Everyday acts of resistance

The purpose of Israel's siege of the occupied territories is not to harm the Palestinians but to flush out the "terrorists," says Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. It is actually making every Palestinian part of the resistance. Graham Usher reports from Jenin, the West Bank
On Saturday morning several hundred Palestinians from different civic organisations marched peacefully to breach an Israeli army checkpoint barring their way to Jerusalem, before being dispersed in a storm of sound bombs, tear gas and rubber-coated steel bullets. The next day Palestinian guerrillas shot and wounded a Jewish settler in a drive-by attack on a by-pass road near Nablus.
Palestinians in the occupied territories see both as legitimate acts of resistance. But they are not the only acts. Nor are they typical of the resistance all Palestinians have to mount, every day, merely to keep some grip on their lives.
One week before the civics took to the checkpoint and the guerrillas to the roads, a dozen or so Palestinians from Arraba village in the northern West Bank descended from their homes on its bluff to the Israeli military base at its foot. They clambered over an earth rampart that for the previous seven days had barricaded their only road to the main northern Palestinian town of Jenin. There they tore the rampart down, slab by slab, stone by stone.
That day the villagers were going to work, shop, visit relatives, come what may. Through binoculars, and from an eyrie bristling with machine guns, the soldiers in the camp allowed them to do so. "It's what the Israelis call 'easing' the closure," says Bassima, a young Palestinian woman who works in Arraba. "It means they let you clear a path wide enough for a taxi to pass without getting shot. 'Tightening' the closure means you will get shot."
There are around 90 army roadblocks in the West Bank and 163 earth barricades. Some are real military barriers, like the up-ended yellow-metal watchtower that guillotines the main road from Israel to the Palestinian town of Tulkarm. Palestinians overcome this by wading through cornfields and over rocky tracks to reach their jobs in Israel. Successfully, it seems. Despite the closure, there are between 10,000-30,000 Palestinians working in Israel on any single day, says the army, and all without permits.
Other barriers are simply concrete boulders dropped at the entrances of villages and left for the Palestinians to haul away. But the most common blockade is the mud and gravel rampart about a metre high, encircled by ditches about a metre deep and watched over by soldiers in jeeps or straddling the tops of armoured personnel carriers. These have torn apart virtually every road leading to a town, village or camp in the West Bank. And their purpose is to prevent cars with suicide bombers getting out and cars with arms getting in, says the army.
Except they don't. Take the main northern road out of Jenin. As usual, it plunges into a cul-de-sac of earth, shale and brick, guarded menacingly by an armoured personnel carrier with a soldier leaning on a machine gun. As usual, Palestinian cars, taxis and school buses snake around the barricade over a freshly furrowed field and, once the trench shallows enough to cross, onto an adjoining road. The soldier neither checks the Palestinians' papers nor searches their vehicles. He doesn't even call them to halt. He tans himself in the spring sunshine.
It is realities like these that convince Palestinians that the siege is precisely what the Israeli government is most loath to describe it: a collective punishment against an innocent and unarmed civilian population. And it hurts like hell.
Prior to the closure, most of Arraba's 7,000 inhabitants worked in Israel. Today only a handful will risk the 10-kilometre hike along dirt tracks and hill passes to reach the border. Instead they till their fathers' fields and delve deeper into ever diminishing savings. "In one way, it's a good strategy as well as a necessary one," says Samia Zeid, a community worker in the village. "It allows the workers to live and weans us off dependency on Israel. But it's tough. In a good week you could earn $50 in Israel. From the land the most you will get is $10. It makes you angry".
What makes her even angrier is the callousness that goes with the siege. Last month, 33-year old Aysheh Nasser died in Arraba from acute anaemia after being prevented by soldiers at the barricade from reaching the area's only hospital in Jenin. She leaves an unemployed husband and five children, who sit, listless, in their home. The oldest, Amal, had hoped to finish school and go on to university. But "there are more important things now," she says. Like being a second mother to her three-month-old sister.
The undeclared aim of such oppression is to exhaust the Palestinians into giving up the fight. What is actually happening is that the fight, "breaking the siege," becomes less political activism than an unavoidable way of life for every Palestinian.
Take Deir Ghazala, a small Palestinian village folded into the hills north of Jenin. It is hardly a stronghold of the "resistance," as the various Palestinian national and Islamic factions have again become dubbed. The only action in recent months was when the villagers came together to buy out a building rented by Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, turning it into a much needed kindergarten. On the walls of the classrooms there are no murals of martyrs, but drawings of rabbits. In the playground, there are no plastic guns but swings, slides and the usual tumble of children at play. "It's quiet here," says Said Salameh Zakarneh, the head of the village council.
But Deir Ghazala's only road is still walled with mud, forcing people to retrieve supplies from trucks on one side of the barrier and carry them on their backs to their homes on the other. "Our biggest problem is shortages, especially medicines," says Zakarneh. For the last four months Deir Ghazala's only clinic has been shut down because doctors and nurses from the neighbouring villages can no longer get there. "We've worked out a way for a doctor to come once every 15 days," he says. "But that's not enough for a village with 600 people."
But if there is no trouble, why the siege? "Because of those," he says, pointing to a ridge of bluish mountains that mark the border with Israel. "Because we live this side of the Green Line, we must be punished along with every other Palestinian." And is the fight worth the punishment? He finds the question incomprehensible. "Of course," he answers. "The Intifada must continue. There is no other way. It is the only protest we have left."
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