more than a fleeting existence; the same agreement specified the timetable for the three "further redeployments," which were going to change this map totally. Thus, the peace process was supposed to roll along its preordained path and reach its maturity in a definite peace agreement, the long-awaited "definite solution." It was not to be.

Azun Atmeh and Beit Amin -- twin villages, far from the noisy mainstream of politics, names which rarely if ever appear in the news-hungry media. Only one hill separates the two villages, which share a single school, and more importantly -- a single family origin, with all inhabitants being descended of the same many-branched clan.

For many decades, this was a forgotten backwater which had no desire to be discovered, tucked away between the mountains and the coastal plain -- a nearly self-contained peasants' republic with some 11,000 industrious inhabitants jealously preserving their independence, selling the produce of their small fields in the marketplace of nearby Qalqilya without showing much interest in city life.

In 1967, the tide of war and Israeli conquest passed quickly over them, without making much of an initial change. But in the early 1980's the true invasion began -- the invasion of the settlers. Israeli settlers broke the immemorial quiet, with bulldozers busily cutting new roads through their hills and Israeli houses with their mock-European red tile roofs springing up in enormous clusters all around the old twin villages -- east and west, north and south. Familiar pieces of land suddenly assumed alien identities with unfamiliar Hebrew names, Elkana and Etz Ephraim and Alfey Menashe and Oranit, some names taken from the Bible and other thought up by the bureaucrats of the governmental Naming Commission.

To make things worse, some of the settlers arrived at the villagers' very doorstep. In the whole of the Territories you will hardly find such a place as this, where the settlers' houses virtually touch the Palestinian school at the bottom of the hill -- a high barbed-wire fence clearly marking the demarcation line.
"Sha'arey Tikva," that is how the new masters of the land dubbed their new acquisition, "The Gates of Hope," with the sign at the gate in the high fence proclaiming that here you may find "Quality of Life..."

And now, the Ministry of the Interior is planning a thorough reform of this region: in the interest of efficiency, a municipal unification is to be effected between the local councils in the area -- the Jewish councils, that is. The plan makes no explicit mention of the twin Palestinian villages, which would find themselves hopelessly trapped in the midst of the new settlement block, whose remaining lands would be confiscated under one legal pretext or another, whose inhabitants would have no alternative but to eke out a meager existence as daily labourers on the land which was theirs...

Last Saturday, the villagers called a protest rally. It was held in the front yard of the school -- the last Palestinian outpost facing the encroaching "Gates of Hope." The villagers made considerable efforts to invite peace-seeking Israelis, in the hope that a joint struggle of the two peoples would foil the threat hanging over them. We came, members of Gush Shalom and Peace Now, several dozens out of the indifferent hundreds of thousands living in metropolitan, cosmopolitan Tel-Aviv -- half an hour's drive and a whole universe away.

Will it be enough? Will the Gates of Hope ever yield?

(Translated from Ma'ariv, 9.7.97)