A young Arab man was brought in by the state attorney and presented as a witness. His head was wrapped entirely in a black and white kuffieh, the chequered headscarf favoured by older Palestinians, leaving only slits for the eyes. He was to testify that he had trained with the Jordanian army right there on that wretched land of Albina's. I objected strongly to this witness. He must show his face, I insisted, there was no reason to bring him to the stand disguised in this manner. Dani Kramer, the state representative, was not prepared to give me the witness's name or age. Clearly he looked too young to have served in the Jordanian army fifteen years ago. I said all this to the panel of judges. The president seemed embarrassed. He knew that this was not right. There was no justification for disguising the identity of a witness in a civil case.
At this point Dani Kramer went forward to the podium and whispered something to the court president that I couldn't hear. He promptly agreed that the masked man could testify with his head covered. The man with the piercing eyes and covered head proceeded to recite everything he had been drilled to say. I suspected that he might have been paid for this either with money or more likely in kind, in the form of a grant of permits from the military authorities which he or members of his family needed.
Who, I wondered, was behind the mask? I thought I recognized those eyes. They looked fervently at me as though they wanted to communicate something. What was it? An apology or a plea to understand and condone? They were not mean or vindictive. They were anxious. What sort of man would accept to testify, lie like this, betray his country?
And there I was with my colleague, Mona Rishmawi, anxious, tense, the two of us trying to do our best, wondering whether we should go on with this farce. Was it good for Palestine for us to continue to the end or were we only lending legitimacy to an illegal court? The state attorney and the panel of judges were discussing amongst themselves, constantly consulting. There was no one else in that courtroom that day.
I looked out of the window; the clouds were gathering. The weather was worsening. The witness was completing his testimony. It was all so dark and tragic and in such contrast with the purity of the reluctant snow that had started falling. Soon it would cover the red-tiled roof of the Mascobieh. The attractive building with a courtyard in the middle would be transformed by a soft white cover. Even the barbed wire over the wall would lose its sting. If the snow should settle on the roads, I would have a hard time getting back to Ramallah. My car was not equipped for such conditions and I was not a good driver under the best of circumstances.
We went through the charade. The masked young man testified that he had taken part in the civil defence unit of the Jordanian army and that they did their training on the hill in question and that they had used these trenches on Albina's land. 'So what?' I argued. 'What did this prove? What if the army had dug trenches? They could do this and still the land would remain private. The land doesn't miraculously get transformed the moment the army touches it. It only changes hands when it is expropriated and this never happened.' Like me the president knew this all too well but would he have the professional integrity and courage to rule in accordance with the law?
I looked up again at the long window. The snow continued to fall, hesitant, cottony. As I sat listening to the drone of Dani Kramer, I was getting distracted by the downy flakes waltzing to the pavement outside, covering the dirt and squalor. I could hardly wait for that day's session to end. When I left I would see a transformed world. Even the notorious prison house next to the court would be covered in pure white. I began to fret again about getting back.
We managed to get out of Jerusalem and back to Ramallah without difficulty, but once there found that the snow was deeper than in Jerusalem. Driving up a side road to the main road I decided not to stop at the stop sign, afraid that the car might skid. At that moment, an Israeli army jeep happened to pass by. It swerved and drew up right next to me. Why did I not stop, the soldiers asked. They found my behaviour suspicious. I tried to explain but they were not convinced. They assumed I was running away from them. It was only the intervention of a taxi driver who recognized me and put in a good word with the soldiers, with whom he seemed to be suspiciously friendly, that they let me go. I was saved from arrest on that cold snowy day by the intervention of a probable collaborator.
A few months after that walk to A'yn Qenya, the decision in the Albina case was handed down. No session was held for reading the decision, it was mailed to me. The Military Objections Committee found that 'There is no doubt in our eyes that the appellant (Albina) is the legal owner of the land in question.' Even so, the Committee decided that the transaction which the Custodian had made with the Zionist Agency to lease the land for a period of forty-nine years 'is in fact standard, strong and binding and this in spite of the fact that we concluded in our opinion that the ownership of the said land belongs to the appellant'. They based this strange decision on Article 5 of Military Order 58, which states that 'Any transaction carried out in good faith between the Custodian of Absentee Property and any other person, concerning property which the Custodian believed when he entered into the transaction to be abandoned property, will not be void and will continue to be valid even if it were proved that the property was not at that time abandoned property.'
In my summing up I had anticipated the possibility that they might invoke this article and had written: 'If Article 5 is not interpreted strictly and the Custodian then believes that whatever action he takes (even if based on improper legal considerations) would be retroactively validated by imputing to it good faith, without using strict criteria to ascertain whether or not it in fact existed, the Custodian would in effect be given a free hand to act arbitrarily … If this happens, a mockery would have been made of the law.'
This statement seems to have had no effect on the court. Not only had the court found a way to justify the takeover of my client's land – it did not even order that my client be paid any compensation. Abu El Afia proved his worth as a loyal Israeli. I was only glad that I had not recommended that my client put up the quarter-of-a-million-dollar guarantee requested by the court as a condition for granting the injunction to stop work on the land pending completion of the case.
According to the Jordanian land law that continued to be in force in the West Bank, long-term leases in land must be registered at the Land Registration Department having jurisdiction over the land. I asked Ghazi, the Land Registrar, whether the lease over Albina's land was registered at the Ramallah Registry, whose jurisdiction included Beit 'Ur. He said it wasn't. Where then was this lease registered? I had once come upon a military order which enigmatically referred to 'Special Transactions in Land' that would be registered in a 'Special Land Registration Department'. I had always assumed that since this register was not at the Ramallah Land Registration Department it must be located at the Headquarters of the Military Commander of the West Bank in Beit El, not in Israel, since the land was in the Occupied Territories. Years later I happened to be checking on a plot of land for a client in Jerusalem and discovered that land leases involving Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank were registered at the Israel Land Authority, where all Israeli state land is registered. With this discovery the last piece of the puzzle fell into place. I realized that to all intents and purposes the lands on which West Bank Jewish settlements were established are considered by Israel as Israeli land. The ideological position that the West Bank belonged by divine edict to Israel was given full force in secular legal terms and through elaborate administrative arrangements that ensured that the land was annexed to Israel in every aspect except by name.
On 15 November 2006, a holiday commemorating Palestine's Independence Day, I went to Beit 'Ur to visit the writer Adel Samara. I also wanted to see what had become of the Albina land. It was no longer possible to get to the village using the short direct route, which would have taken twenty minutes. Instead I had to travel west then south then east again, in a big loop, through the villages of A'yn Arik, Deir Ibzi,
Kafr Ni'ma, Safa, Beit 'Ur El Tahta and finally after a ninety-minute tortuous trek over narrow winding roads through the hills and valleys to Beit 'Ur El Fauqa. Once in the village I could hear the hum of the heavy traffic on Route 443 that replaced the old road which had once connected Beit 'Ur and Ramallah to the coastal plain, passing through the centre of the village. The new road, built south of the old one, bypassed the village. Even though the new road included a 9.5 kilometre stretch in the West Bank and was built on lands appropriated from six Palestinian villages for 'public needs', including the agricultural lands of Beit 'Ur, the Israeli army prohibited Palestinians from using it and had closed the exit to Beit 'Ur with cement blocks. Adel, who lived in the village and had to commute daily to Ramallah, where he worked, pointed to the road which we could see below and said: 'Look at this graphic example of discrimination.' He told me that his family owned olive groves on the other side of the road but could not pick the olives because of the danger of crossing a busy highway without a pedestrian crossing.
To get to Adel's house in the centre of the small village of 800 inhabitants, we drove over the same segments of the old road that I had driven on when I visited with the court. I remembered the store where we used to stop to buy home-baked taboon bread. It was still there, but today I had no stomach for food.
I drove up to Albina's land, climbing up to the highest point in the village and passing by the half-demolished ancient Ottoman fortification. Adel pointed out the hole in the tower caused by the shelling of the Ottoman garrison protecting the road north of Jerusalem in the First World War from the force commanded by General Sir Edmund Allenby stationed on the opposite hill to the east of the village. After a short drive down the slope we came upon a five-metre wall, made of concrete and steel, that enclosed the entire Albina land. I gasped when I saw it. I remembered the gentle slope bordered by a few pine trees. Now there was a rude termination of the ancient village as though a prison had been placed at the southern tip of the hill. The wall enclosed an estate of expensive villas housing wealthy Israelis, mainly technicians working in information technology. They had their backs turned to their Palestinian neighbours, making the point in as blunt and rude a manner that they belonged to another world, that of a modern consumer society which subsidizes luxury homes built on land that came to it free of charge, with breathtaking views and clean air, connected to the centre of the country by a fast four-lane highway built on their neighbours' land and to which their neighbours had no access. No part of the settlers' dwellings, not even the roofs of their villas, could be seen from the village, only the high street lights that were lit all day and night to provide further protection in case one of the village youths decided to put a ladder up and climb the wall and attack the settlement. I had intended to inquire from Adel about relations between the inhabitants of the settlement and the village, who seemed of almost equal numbers. But when I saw how things looked on the ground there was no point in asking. The answer was writ large in the most graphic way possible.
Standing before the wall I could see in concrete terms the consequence of the policy of building Jewish settlements pursued by successive Israeli governments over the past thirty-nine years. For an occupier to take through legal chicanery the lands of the occupied, and in stark violation of international law settle its own people in the midst of the towns and villages of the hostile occupied population, can only lead to violence and bloodshed. There is no way that such usurpation of land could be accepted. A bloody struggle was inevitable. A high wall dividing the mixed population living on the same hill in Beit 'Ur and Bet Horon will not placate anyone. It only shields the usurpers from the anger and hatred in the eyes of those whose village has been unjustly divided, whose life and movement have been restricted, whose future has been doomed.
The mighty wall stretched from the top of the hill down to the road, leaving the southern slope, outside its borders, where some villagers had their homes. The government school serving several villages, including the two Beit 'Urs, stood at the bottom of the hill – sandwiched between the wall and the new highway. The school and houses were reached by a steep, narrow, asphalted road bordering the wall. We could see some twelve-year-old boys returning from school, carrying their heavy bags up the hill. Adel pointed out that twice a day they pass along this ugly, prohibitive structure when in the past they had a panoramic view of the entire valley to the east. 'What will they grow up thinking?' he wondered aloud.
I parked the car and we stood at the top of the hill, where the wall looped, looking at the hills and Wadi Jaryout to the north. A military road, another one dug by the Israeli army through the hills, had recently been opened, connecting Bet Horon to Jerusalem and skirting the town of Beitunia south of Ramallah from the east. Adel explained that this road would border the wall that was to be constructed, expropriating the entire hill north of the village and connecting with the wall around Bet Horon. This would place the settlement within one of the 'settlement blocs' north of Jerusalem that Israel planned to annex. I asked Adel whether the area we were looking at had good walking tracks. He told me that when he was young he often walked from his village to Ramallah through Wadi Jaryout and remembered the track very well. He also told me that there were two Maqamat (shrines for holy men) along the way; one was called Maqam Abu Zaitoun and the other Maqam Um El Sheikh, who he presumed was the mother of the first saint. Along the way were two springs: the one that was fastest flowing and that had the sweeter water remained active throughout the year and was called A'yn Jaryout. The other was A'yn Meita.
'And what about this valley that we can see going to the west?' I asked.
'This is a wide beautiful valley we call Wadi El Mallaqi (the wadi of meetings). Perhaps it was given this name because it connected many villages from the central hills and the coastal plain.'
I realized this was the wadi I had long wanted to take to fulfil my ambition of walking from the Ramallah hills to the coastal plain and the sea. Now it was too late. Even if I risked scrambling the heights of Beit 'Ur to get down to the wadi I would hardly be able to walk a fifth of the way. Once by the village of Bil'in to the north-west I would meet with the newly constructed wall, and even if I should manage to cross it the numerous Moodi'n settlements built in the wadis and over the hills along with the other settlements that straddle the green line would block my way. This is one walk I will never be able to take.
I will always associate the path down the A'yn Qenya valley with my bachelor days. Six years later, when Penny and I were married at the height of the Palestinian Intifada in 1988 and, a few days after the Palestinian declaration of independence, we moved to a new house further down the road from my old place. We began to take walks in Wadi El Wrda, the Abu Ameen wadi, just behind where we lived. But then one afternoon, in the summer of 1999, Penny called me at the office.
'How about a walk in the hills?' she asked.
I was ready to leave the office and welcomed the suggestion. She had in mind, she said, a walk in the A'yn Qenya valley which we had long neglected.
We were well into the Interim Phase, the five-year period designated by the Oslo Accords before negotiations would begin for determining the final status of the Occupied Territories. It was then that the fate of the settlements was to be decided. The Palestinian hope for a better future and an end to the conflict was reflected in the higher levels of investment, much of it going into construction. Ramallah was already hemmed in from the east and south by Jewish settlements. The only land left for the town to expand into was the hills to the north and west, which were quickly being developed by new Palestinian construction. Not far from our house Birzeit University was completing a housing development for its employees. A new private school had also been constructed, as well as a number of attractive villas, signalling new wealth for the emerging elites. As a result of all this we had to walk further up the road before we could begin our descent into the valley. But everywhere we went we found piles of rubble that had been dumped down the side of
the hill. We first tried going down one but the dirt was too soft and slippery to trudge over and we couldn't make it. We continued through the building site until we found a spot where I thought we could descend since it had a makeshift path created by concrete which must have been poured there by mistake. We made it down and I suggested to Penny that we first visit the nearby qasr. From there we began our descent, risking the possibility that we might have to walk back in the dark. It was then that we heard shots. I thought they were close, but ever optimistic, Penny thought we were only hearing echoes. More shots followed, louder and closer. They could not be echoes. One whizzed overhead, and Penny fell to the ground. I feared she had been shot.
She hadn't. She lifted her head and said: 'I think we're being shot at.'
I held her hand and we ran to take shelter against a rock that formed the wall of one of the terraces down the side of the hill. The shots were coming from behind us, from above. We hoped that by flattening our bodies against the rock no part of us would be exposed to the fire.
Palestinian Walks Page 9
