c. 1999 Religion News Service
EL BIREH, West Bank _ Khadijeh Abu Sharifa and Dr. Larry Hirsch have little in common except a short stretch of highway and a deep distrust of each other.
On the downhill side of the Nablus-Ramallah Road, which cuts through the densely populated heart of the West Bank, lies Jelazoun. The United Nations-run refugee camp, home to Abu Sharifa and about 7,000 others, was created 50 years ago as a temporary home for Palestinians displaced in the 1948 war that established Israel.
Uphill is Beit El, a sprawling enclave of about 5,000 Orthodox Jewish settlers, including Hirsch. Built 21 years ago to buttress Israel’s claim to the region west of the Jordan River, the settlement is growing quickly.
The two-lane road might as well be a canyon, there is so little contact between the Palestinians and Jews. Here, on the front lines of the peace process, neither side really wants to share anything _ power, land or bread _ with the other.
Abu Sharifa, a 52-year-old grandmother, has lived among the dingy concrete buildings and bumpy dirt roads of Jelazoun since 1971. She eyes the homes of Beit El with longing.
Under the Oslo peace accords, signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1993, most of the surrounding land has already been transferred to Palestinian control. Abu Sharifa believes the Jews should also be forced to return Beit El, which sits on land claimed by Arab residents of the nearby city of El Bireh.
“It is our duty to fight to liberate our land,” says Abu Sharifa, who hails from a village near Tel Aviv, where her family’s orchards are now occupied by Israeli settlers.
Abu Sharifa, deceptively demure in her traditional Islamic head scarf and long dress, has already tangled with the Israeli army once: Last August, she traded fists with some soldiers who raided her home at midnight in search of her 19-year-old son, Mahmoud.
While she distracted the troops, Mahmoud escaped, although he was arrested a few days later and convicted of throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at Israelis. A member of the Palestinian police, Mahmoud was released last month as part of the first wave of prisoners freed under this year’s Wye River peace agreement.
“Everyone should struggle in all possible ways. My first preference is by negotiation, but if we are not successful, I prefer the gun,” says Abu Sharifa during a visit to her elder son Saleh’s video store in El Bireh. The store displays photos of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and of Mahmoud firing a Kalishnikov along with the usual “Terminator” and “Rambo” posters.
Hirsch, who lives a mile away in a comfortable house in Beit El, fumes at the idea of leaving this region, reputed to be the site of an ancient road to Jerusalem that Jews walked on more than 2,000 years ago.
“Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to live here,” says Hirsch, originally from Chicago. He believes the Bible gives Jews a clear right to all of the West Bank, including the territory already ceded by the Israeli government to the Palestinian Authority.
“This isn’t their land,” says Hirsch. “God gave this land to me. Are you going to let a bunch of barbarians like Arafat rule it?”
To Hirsch, the Israeli government’s plan to divide the West Bank, even in the name of peace, will lead to chaos. “As we give more and more to the Arabs, the Arabs will act up more and more,” he says.
And despite his Hippocratic oath, Hirsch is prepared to meet violence with violence. The internist carries an Uzi submachine gun in his briefcase to protect himself as he visits clinics at Israeli settlements throughout the area.
“Life’s tough for a Jew. There are people who don’t want you alive,” says Hirsch. “Every time an Arab passes me on the highway, I’m afraid I’m going to get shot.”
Abu Sharifa and Hirsch are by no means unique. Recent interviews with dozens of Jews and Palestinians in the West Bank suggest that mutual distrust, even outright hatred, of the other side is a common sentiment.
Furthermore, neither Arabs nor Israelis have faith in their political leaders to watch out for their best interests. The government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in shambles, and Arafat is constantly battling challenges from Palestinian lawmakers and rival groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
“The politicians are utterly detached from the realities that go on here,” says Hirsch.
One reason peace is so difficult is the strong grip of history and religion.
Many of the estimated 170,000 Israelis living in the West Bank are religiously observant Orthodox Jews, and they repeatedly cite Scripture to support their right to live in a region inhabited by 1.2 million Arabs.
In the 1970s, the Israeli government began urging Jews to move to the often remote outposts as a way to solidify political and military control over the area, seized from Jordan in the 1967 Six Day War.
The settlers who come are drawn to the dry, desert hills for both spiritual and material reasons.
Daniel Nakonechny, a Beit El resident who emigrated to Israel from New Jersey in 1979, moved to the West Bank five years ago because the Bible identifies it as the place where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob lived.
Driving from Jerusalem to Beit El on a new Israeli-built expressway that bypasses Arab areas, Nakonechny points out numerous ancient sites, including graves dating back 3,000 years to the era of King David.
“Whether you believe it or not, it’s clearly written in the Bible that the land of Israel was given to the Jewish people,” says Nakonechny, 49, who works as a computer technician.
Beit El is a tight-knit, homogeneous community. Once past the gate, where guards carefully screen anyone who looks Arab, the settlement resembles a typical suburb, with tract homes, schools, a grocery store and a synagogue where the men pray three times a day.
Yet residents never forget that they are surrounded by Palestinians.
Five times a day, they can hear loudspeakers calling the Muslim faithful to prayer in the surrounding mosques. When they leave the complex, most of the men carry guns, which they practice firing at Beit El’s shooting range.
To reach the new bypass road to Jerusalem, the settlers must drive along a short stretch of the Nablus-Ramallah Road, where they sometimes encounter rock-throwing Palestinian youths.
Nakonechny’s Hyundai van was a target last March. The attackers took out both windshields and two side windows.
Still, residents say the benefits of living in the settlements outweigh the risks.
For Palestinians, Beit El’s very existence is a painful reminder of the Israeli occupation, which ended just a few years ago.
Samiha Abu Raddhah, 57, still gets teary-eyed as she recounts how Israeli soldiers shot her 15-year-old son, Ahmin, in the head outside their house in 1988, at the beginning of the decade-long series of Palestinian protests known as the intifada.
“It was a normal day,” she says, standing on the street corner where the shooting took place. “Then someone threw a rock.”
Israeli troops fired shots. “Ahmin ran about 50 feet before he fell down,” Abu Raddhah recalls. “I found him on the ground.”
The Israelis tried to save him, but he died a few days later. Although witnesses identified the soldiers involved, Abu Raddhah says Israel never prosecuted anyone for the shooting or even apologized.
“They never said anything to me, as if they were shooting dogs,” she says.
Palestinians also chafe at Israeli-imposed limits on their movements. Even though the Palestinian Authority controls some pockets of territory, most of the land is not contiguous. Under the peace accords, a Palestinian citizen cannot travel outside a Palestinian-controlled area _ say, to Jerusalem _ without Israeli permission. Israelis, however, are free to travel anywhere.
Still, some settlers see hope for eventual peace.
Andrew Deutsch, a technical writer for a unit of Lucent Technologies, says that Jews in his largely secular settlement, Nofim, are working with nearby Arab villages. The two sides try to solve common problems, such as water pollution, and even operate joint businesses, such as gas stations.
Gradually the two sides are learning to trust each other, says Deutsch. “If you base your agreements on fear, there is no end of it.”
DEA END GOEL
