we built this city on rock and roll and ideology

the lewis clan is in town. annie’s parents know the cousins of the wife of the mayor of ariel, who insisted that they come on a private tour of his city (and they invited me to tag alone). ariel is a city of 18,000, established in 1978 in the heart of samaria. samaria is the northern part of the west bank, making ariel one of the largest jewish settlements in the occupied territories.

our tour guide has not only been the mayor for 25 years (now his full time job), he was a founder of the settlement when is was just a collection of tents on a hill top (something that might now be considered an illegal outpost, but was sanctioned, and even encouraged by the Israeli government at the time). he is a secular ideologue with a lot of vision. it is one of the leading cities for immigrant absorption (approximately half the population arrived recently from russia), houses a college with 10,000 students (mostly commuters) and plans are in the works to expand the settlement to 60,000 residents.

no stranger to tours and publicity, he had many rehearsed lines. he talked to us non-stop for 2 hours, both in the modest city hall and while driving us around the sausage shaped settlement. as a politician, he answered very few of our questions. besides the fact that he and I don’t see eye-to-eye on many issues, I was also irritated by the condescending tone he used and the assumptions he made about us as american jews. granted, I may not fit the typical american or jewish american mold.

his main point seemed to be to show us that the citizens of ariel are not gun-carrying, bible-thumping, black-hatted, arab haters who throw dirty diapers and beat up palestinian olive harvesters. but rather, they are normal people, who a have a modern town, with tourism, advanced technology and industry and his city is shaped like a hot dog because they took care never to steal a single olive tree from palestinian owned land. he insists that they are not occupiers because he legally owns the land his house is built on. and despite his pride in being a secular mayor of a largely secularly city, he referenced abraham’s biblical purchase of land in hebron as another reason why this land belongs to him and the jewish people.

whether or not he calls himself an occupier, he knows exactly what his presence in the west bank implies. he spelled it out for us in his own words: “I established this city to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state” and, “I am not an obstacle to peace, I am an obstacle to a Palestinian state.”

he went on to explain that the major west bank palestinian towns should be incorporated as part of Jordan, while ariel and the other major jewish settlements should be annexed to Israel and gaza should be given back to egypt. maybe news is slow to make it to samaria, but im pretty sure that offer isn’t really on the table. then again, I guess to be the mayor of a major settlement, you have to be ready to ignore international opinion.

it might have been easier to claim citizenship

than to open a checking account as a foreigner.*

after over a month of paying sovereign bank’s $5 fee every time i withdrew money from an international atm and to assist the process of paying rent in shekels, i decided it was time to open an israeli bank account. i inquired with several israelis as to which was best and was told that other than bank hapoalim (which is apparently evil), just pick the one closest to your house.

this advice brought me to bank discount. my first trip there involved waiting in approximately a bazillion lines for a total of nearly 2 hours, but i left successfully with empty bank account and promises that in less than a week I could get an atm card and checks. several days after making arrangements to transfer money into my new account I returned to the bank to see if the transfer had come through and if I could pick up my new atm card and checks.

after again waiting in several lines to find the appropriate people, i learned the money had come through, but, “you didn’t order the card and checks? you have to order them!” apparently, these perks aren’t automatic.

so i waited in one line to order the atm card and a second line for the checks. the atm request went seemingly well, but I had no such luck in the checks line.

“hi, i’d like to order checks.”
“account number and id please”
“61…”
“61? is this a foreigner account?”
“yes, i’m not israeli.”
“oh, I don’t know if I can do this, and see here, this paper says that your account cant get checks.”
“but I need checks, i have to pay rent.”
“maybe you should talk to the manager. the desk over there.”

the manager informed me that because i am a foreigner and they don’t “know me” they cant yet trust me with checks. “use the account a bit, then come back and maybe we can do it.”

fast forward one month: after receiving my atm card and pre-chosen pin code (no, you don’t get to pick your own), i used my bank account multiple times, withdrawing the daily maximum of 600 NIS at the minor fee of 1.25 shekels. it was time, i decided, to return to my quest for checks (i now owed my roommate 3 months of rent).

“hi, i opened an account a while back, i’d like to order checks.”
“account number and id?.”
“61…”
“61? is this a foreigner account?”
“yes.”
“micki, this girl has a foreigner account, can we order checks for her?”
“yes, yes, just take her first born child and 4 dunams of her orange orchards.”
“but I don’t grow oranges…”
“ok, fine. come back in 3 days to pick up the checks.”

it was too simple, i knew it. instead of 3 days, i gave them a week. at least by this point I knew which line to wait in.

“hi, i ordered checks last week, can I pick them up?”
“account number and id?.”
“61…”
“61? a foreigner account? oh no, those checks wont be ready for at least another week. and maybe you should call before you come back, because really we don’t know how long it will take.”

so in sum, nearly 2 months after opening my account, i have a very patient and understanding roommate but no checks. for more tales of israeli bureaucracy, refer to adler’s blog.

[*note: this statement only holds true for me as a jew. if I were, lets say, a palestinian from east jerusalem it would be easier to build a bank out of toothpicks and yogurt than to get citizenship.]

"balls to walls"

officially, fuad is a resident of beit jala, a community in the west bank. he graciously served us tea at the abandoned building next to his home as he described how his property, on the outskirts of his west bank town, has recently been incorporated as part of israeli-controlled east jerusalem through the construction of the separation barrier, while the rest of his town has been fenced off. the concrete wall prevents him from accessing his community, relatives, friends, children’s school and more. he has a piece of paper permitting him entry into israel (from which regular beit jala residents are prohibited) but it can still take hours, or even an entire night to cross the checkpoint.

(i have no digital camera- diagrams will have to suffice)

earlier this week b’tselem (http://www.btselem.org/English/index.asp), an israeli human rights organization, took the staff and volunteers from my office (sadaka reut) on a tour of the “separation barrier” that israel is in the process of building. despite everything I had seen, heard and read about the wall, seeing this much of it all at once was almost like being punched in the face, or perhaps, like watching thousands of palestinians get punched in the face.

some historical background: in june, 1967 israel gained control over the west bank, including east jerusalem (as well as gaza, the golan heights and the sinai peninsula). in order to procure jerusalem as the "eternal and undivided" capital of the jewish state, east jerusalem was annexed to the state of israel while the rest of the west bank remained offically occupied territory. despite this drastic effort, east jerusalem remains the desired capital of the palestinian people and the city remains (at least socially, culturally, and economically) immensely divided. trash collection occurs regularly only in west jerusalem and other jewish neighborhoods. arab east jerusalemites are ever so privileged to have the status of permanent residents (not citizens) of israel. and as a permanent resident, one should expect to be denied building permits, even when diaspora jews are allowed to build apartment complexes in the middle of east jerusalem arab neighborhoods. we drank more tea in the legal portion of abu said’s home. the second floor that is under construction for his son is illegal, but he thought it more likely go unnoticed by the authorities than a whole new structure.

in this tiny country, land and demographics are of the utmost importance to politics. the wall is carefully winding its way around the fringes of jerusalem in what comes off as a last ditch effort to assert territorial control. it’s the political equivalent of an animal peeing to mark its territory.

its hard to dispute the fact that israel has security concerns and under the guise of defense, the government claims to be building this complex structure of concrete walls, watchtowers, fences and barbed wire, to keep out terrorists. but watching the fence twist and turn in peculiar patterns (with little regard for the green line or the communities through which it passes) makes it fairly obvious that this barrier is about more than security.

interestingly enough, half of the residents of abu dis are a security concern to the state of israel, while their neighbors on the west side of town are not. the abu dis portion of the wall has been featured on international news because it literally divides the community in two, leaving a small hole in the fence, guarded by israeli soldiers as the only place people can cross to carry on their lives. it is tagged with graffiti: “seattle/india/ireland/etc supports palestine,” “from warsaw ghetto to abu dis ghetto” and the ever clever, “balls to walls.”

the community of sheikh sayeed may soon meet a similar fate. we spoke with some of its residents who told us they considered their community to be a neighborhood of jebel mukaber, which is considered by israel as part of jerusalem. however, unlike their j.m. neighbors, residents of the sheikh sayeed village do not have blue identity cards giving them the elusive “permanent resident” status because some imaginary line has deemed those in sheikh sayeed as residents of the palestinian authority. so to the west lies what israel sees as jerusalem and to the east the landscape plummets into a deep wadi with no roads out. the intended route for the separation fence is about to cut the village of sheikh sayeed off from the rest of jebel mukaber, which for all intents and purposes will turn it into a 2,000 person ghetto. in this case, even geography is against the palestinians.

this security fence is not an apartheid wall (i believe this conflict is too unique to appropriate terms from elsewhere), but it is definitely wronging an entire population. and if im still reeling from the tour, I cant even imagine how they feel.