I
thought they would feel right at home in the alleys of Balata refugee
camp, the Casbah and the Hawara checkpoint. But they said there is no
comparison: for them the Israeli occupation regime is worse than
anything they knew under apartheid. This week, 21 human rights
activists from South Africa visited Israel. Among them were members of
Nelson Mandela's African National Congress; at least one of them took
part in the armed struggle and at least two were jailed. There were two
South African Supreme Court judges, a former deputy minister, members
of Parliament, attorneys, writers and journalists. Blacks and whites,
about half of them Jews who today are in conflict with attitudes of the
conservative Jewish community in their country. Some of them have been
here before; for others it was their first visit.
For five days they paid an unconventional visit to Israel - without
Sderot, the IDF and the Foreign Ministry (but with Yad Vashem, the
Holocaust Memorial and a meeting with Supreme Court President Justice
Dorit Beinisch. They spent most of their time in the occupied areas,
where hardly any official guests go - places that are also shunned by
most Israelis.
On Monday they visited Nablus, the most imprisoned city in the West
Bank. From Hawara to the Casbah, from the Casbah to Balata, from
Joseph's Tomb to the monastery of Jacob's Well. They traveled from
Jerusalem to Nablus via Highway 60, observing the imprisoned villages
that have no access to the main road, and seeing the "roads for the
natives," which pass under the main road. They saw and said nothing.
There were no separate roads under apartheid. They went through the
Hawara checkpoint mutely: they never had such barriers.
Jody
Kollapen, who was head of Lawyers for Human Rights in the apartheid
regime, watches silently. He sees the "carousel" into which masses of
people are jammed on their way to work, visit family or go to the
hospital. Israeli peace activist Neta Golan, who lived for several
years in the besieged city, explains that only 1 percent of the
inhabitants are allowed to leave the city by car, and they are
suspected of being collaborators with Israel. Nozizwe
Madlala-Routledge, a former deputy minister of defense and of health
and a current member of Parliament, a revered figure in her country,
notices a sick person being taken through on a stretcher and is
shocked. "To deprive people of humane medical care? You know, people
die because of that," she says in a muted voice.
The tour guides - Palestinian activists - explain that Nablus is
closed off by six checkpoints. Until 2005, one of them was open. "The
checkpoints are supposedly for security purposes, but anyone who wants
to perpetrate an attack can pay NIS 10 for a taxi and travel by bypass
roads, or walk through the hills.
The real purpose is to make life hard for the inhabitants. The
civilian population suffers," says Said Abu Hijla, a lecturer at
Al-Najah University in the city.
In the bus I get acquainted with my two neighbors: Andrew
Feinstein, a son of Holocaust survivors who is married to a Muslim
woman from Bangladesh and served six years as an MP for the ANC; and
Nathan Gefen, who has a male Muslim partner and was a member of the
right-wing Betar movement in his youth. Gefen is active on the
Committee against AIDS in his AIDS-ravaged country.
"Look left and right," the guide says through a loudspeaker, "on
the top of every hill, on Gerizim and Ebal, is an Israeli army outpost
that is watching us." Here are bullet holes in the wall of a school,
there is Joseph's Tomb, guarded by a group of armed Palestinian
policemen. Here there was a checkpoint, and this is where a woman
passerby was shot to death two years ago. The government building that
used to be here was bombed and destroyed by F-16 warplanes. A thousand
residents of Nablus were killed in the second intifada, 90 of them in
Operation Defensive Shield - more than in Jenin. Two weeks ago, on the
day the Gaza Strip truce came into effect, Israel carried out its last
two assassinations here for the time being. Last night the soldiers
entered again and arrested people.
It has been a long time since tourists visited here. There is
something new: the numberless memorial posters that were pasted to the
walls to commemorate the fallen have been replaced by marble monuments
and metal plaques in every corner of the Casbah.
"Don't throw paper into the toilet bowl, because we have a water
shortage," the guests are told in the offices of the Casbah Popular
Committee, located high in a spectacular old stone building. The former
deputy minister takes a seat at the head of the table. Behind her are
portraits of Yasser Arafat, Abu Jihad and Marwan Barghouti - the jailed
Tanzim leader. Representatives of the Casbah residents describe the
ordeals they face. Ninety percent of the children in the ancient
neighborhood suffer from anemia and malnutrition, the economic
situation is dire, the nightly incursions are continuing, and some of
the inhabitants are not allowed to leave the city at all. We go out for
a tour on the trail of devastation wrought by the IDF over the years.
Edwin Cameron, a judge on the Supreme Court of Appeal, tells his
hosts: "We came here lacking in knowledge and are thirsty to know. We
are shocked by what we have seen until now. It is very clear to us that
the situation here is intolerable." A poster pasted on an outside wall
has a photograph of a man who spent 34 years in an Israeli prison.
Mandela was incarcerated seven years less than that. One of the Jewish
members of the delegation is prepared to say, though not for
attribution, that the comparison with apartheid is very relevant and
that the Israelis are even more efficient in implementing the
separation-of-races regime than the South Africans were. If he were to
say this publicly, he would be attacked by the members of the Jewish
community, he says.
Under a fig tree in the center of the Casbah one of the Palestinian
activists explains: "The Israeli soldiers are cowards. That is why they
created routes of movement with bulldozers. In doing so they killed
three generations of one family, the Shubi family, with the
bulldozers." Here is the stone monument to the family - grandfather,
two aunts, mother and two children. The words "We will never forget, we
will never forgive" are engraved on the stone.
No less beautiful than the famed Paris cemetery of Pere-Lachaise,
the central cemetery of Nablus rests in the shadow of a large grove of
pine trees. Among the hundreds of headstones, those of the intifada
victims stand out. Here is the fresh grave of a boy who was killed a
few weeks ago at the Hawara checkpoint. The South Africans walk quietly
between the graves, pausing at the grave of the mother of our guide,
Abu Hijla. She was shot 15 times. "We promise you we will not
surrender," her children wrote on the headstone of the woman who was
known as "mother of the poor."
Lunch is in a hotel in the city, and Madlala-Routledge speaks. "It
is hard for me to describe what I am feeling. What I see here is worse
than what we experienced. But I am encouraged to find that there are
courageous people here. We want to support you in your struggle, by
every possible means. There are quite a few Jews in our delegation, and
we are very proud that they are the ones who brought us here. They are
demonstrating their commitment to support you. In our country we were
able to unite all the forces behind one struggle, and there were
courageous whites, including Jews, who joined the struggle. I hope we
will see more Israeli Jews joining your struggle."
She was deputy defense minister from 1999 to 2004; in 1987 she
served time in prison. Later, I asked her in what ways the situation
here is worse than apartheid. "The absolute control of people's lives,
the lack of freedom of movement, the army presence everywhere, the
total separation and the extensive destruction we saw."
Madlala-Routledge thinks that the struggle against the occupation
is not succeeding here because of U.S. support for Israel - not the
case with apartheid, which international sanctions helped destroy.
Here, the racist ideology is also reinforced by religion, which was not
the case in South Africa. "Talk about the 'promised land' and the
'chosen people' adds a religious dimension to racism which we did not
have."
Equally harsh are the remarks of the editor-in-chief of the Sunday
Times of South Africa, Mondli Makhanya, 38. "When you observe from afar
you know that things are bad, but you do not know how bad. Nothing can
prepare you for the evil we have seen here. In a certain sense, it is
worse, worse, worse than everything we endured. The level of the
apartheid, the racism and the brutality are worse than the worst period
of apartheid.
"The apartheid regime viewed the blacks as inferior; I do not think
the Israelis see the Palestinians as human beings at all. How can a
human brain engineer this total separation, the separate roads, the
checkpoints? What we went through was terrible, terrible, terrible -
and yet there is no comparison. Here it is more terrible. We also knew
that it would end one day; here there is no end in sight. The end of
the tunnel is blacker than black.
"Under apartheid, whites and blacks met in certain places. The
Israelis and the Palestinians do not meet any longer at all. The
separation is total. It seems to me that the Israelis would like the
Palestinians to disappear. There was never anything like that in our
case. The whites did not want the blacks to disappear. I saw the
settlers in Silwan [in East Jerusalem] - people who want to expel other
people from their place."
Afterward we walk silently through the alleys of Balata, the
largest refugee camp in the West Bank, a place that was designated 60
years ago to be a temporary haven for 5,000 refugees and is now
inhabited by 26,000. In the dark alleys, which are about the width of a
thin person, an oppressive silence prevailed. Everyone was immersed in
his thoughts, and only the voice of the muezzin broke the stillness.
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