Eric's Reports from Palestine

 

The Earth is Flat in Qalqiliya   7/29/2003

   

Four hundred years after the world was proved to be round, Qalqiliya tells a different story. In Qalqiliya the world is flat. Go to the center of the city and pick any direction, North, South, East or West and begin walking. Eventually you will come to a wall, 8 meters high.

 

Qalqiliya (pronounced call keel ya) is a Palestinian city of approximately 50,000 people and is entirely surrounded by a 'security fence' that Israel is building. The security fence, a giant black cement wall with guard towers every half mile, does not run along the border between Israel and Palestine. It is entirely located within the West Bank and specifically mapped out to accommodate Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

 

Some settlements remain to the west of the winding wall and some to the east, but Qalqiliya is entirely fenced in, a giant prison, with one checkpoint and one farmer's gate. The farmers that use the gate have been cut off from the 1,600 acres of agricultural fields that surround the city.

 

From the faces of the children in the city you would not guess the situation. Walking down the street they flock to you like birds saying "What is your name, what is your name, what is your name?" It is the only phrase they know in English. They smile and run and play and they are so plentiful, it seems that another one is yet to come around the corner.

 

The faces of the adults tell a different story. Still as warm and welcome as the children, the adults smile and say "Salaam Alakum" and offer you tea. But the words that come out of their mouths belie their understanding that they are not like everyone else that exists outside the walls.

 

Osama, a farmer in Qalqiliya, is hoping to take action agaist the wall. "We try to go through the famers gate and the soldiers ask where we are going. I say 'to my land.' The soldiers say 'you have no land.'"

 

"Israel used the same scenario in 1948 to emmigrate Palestinians. But now we will not do the same thing. We will die on our land."

 

Osama is referring to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 when 418 villages, over 750,000 Palestinian people, were expelled from their land. The West Bank and Gaza now comprise 22 per cent of what was considered Palestine at the turn of the century.

 

To the west of the farmer's gate, if you drive on a road toward the wall, you come to a point where many refrigerator-sized boulders block the road. This road block was put here by Israeli soldiers to prevent Palestinian farmers from cultivating the farmland that lies beyond it, a few hundred meters from the wall.

 

"This place is a camp. They are planning to take even more farmland near the wall" says Rami, a Palestinian farmer with a Greenhouse.

 

All Palestinian property within 35 meters of the wall has been or will be destroyed by Israel. This includes homes, agricultural fields, and greenhouses. In all of the West Bank, Israel's security fence is being entirely built on land confiscated from Palestinians.

 

There has been some demonstrations within the city but it is difficult to see what its effects are, if any.

 

"Problems in Qalqiliya are different," says Mohamad Saleem, a local organizer. "Education, Industrial, Trade, just getting outside of Qalqiliya is a problem for us. A one-hour drive to Nablus takes a day. It's a problem for farmers to irrigate their fields. If I have a choice to demonstrate against the wall or irrigate my land, what do I choose?"

 

Increasingly isolated, Qalqiliya is becoming a world of its own. As the sun sets and the hours grow late you will not see children running through the streets. As the last gate is closed at whatever hour the soldiers choose, Qalqiliya closes its eyes and prays that the gates will open another day.

 

Eric Monse

Qalqiliya, West Bank