The Spectre

Today we visited the Yafa Cultural Centre in Balata refugee camp, which is near Nablus. Violence inside the refugee camp raised over the years since the second intifada, especially domestic violence, due overtly as a result of the physical, psychological and systemic violence of the military occupation of Israel.The Cultural Centre provides a therapeutic programme to the brutal military occupation to children living in the refugee camp including theatre, painting, filmmaking, dancing and music workshops.

The cultural centre further resembled a box of experiences, emotions and observations from children, whom live under military occupation and provided them with the skills for developing both academically and personally in many key areas. The cultural centre provides a variety of workshops to do this. Many of the workshops are adapted to their own personal stories such as the theatre play being developed, which converges and captures various of their own experiences and visions of the occupation. We managed to interact with the children within the organisation by visiting the filmmaking workshop and talking with the sound and light system crew about the cultural meanings of colours in our countries. The workshops managed to mitigate the levels of embedded violence from the occupation on children and provided an oasis for them to express themselves.

Al Khalil (Hebron) Adam and Eve arrived here after they were expelled from the Garden of Eden and founded a city in which Abraham (Ibrahim), Issac, Jacob and their wives lived. The tombs of the latter can be found in Ibrahim’s mosque. It remains a sacred place for Jews, Christians and Muslim’s. Violence began in 1994 after the Baruch Goldstein massacre inside the Mosque which killed more than 29 Palestinians. The mosque was subsequently divided into two separate parts, one for the Jews, which turned it into a Synagogue, and the other side remained a mosque for Muslims. The holy site according to the main monotheistic religions resemble a vibrant and tense environment where white non-transparent doors divide the two sides and one in which the only direct visual contact is through a tiny window slit adjacent to Abraham’s (Ibrahim) tomb. Nowadays, settlers under the Shiva further increase hostile tensions by singing loudly and dancing in the middle of the prayers of Muslims.

To get a clear picture of Al Khalil one must mention some important facts. The first one is that 5 settlements have been established in the city centre since the 1967 invasion including other larger ones on the outskirts of the city. The ultra-zionist Rabbi Moshe Levinger and his US born wife began colonising the centre of the town after Israel seized the West bank in 1967. Against Israeli law, Kiryat Arba was established nearby to draw settlers and much later they were guaranteed protection by the Israeli state. More than 7,000 settlers live around the area. 400 settlers live within the old city under the “protection” of 4000 IOF (Israeli Occupation Forces), although seeming ironic, since Palestinian families living in the proximities of the settlement are harassed, terrorised and physically attacked every single day by settlers. The settlers, in the illegally occupied Hebron, are the most extreme-Zionists in the West bank and are allowed to carry weapons, which further increase their aggression and undermine the living of Palestinians. Due to the constant siege of Palestinians both by the IOF and the settlers the city has been divided into two pieces; H1 (80% municipality, under Palestinian control) and H2 (20% of the municipality under military and civil control). H2 includes the tomb of the Patriarchs and parts of the old city, evicted houses of the Palestinians and the destruction of the once vibrant market area that was filled with shops and restaurants owned by Palestinians. More than 40,000 Palestinians live in the old city under constant threat of settler attacks.

We were established near Tel Remeida, in the proximity to one of the settlements in the area. Any Palestinians wishing to transport food and resources around the area are forced to cross-checkpoints. I witnessed many Palestinians being forced to stay on the sun for long periods of time while Israeli soldiers checked their passport while they were being interrogated. Every 10 to 15 metres there are outposts, which can stop Palestinians arbitrarily by the mere look of seeming suspicious or merely due to the boredom of the Israeli soldiers. A presentation about the Military orders, accessed by a prominent Palestinian activist named Issad demonstrated that Palestinian vehicles were not allowed to drive in certain streets, furthermore shops were not allowed to be re-open after the evacuation of settlers, whom had occupied them. And another fact, which is most startling, that is that among the military orders there’s no statement that mentions that Palestinians are prohibited from walking certain roads. In real life Palestinians are denied entry into areas around the old city and into certain streets, among them the most famous one called Shuhada street. Palestinians are forced to take alternate routes around these streets prolonging their paths into schools, medical centres and holy places. They are further humiliated and denigrated by prohibiting the opening of the roads on which the played as kids and their own shops. The latter having cultural significance as part of their identity, which is crushed and diminished, as well as having economic and political value. This is an ultimate phenomenon containing certain qualities of both Apartheid and Colonialism, although it most clearly identified and defined in Ilan Pappe’s term: Ethnic cleansing of Palestine.