Discovering Oslo 2 Diary
12 December 1996
Closure hits again
Wake-up call
Sure enough the closure of Ramallah and surrounding area was officially announced and I was greeted before I left my house by Cathi from the Human Rights Action Project office (pictured left), arriving to let me know there was no rush after fruitlessly trying to reach the out-of-reach university.
The newspapers and radio news quickly rushed to give details. A settler spacewaggon from Bet El, carrying Yoel and Etta Tzur and five of their nine children, aged 4 to 17 years of age, was ambushed in a drive-by shooting in the section of the bypass road between Beit El and the Surda crossing point of the Ramallah-Birzeit road. Etta and her 12-year-old son Ephraim died and the rest of the family were injured by over 30 bullets that hit the car.
Political prisoners of their parents
Children dying is always difficult to deal with but how much more so when they ultimately are the victims of the political machinations of their parents. The Tzur family knew exactly what they were doing. The family was described as “one of the veteran and leading families” of the Beit El settlement’s B project, the second northward expansion of the original settlement. Yoel Tzur is one of the managers of the Arutz 7 radio and an administrative head of the yeshiva there. He is one of the field officers of the Israeli right wing, on the frontline in the process of creating facts on the ground at the expense of the Palestinian population. These people hate Palestinians, call them “Arabs” to suggest their presence is an ethnic problem rather than an issue of struggle for national rights, and they are virulently opposed to the peace process, although not adverse to using it for political propaganda. The mother of yeshiva student David Boim, killed in a November 1995 drive-by shooting, asked, “What kind of peace is this, if Arabs [sic] can feel free to murder our children and escape to their Oslo havens of refuge?”
Here we go again
Meanwhile, in “Oslo haven of refuge” Ramallah, it’s clear that we are not going anywhere, as we set out onto the streets. Approaching the Manara, there are hundreds of people waiting to go to work in surrounding villages, and the faculty and students of Birzeit University are wearing those ‘here-we-go-again’ faces. Exams are on at the moment. Taxi drivers stand around drinking coffee. Cathi recounts a story of some unnamed international students who came up to her on the way to my house, complaining about not being able to get to the university and how worried they were that the road might suddenly open and they might not know. Will Cathi tell their teachers if she gets there first that they were having difficulties getting there, they ask? No, says Cathi, she won’t. I suspect this is because the lecturers might be able to notice all by themselves that the university campus is like a ghost town, even if they weren’t turned back themselves at checkpoints.
I don’t blame her. She has more to worry about this morning. Left, right and center, the Palestinian Authority is arresting tens of people, including our students, and dragging them off to God-knows-where. Just when the numbers of students in Palestinian prisons was falling again. We are hoping they aren’t taken to Jericho, a prison notorious for its torture.
Take your pick
Rumours have it that the PFLP, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, carried out last night’s attack, but we are suspending judgement until the facts become clearer. The rumour came from the fact that yesterday was the 29th anniversary of the PFLP’s founding in 1967 but, then again, it was also the 48th anniversary of UN Resolution 194 that specified the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their land; we are bang in the middle of the Jewish festival of Hanukka; Israel has just announced that a new settlement will be built in the heart of Palestinian East Jerusalem; and 11-year-old Hilmi Shoushi was beaten to death last week by a settler. In other words, take your pick of possible motivations.
The local journalists are out in force, hanging around in the Manara. It raises an interesting comparison. Israeli neighbourhoods are not put under curfew or closed off when incidents happen inside the Green Line. I can only imagine the outrage that it would cause.
Mmmm...when do you think..?
In the evening, a group of us congregated at Cathi’s house to relax. The hourly question that kept coming round like clockwork was, When do you think they’ll open the roads again? Whatever we talked about, it always came back to this topic. Walking home later, Palestinian Police stopped us to question Kifah, a student friend from Birzeit village who has been staying with me since last night’s closure. They weren’t interested in my passport or the passport of the other international with us, just his haweeyah (identity card). It just felt like harrassment and I will never feel comfortable with the racist nature of the obsessive identity checking in this country by both sides. I offered my passport to the officer, who repeatedly refused it, telling him, Khod! Izza wahad minna wisikh, koolna wisihkeen! (“Take it! If one of us is dirty, all of us are dirty!”).
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Digital photos © Nigel Parry.