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Life on the Line
Isabel Kershner
 ISABEL KERSHNER |
It's mid-morning and the "popular market" along the road that straddles the Arab Israeli town of Baqa al-Gharbiya and the neighboring Palestinian-Authority controlled Baqa al-Sharqiya is deserted. Two days ago Aharon Obidiyan, a 41-year-old kashrut supervisor from Zikhron Ya'akov, was fatally shot in the head at close range here by unknown Palestinian assailants as he loaded his shopping into his car. Obidiyan used to supervise food factories in this area of Israel known as the Triangle, which has a large Arab population and borders on the West Bank.
The market literally lies on the Green Line, the pre-1967 border that divides Israel proper from the West Bank. No more than 50 meters to the east, an Israeli army roadblock is clearly visible at an intersection on the main road, enforcing the security closure that has been imposed since the beginning of the intifada last fall. It serves both to stop Palestinian traffic into Israel, and prevent Israelis from wittingly or unwittingly entering dangerous territory.
Strictly speaking, the army roadblock ought to be in the middle of the market, just about where Obidiyan was shot at 4:30 in the afternoon. But the twists and turns of the invisible Green Line - which has one shop sitting in Israel and the next in the West Bank, one side of the narrow street Israeli and the other Palestinian - makes that impractical, impossible. It cost Obidiyan his life. And it is costing the disaffected shopkeepers here their livelihood. The morning after the killing, the soldiers came in and dismantled the stalls, leaving nothing but a few crushed watermelons and rotting vegetables on the dusty ground.
"We're not happy about what happened here," says Abu Murad, the owner of a permanent store that sells chickens and eggs across the road, and a grocery around the corner. "Hundreds of families live on what they earn here. Business is a disaster. Clients used to come from all over," he says, listing off Jewish towns such as Haderah, Pardes Hannah and Karkur, and nearby Arab Israeli towns like Jatt. "Now maybe 5 percent come."
Abu Murad is a Palestinian resident of the West Bank. Technically, he cannot set foot in Israel without permission, which in his case means crossing the road or walking to the store on the next corner. He says he knows nothing about who shot Obidiyan almost directly in front of his store, that he just saw everybody running away. But he adds that Obidiyan was a regular customer at the market. "Everyone knew him."
Living and trading on the Green Line puts the 6,000 or so Palestinians of Baqa al-Sharqiya, which means eastern Baqa, and the 18,000 Israelis of Baqa al-Gharbiya, or western Baqa, on ambiguous ground. It also creates a kind of political schizophrenia.
According to Abu Murad, the traders are thinking about bringing out a statement condemning the murder. "He wasn't a soldier," he says. "We're sorry about what happened here. I'm not talking about what's going on in all the rest of the territories, but here. We hope that Israel will stop its aggression too."
Ra'ed Hussein, a young worker from an aluminum workshop in the market area, was taken into Israeli detention along with some 30 others in an army round-up following Obidiyan's murder. He was kept for two days before being released. "The guy who murdered the Jew murdered the livelihood of thousands," Hussein says. "All the products come here from the West Bank. The producers, the landowners, the drivers - everyone will suffer."
As he talks, a lone Jewish Israeli customer drives his van up to a garage around the corner. Asked whether he isn't afraid, the driver, from the nearby moshav of Bat Hefer, merely shrugs, as if to imply that for the price he has no choice.
WHENEVER ISRAEL'S SECURI-ty situation takes a turn for the worse, the notion of unilateral separation is raised again in Israel; calls for putting up a high fence between Israel and the West Bank come from across the Jewish political spectrum. Factors mitigating against the idea are the cost, the question of effectiveness and the internal political-ideological problem that would be posed by Israel demarcating a de facto border that would necessarily leave many Jewish settlements on the outside.
Soon after Obidiyan's murder, the question of separation inevitably cropped up on the news again, with security officials reportedly examining the possibility of putting up an electronic fence in certain places, including between Baqa al-Gharbiya and Sharqiya.
In reality, the two Baqas are united and divided in various ways at the same time. One area in the heart of Israeli Baqa al-Gharbiya abuts the West Bank Palestinian neighborhood of Nazilat Issa. The fruit store on one side of the street lies in Israel. The coffee shop across the road is Palestinian. A small concrete block used to mark the Green Line running between the two, a leftover from 1967. More recently, a mound of earth has served as a barrier, stopping all vehicles from driving through.
Since the outbreak of the intifada, Israeli bulldozers have constructed such earthen barriers at the entrances and exits of most West Bank villages and towns, the physical implementation of Israel's policy of closure and encirclement designed to stop free movement. Here, the mounds crop up in the middle of residential neighborhoods and between the stores.
The mounds hardly constitute Baqa's version of the Berlin Wall. A boy on a bicycle easily rides over one. Palestinian taxis from West Bank towns like Tul Karm and Jenin are parked on the far side of another, by the coffee shop. They drop off illegal Palestinian workers here, leaving the few who still dare to stroll across the low, well-trodden hill into Israel.
In tune with the physical ambiguity of the terrain, there seem to be nearly as many different opinions here as there are residents.
Abed Ghena'em lives just beyond one of the small earth barriers, just inside Israel. He has infected-looking bandaged legs and needs to go for daily treatments, but can no longer drive his car up to his house. The Israeli measures are causing him suffering, he says. But he has little sympathy for the Palestinians on the other side of the mound either. "The workers all come and park here. They eat and throw their garbage where they stand. I worry for my children going to school - they could get run over," he complains. An electronic fence would help, he says, adding, "I wouldn't mind if they took from my land to construct it." A neighbor of his has taken a cue from the Israelis and has made his own traffic barrier, unilaterally closing off his road so that nobody can pass.
Palestinians at the coffee shop across one of the mounds, expectedly, reject the fence idea. "How would people come to work?" they ask. "We have relatives, friends - how will we get to visit them?"
The idea of separation is not entirely new. Between 1948 and 1967 there was a border here. Baqa al-Sharqiya was then under Jordanian rule. Now, the official Palestinian position is for a Palestinian state with the 1967 line as its border. When asked about that, Adnan, the owner of the coffee shop, explains that the solution should be a Palestinian state that has peaceful relations with Israel - and no closed borders.
Back at the market, Abu Murad argues that borders "make even worse problems and breed more violence. People," he says, "want to live. They want to put up a border? OK. But let us earn a living."
There are some ironies too. Some Israeli politicians have raised the notion of "swapping" parts of, or all of the Triangle with a future Palestinian entity, in return for land and Jewish settlements on the other side of the Green Line. Most of the Israeli residents of Baqa al-Gharbiya staunchly reject that idea - including the town's fundamentalist Islamic Movement head, Khere Mejadly. There is no connection between the councils of Baqa al-Gharbiya and Baqa al-Sharqiya, he notes, stressing the different status of the two localities. "They're not Israeli. They have no state. It's not clear what they are," he says, "whereas we are under Israeli jurisdiction, the Interior Ministry, Israeli law. There's no connection between us and the Palestinian Authority."
Still, Mejadly is against separation, because it would hurt the Palestinians on the other side. Israel should get out of the territories, he says, but if there is a border, "it has to be open."
The Islamic Movement's agenda foresees an eventual Islamic state on all of historic Palestine, including present day Israel. But in the meantime, he says, "We want to be here. Not under the PA or Jordan, but here on our land under the temporary regime we have here now. I'm staying here as a citizen of Israel."
Not far down the road sits Jamal Majadleh. He is the owner of a local press, an agent for several Hebrew newspapers, the chairman of Baqa al-Gharbiya's chamber of commerce and a member of the same clan as the Islamic Movement head.
"We're very close to those people who live in poverty, with no normal reality in sight," he says of his Palestinian neighbors. "They're family, friends. It's not easy."
He says that in the "Palestinians' bitter experience, everyone who stayed put suffered less. We want to stay here on our land, in our houses." He doesn't think putting up a wall along the 1967 border will solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem, and certainly not that of the Arab Israelis. However, he doesn't reject the idea of being transferred, together with all his land and property, into a Palestinian state.
"We say we want to stay in Israel because it's more democratic, there's National Insurance and so on. But maybe that's not quite accurate," he says. "Maybe it's democratic in A, B and C, but not in D, E and F. Perhaps if we and all our land were to go over to Palestine, we could help make a Palestine that is democratic, cultured and free. At least we'd be equal. Here, we're second-class citizens at best. Maybe we'd have the 1967 borders for 5, 10 or 15 years and then see. In the end, we have to live together. We need a new reality."
The residents of Baqa al-Gharbiya, and Baqa al-Sharqiya, may yet be pondering idealistic options for a long time to come. The current reality, though, consists of clambering over a dirt mound to buy bananas in an empty store. That is, so long as there's no electronic fence.
(July 30, 2001)
Palestinian Affairs
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