In interviews conducted by the 'Post' across the West Bank over the last few months, settlers revealed a range of reactions and strategies to the security barrier and Ehud Olmert's 'convergence' plan'
By Rafael D. Frankel
From her second-story Tekoa balcony, Shani Simkovitz can see not only the past 30 years of development which has yielded hundreds of homes and a community of more than 1,500 people on these pine-tree- lined and shrub-covered hills. Gazing eastward, to the moonscaped mountains of the Judean desert, she sees a thriving future where her children should be building the next generation of Jewish settlements.
But these days, it is not the idyllic years ahead the 25-year resident is contemplating, but an uncertain present.
"The issue of the fence comes up every day in my family," Simkovitz said, referring to the security fence Israel is building in and around the West Bank. "It's strangling us."
While international criticism and local protestations have rained down on Israel for the negative impact the barrier is having on Palestinian livelihood, it is also upending the lives of thousands of Israeli settlers who see in the fence the beginning of the end of their time in Judea and Samaria.
"I'm not dreaming. Israel will succeed in building the fence," said Yair Wolf, the deputy mayor of Gush Etzion, the settlement bloc just a few miles west of Tekoa which will remain inside the fence's perimeter. Like most people in his jurisdiction, Wolf opposes the barrier because of what it will do to Tekoa and a few other satellite communities.
"From one side, you can say this is for security, but everyone knows this is going to be a border and those people will have to leave."
Within those borders, which include east Jerusalem and major settlement blocs such as Ariel and Ma'aleh Adumim, in addition to Gush Etzion, most of the 240,000 Israeli Jews living on land captured in the Six Day War will remain. But in the wake of the March 28 election, and the Ehud Olmert- led coalition it will likely yield, that leaves up to 80,000 settlers like Simkovitz in around 65 settlements facing the prospect of eviction from their homes, possibly in the not-too-distant future.
In interviews conducted by The Jerusalem Post across the West Bank over the last few months, settlers revealed a prism of reactions and strategies to the fence, and to Olmert's "convergence" plan, from those who vow never to leave this biblical ground to groups who are proactively seeking a way out.
Around Tekoa, six miles south of Jerusalem, the security fence has yet to be built. Nevertheless, it has cast a larger-than-life shadow, causing some residents, like Simkovitz, to plot political and tactical strategies to defend their homes from evacuation.
But most people, said 15-year resident Meir Ben-Hayoun "are in denial. It seems obvious that they will evacuate us, but no one here talks about what we will do when that day comes."
Instead, the father of two young daughters said, home construction in Tekoa continues and "the people go on acting like we will be here forever."
NINETY MINUTES north of here, near the city of Nablus, where olive groves cover the rolling hills, Beni Raz is taking the exact opposite approach. A 13-year resident of Karnei Shomron, a town of 7,000 close to the largest settlement, Ariel, Raz has started an organization which is trying to get the government to fund a voluntary Jewish evacuation of the West Bank.
Though Karnei Shomron lies within a broad swath of the West Bank the security fence will supposedly encompass when it is complete, Raz said he does not want to live with the uncertainty of one day perhaps being forced to leave.
"Reality is stronger than we are and we know the world is changing," said Raz, who sees no final peace until Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders. "We want to build our future and we want to build it in a permanent place."
According to him, the fence has made Jews living on the other side of it "secondary citizens" whose protection is no longer a priority of the army. That, and a desire to avoid the fate of the Gaza evacuees - many of whom are unemployed and some still without even temporary housing more than six months after disengagement - has convinced many non-religious people that it is time to leave.
"We're saying, 'We don't want to wait; let's go now,' We're just looking for help to do it," Raz said. "Most of us are not ideologues. We just came here for a good life, and we're very happy to have it somewhere else."
But as more secular settlers look for ways to return to 1967 Israel, harder-line elements are digging their heals in to entrench themselves in the land as deeply as they can.
In the biblical city of Hebron, an hour south of Jerusalem and home to the Cave of the Patriarchs, around 500 Jews live among 150,000 Palestinians. In January, when police tried to serve eviction notices to eight Jewish families there who took over the Shalhevet market place claimed by Palestinians, days of riots broke out in which settlers donned masks and hurled rocks at police and army forces.
According to David Wilder, a spokesman for Hebron's Jewish community, those riots would be "children in a nursery school compared to what might happen" if they were forced out of Hebron. "I don't like to be crass, but if someone came in and said, 'I'm going to rape your wife,' would you say, 'Come in, here's the bedroom?'"
To a person, the Jews of Hebron refuse any scenario which would see them leaving the city. Like many religious settlers in the West Bank, the connection to the land, and in this case, the holy site, is too strong to allow for voluntarily severing. Any effort to remove them, said Hebron Deputy Police Chief Avi Herush, "is likely to be violent."
THOUGH IT was "the spirit of the land" that led Tamar Asaraf to Hayovel eight years ago, violent resistance is not something she and her community advocate.
Her brand new home, and 11 others like it, constitute this outpost an hour north of Tekoa along the main West Bank highway perched atop a mostly baron hill studded with shrubs, where cold winds penetrate even winter clothing.
Due to its illegal status, Hayovel may be evacuated months or years before established settlements built with government support. When parts of a similar outpost, Amona, were dismantled in February, violent confrontations between protesters and the police and IDF forces that did the job left more than 200 people injured.
That incident, and its contrast to the relatively peaceful disengagement from Gaza last summer, convinced Asaraf that if the order came from the government to leave, she would do so before the soldiers and police came, in order to spare her children the trauma of eviction and the likely media circus surrounding it.
Nevertheless, in the evacuation of settlers and demolition of their homes, Asaraf sees a determination from politicians and unsympathetic citizens to destroy the "precious way of living" in these settlements.
"It is not common to find neighbors with honesty, simplicity and dignity" in this country anymore, said Asaraf, who was born in a suburb of Tel Aviv before becoming religious and moving to Hayovel in her mid-20s. "In Tel Aviv, you see a culture that is not an honest way of living. All of it is for show. Every time I come back here, I thank God for the kind people I live with."
Though Palestinian towns surround Hayovel and the perimeter of the settlement is patrolled night and day by residents with M-16s slung around their shoulders, Asaraf said that living there allows her four children to grow up in relative safety.
"Here, my kids are really kids. They are kept in such an innocent place," she said. "The danger here is from terrorists, but how many kids were murdered here compared to how many were raped or abused in other places?"
©2006 The Jerusalem Post
Thursday, March 30, 2006
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
For hardened trekkers, even rain on the way to Cairo is no surprise
Part of an exclusive series on an expedition from Jerusalem to Tripoli
By Rafael D. Frankel
THE GREAT SAND SEA, Egypt- It rained here Monday. Not just a few drops, but a steady rain for hours.
So what's the big deal?
Asked when the last time it rained here was, local guide Yahia Kandil said: "Maybe three or four or five years ago."
Despite the odds, no one from this expedition was surprised as this peace mission has taken on a "what next?" attitude as it hits the home stretch in its push to plant an olive tree from Jerusalem on Mount Sinai.
The comedy of errors isn't weighing on everyone, though. "It's an adventure," said Ukrainian Yezgen Petrovich Kozhushko, who fought in the Iraq war. "The rain and everything else doesn't bother me."
The rain came on the second leg of a two-day, 700- kilometer push from the desert oasis Siwa to Cairo via the remote Baharia road - "road" being a generous description of the mostly rocky, often jarring, military checkpoint- laden path which links the Baharia oasis with Siwa.
Before setting out, special travel permits were required. The price, according to Yussuf, the Beduin guide who arranged the permits: $10 per Western passport, $500 for Palestinian Mohammad Azzam Alarjah.
Baksheesh?
"It was a mistake," said Sammy, the soldier that accompanied the group on the military road. "This is the price Arab princes on hunting trips have to pay." Can we get a refund? "Ha ha ha," he laughed. So $700 lighter the group set out, with a half dozen people taking advantage of the slow going to sit on the roofs of the trucks and take in the view of the Great Sand Sea upon whose northern edge the Baharia road runs.
At the first military checkpoint, the group climbed to the summit of a three-story-high sand dune from whose vantage point the sea stretched southward as far as the eye could see. Like waves of water, dune after dune crested in this ocean of sand, their peaks and troughs dictated by harsh desert winds and tracked by months rather than seconds.
And then the fun began, with the Israeli leader of the group, Heskel Nathaniel, kicking off the dune tumbling event in the Breaking the Ice Summer Olympics. Down he rolled in a tight spiral with Director of Operations Adam Rice and Kozhushko hot on his tail. At the bottom, the three embarked on a real challenge: standing up without losing balance as cochlear fluid swirled around the inner ear and caused the horizon to do the same in the field of vision.
As the day unfolded, the northern landscape continually changed. Lunch was taken a few hundred meters off the road in an ancient seabed, where shells and stones moved out by eons of water flow lined the earth which comfortably sank a few centimeters with each barefoot step. Under a baking desert sun, mushroom-shaped cliffs of fossilized coral reefs spontaneously broke the flat and rolling terrain.
Though the occasional marsh or lake lent a little greenery through the scenes, the roof-top view of the parched earth gave way only when the sun went down and the stars of a moonless desert night appeared in a display of the constellations.
Despite protestations and a warning from Sammy that an investigation was forthcoming about why the group was stopping in a closed military zone, camp was made around 9 p.m. and a few people took advantage of the first windless night in a week to sleep sans tents.
That proved somewhat costly at daybreak when the first raindrops started to fall.
While the locals said the rain was good luck, the constant precipitation meant braking the plans to camp in the desert 100 km. out of Cairo and driving through the mosquito-ridden confines of a hot camp next to the pyramids of Giza. That, and one of the trucks running out of fuel for the second time on the trip, made for a night where many in the group saw the sun before the pillow.
Though the rain and unseasonably cold weather continued through Tuesday afternoon as the expedition drove towards the Suez Canal, one bit of good news lightened the spirits of the peace mission: Iraqi Latif Yahia, good to his word, rejoined the group in the Egyptian capital after a two-day hiatus.
"Back to family again," the former Uday Hussein body double said after receiving hugs and kisses from the group during their Cairo rendezvous.
©2006 The Jerusalem Post
By Rafael D. Frankel
THE GREAT SAND SEA, Egypt- It rained here Monday. Not just a few drops, but a steady rain for hours.
So what's the big deal?
Asked when the last time it rained here was, local guide Yahia Kandil said: "Maybe three or four or five years ago."
Despite the odds, no one from this expedition was surprised as this peace mission has taken on a "what next?" attitude as it hits the home stretch in its push to plant an olive tree from Jerusalem on Mount Sinai.
The comedy of errors isn't weighing on everyone, though. "It's an adventure," said Ukrainian Yezgen Petrovich Kozhushko, who fought in the Iraq war. "The rain and everything else doesn't bother me."
The rain came on the second leg of a two-day, 700- kilometer push from the desert oasis Siwa to Cairo via the remote Baharia road - "road" being a generous description of the mostly rocky, often jarring, military checkpoint- laden path which links the Baharia oasis with Siwa.
Before setting out, special travel permits were required. The price, according to Yussuf, the Beduin guide who arranged the permits: $10 per Western passport, $500 for Palestinian Mohammad Azzam Alarjah.
Baksheesh?
"It was a mistake," said Sammy, the soldier that accompanied the group on the military road. "This is the price Arab princes on hunting trips have to pay." Can we get a refund? "Ha ha ha," he laughed. So $700 lighter the group set out, with a half dozen people taking advantage of the slow going to sit on the roofs of the trucks and take in the view of the Great Sand Sea upon whose northern edge the Baharia road runs.
At the first military checkpoint, the group climbed to the summit of a three-story-high sand dune from whose vantage point the sea stretched southward as far as the eye could see. Like waves of water, dune after dune crested in this ocean of sand, their peaks and troughs dictated by harsh desert winds and tracked by months rather than seconds.
And then the fun began, with the Israeli leader of the group, Heskel Nathaniel, kicking off the dune tumbling event in the Breaking the Ice Summer Olympics. Down he rolled in a tight spiral with Director of Operations Adam Rice and Kozhushko hot on his tail. At the bottom, the three embarked on a real challenge: standing up without losing balance as cochlear fluid swirled around the inner ear and caused the horizon to do the same in the field of vision.
As the day unfolded, the northern landscape continually changed. Lunch was taken a few hundred meters off the road in an ancient seabed, where shells and stones moved out by eons of water flow lined the earth which comfortably sank a few centimeters with each barefoot step. Under a baking desert sun, mushroom-shaped cliffs of fossilized coral reefs spontaneously broke the flat and rolling terrain.
Though the occasional marsh or lake lent a little greenery through the scenes, the roof-top view of the parched earth gave way only when the sun went down and the stars of a moonless desert night appeared in a display of the constellations.
Despite protestations and a warning from Sammy that an investigation was forthcoming about why the group was stopping in a closed military zone, camp was made around 9 p.m. and a few people took advantage of the first windless night in a week to sleep sans tents.
That proved somewhat costly at daybreak when the first raindrops started to fall.
While the locals said the rain was good luck, the constant precipitation meant braking the plans to camp in the desert 100 km. out of Cairo and driving through the mosquito-ridden confines of a hot camp next to the pyramids of Giza. That, and one of the trucks running out of fuel for the second time on the trip, made for a night where many in the group saw the sun before the pillow.
Though the rain and unseasonably cold weather continued through Tuesday afternoon as the expedition drove towards the Suez Canal, one bit of good news lightened the spirits of the peace mission: Iraqi Latif Yahia, good to his word, rejoined the group in the Egyptian capital after a two-day hiatus.
"Back to family again," the former Uday Hussein body double said after receiving hugs and kisses from the group during their Cairo rendezvous.
©2006 The Jerusalem Post