Life in Nu'man land

How Israel's West Bank wall has turned a Palestinian village
into a day-leave prison for its 200 residents

Rory McCarthy in Nu'man
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 6 May 2009 22.00 BST

The Palestinian villagers of Nu'man have lived on
their hilltop for generations, looking out across
sweeping views of the terraced olive-tree slopes of
the West Bank. But their view is changing dramatically
and they fear there will be little place for Nu'man in
the new landscape.

The village, close to the city of Bethlehem, is surrounded
on three sides by Israel's vast West Bank barrier, here a
wide steel fence. At its entrance is a military checkpoint,
where Israeli soldiers have orders to let no one other
than the 200-odd villagers into Nu'man. Looming just
to the west is the large Israeli settlement of Har Homa,
already home to as many as 15,000 settlers, with an
expansion planned on to a portion of Nu'man's land.

There is one barely functioning shop in the village,
but no school, mosque or health clinic. There is no
public transport and there are no permits for the
younger generations to build themselves new homes.

As far as Israel is concerned, Nu'man is in Jerusalem,
within the slice of the West Bank that it annexed after
capturing the land in the 1967 war, an annexation
unrecognised by the rest of the international community.

Although Israel took the land, it did not take the villagers.
They were not given Jerusalem residency and do not
receive the city's services. Instead they retain their
West Bank identity cards, which means they cannot
travel to Jerusalem and explains why in the past some
have been detained for the perplexing crime of living
in their own homes.

For most of the past four decades, villagers like Ibrahim
Darawi, 62, lived their lives in the West Bank, walking
over the hills to the nearby villages to shop, work and
pray. But once Israel began building its West Bank
barrier in 2002, the situation changed rapidly. "Now
the village is inside the wall," Darawi said. "They want
to force us to leave. It's a quiet transfer."

Israel insists its barrier is crucial in the effort to stop
terrorist attacks inside Israel. However, for most of
its route it runs inside the West Bank, sometimes
deep inside, effectively attaching Jewish settlements
and parts of the West Bank to the rest of Israel. The
international court of justice has said in an advisory
opinion that the barrier is illegal where it crosses into
the West Bank and should be torn down.

No new houses can be built in Nu'man – those that
have been built without permits have been demolished
or face demolition orders. Villagers are not allowed
to enlarge existing homes either, leaving Darawi unable

to expand the two-bedroom apartment where he lives
with a family of 11. His eight children study in the
kitchen and when they finish university they will leave
Nu'man and follow careers elsewhere.

"It's a tragedy," he said. "I think the strategy is that
15 years from now the village will be quite empty.
The old will die and the young will leave." The villagers
have twice petitioned Israel's supreme court for Nu'man
to be recognised as part of the West Bank, or for its
residents to be given Jerusalem residency cards. The
case is pending.

The UN, in a new report that warns of the growing
fragmentation and weakening of the Bethlehem
region in the face of the Israeli occupation, describes
Nu'man as a village "living in limbo."

Village land has been confiscated, the UN says, for
the construction of the barrier, an Israeli border police
base, a major checkpoint and for a new settler bypass
road that leads from Jerusalem out to Jewish settlements
deep inside the occupied West Bank, including Nokdim,
home to Israel's hardline foreign minister, Avigdor
Lieberman.

"The combined restrictions have segregated the village
from neighbouring communities and obstructed
normal family life," says the UN office for the co-ordination
of humanitarian affairs said. "Young couples are prevented
from building in the community because of the impossibility
of receiving construction permits."

For Niveen Darawi, 20, this much is obvious. She is in her
third year of a five-year computer engineering degree and
still living at home in Nu'man. After that, she will go. "I will
have to leave the village. It will happen," she said. "People
here cannot build, so people have left. I think Israel wants
it that way."

posted by annie at 8:58 PM