wfn.org | [PCUSANEWS] Palestinians survey ancestral property - through a fence

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Note #8708 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

05195
April 7, 2005

Land locked

Palestinians survey ancestral property - through a fence

by Alexa Smith

BETHLEHEM - Johnny Atik shakes his head, smiles ruefully and says: "I built
this house to be closer to the land. That was 20 years ago."

	He is on the veranda of his three-story house, sipping high-octane
coffee from a dainty little cup. The white stone residence, built into the
hillside, commands a broad view of the valley, which, after winter's heavy
rains, is turning deep green.

	As he talks, his friend, Elias Maria, translates.

	They have known each other all their lives. Maria lives in town,
about five miles away in Bethlehem's Old City, but his family and Atik's have
owned adjoining land for eons.

	Atik has deeds that trace back to the Turkish occupation of
Palestine, centuries ago.

	The rich red dirt in their olive orchards has been plowed, the
upturned earth allowing rain to saturate the soil, so that a fat crop will be
ready by fall.

	It looks idyllic: the low hills in the distance, the grape arbors
nearby, the tractor parked in the yard.

	Idyllic - except for the two big metal fences. And the dirt road that
cuts through Atik's orchard like a scar.

	Fortified wire fences now block Atik's access to big tracts of his
own land. He can see his trees but can't tend them. He can't plow, or prune,
or weed. That has been the case for two years. He guesses that 30 percent of
the trees have gone to ruin.

	Atik, 53, lost more than four acres just in the area between the two
fences. Over the hill there is more. Much of his land slopes toward Har Homa,
an expanding Israeli settlement edging down the hillside as new housing is
built.

	"The army told us that we'd get permits to enter and look after the
land," Atik says, sipping his bitter coffee.

	Maria says, "Until now, there are no permits."

	So they tend what they can, and stare at the rest. Through a fence.

	The fence - part of the Israeli-built barrier meant to guard against
Palestinian attacks - attaches to a 30-foot concrete wall marking the new
entrance to Bethlehem and establishing new city limits. Atik's house and a
bit of his land are just on the Bethlehem side. The rest is now in Jerusalem.

	Historically, the Bethlehem-Jerusalem border has been at St. Elias
Monastery, which sits on a hilltop about a mile north of the nearly-finished
wall, not far from a military checkpoint where soldiers ask for permits from
Palestinians and others who want to enter or leave the city.

	Bethlehem officials say it isn't clear how the new gates will be
managed when the wall is finished. They can't answer questions about hours of
operation, availability of permits, automobile access.

	Atik doesn't know either whether he will get a permit to get to his
fenced off property - although his lawyer tells him that it will come
eventually. He doesn't know what sort of access he'll have to his trees: Only
at harvest time? What days? What hours?

	If that isn't complicated enough, Maria lays out another dimension to
the same problem for Bethlehem's Christians.

	Maria, 68, says he has eight children, and this land is their
inheritance. His family, like the Atiks, are among the roughly 20,000
Christians still in Bethlehem despite the occupation's disastrous effect on
the economy.

	But it's not just about money.

	"More important than the inconvenience of all this: We want our land
so that we can continue our generations here. So our children can build. So
our city can expand," he says. "... More than 98 percent of the people
affected by this are Christians."

	Maria, a Roman Catholic, points at the fence that rips through Atik's
property and says, "This is the only area left for expansion."

	ATTORNEY Daniel Seidemann says the Israeli government wants to stop
Palestinian expansion, and that's why Atik and Maria never got their permits.

	Neither was officially informed that the Israeli government passed a
resolution in July enacting a 1950 Absentee Property Law (also called the
Abandoned Property Law) to annex parts of the West Bank without compensating
landowners.

	According to Seidemann, the law means that people living in Palestine
cannot own land in Israel - and the wall, or, in this case, the fence,
changes the borders so that the land is annexed. Technically, Atik and Maria
no longer own the property. (Attorney General Menahem Mazuz has instructed
Finance Minister Benyamin Netanyahu to overrule the seizures of West Bank
property and assets in East Jerusalem, but Netanyahu has not acted in the
matter.)

	For Seidemann, the barrier, the settlements and the law together
disclose the intention of the current Israeli government to annex East
Jerusalem - and parts of the West Bank - into Israel proper.

	However, Seidemann says, the attorney general's decision is binding:
Even though Atik's land is technically in Jerusalem, it's still his land.

	"It is clear that (the former landowners) have a right to access the
land," he says. "It's very likely we'll get the permits, but it is
embarrassing that it is so problematic. It's scandalous."

	Seidemann represents about 10 families, but says the barrier affects
hundreds of others in Bethlehem.

	Rachel Naidek Ashekenazi, a Ministry of Defense spokesperson, told
the Presbyterian News Service that farmers can reach their land through
agricultural gates elsewhere on the West Bank. Crossings are permitted three
times a day, at times coordinated with the Israeli Defense Forces, she said,
and the same will be true in Bethlehem. 

	She said the wall is a security provision, not part of a land grab.

	When construction of the fence began, Seidemann asked the military to
move it so that it wouldn't separate Atik from about 150 of his olive trees.
The request was denied, but the army did move and replant some trees that had
been uprooted, and assured Seidemann in writing in 2002 that he would be
given a permit allowing him to pass through the barrier to work his land.

	He learned only this summer that the Absentee Property Law had been
evoked, ironically, just when the new Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas was
promising to negotiate peace. "If Abu Mazen (Abbas' nickname) is able t
consolidate 1) a ceasefire and 2) a credible government, the whole pretext of
the wall will be undermined ...

	"A credible ceasefire is more effective for security than a barrier."

	THIRTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD William Atik is reserved, like his dad. They sit
together on the third-floor porch, watching the landscape change. At the rear
of their house sits the small stone cairn where his ancestors camped while
working in the fields.

	"It's a very big problem," Wiliam says quietly. "This is my life. ...
I have no other job. My work is the land. ... I want to be a farmer."

	Maria says two of his sons, unable to find work, already have left
Bethlehem. "I'm extremely depressed," he says.

	Johnny Atik adds: "Bethlehem is the most sacred spot in the whole
world for the Christian community. If we leave ... Bethlehem will be just a
convent, just a church without a community."

	Maybe, he says, Western churches ought to buy up land within
Bethlehem's old boundaries, or lend money so that local churches can do so.

	Atik gestures toward Ha Homa, lowering his finger to point directly
at the new construction on the hill, moving closer to the olive trees in the
valley. "I told him," he says, nodding now toward Maria, "'One day, they're
going to come and take our land.

	"They started at the top of the hill. Now they're expanding down the
hill," he says. "The Israelis pretend this road and this fence are for
security. If that were so, why not put it on the border that was established
in 1967? And then leave us alone to take care of ourselves."

Lighting a cheap French cigarette, Maria says: "Before this, when there were
no problems, I smoked a pack of cigarettes every two or three days. ... With
this stress, when I think about the land, about our property ... I smoke two
or three packs a day."

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