haifa.13

Haifa Fornightly(Editor--Huzefa Mehta) 13th edition 1/5/93 A day in west bank. ------------------ We spent a day in the West bank last weekend. The idea was to see a couple of major cities in the occupied territories and maybe visit a refugee camp. Greg rented an Arab taxi and the seven of us(myself, Reena, Greg, John, Millind and a Czec girl studying Arabic at Haifa U.). Fortunately the territories were not closed on Saturday. When a territories are closed it means that no one is allowed to cross over for work and any one from the territories found on the other side can be arrested. The territories close every evening at 7:00. We decided to visit the first major city called Jenin. Nothing eventful no signs of Hebrew nor any military outpost. People in Arab dress smoking hookah. We had coffee in a roadside stall and continued on our way to Nablus which is the biggest town in the occupied territories. The Arab triangle between Nablus, Jenin and Ramallah is supposed to be off-access even to the regular Israeli visitors of the West Bank. The couple of Jewish settlements we saw from the road looked liked guarded fortresses. We visited a town on the way with a lot of Roman ruins and reached just before lunch to Nablus. We roamed in the bazaar for quite a while ,had lunch and just hung around. Would this be the capital of Palestine in the most likely event of Jerusalem not being given away? Even though we have been in Israel we havent seen in Israel a place like this. Most of us had seen more of the West bank on CNN than in real life. People seemed to be busy in what they were doing and markets were lively. Later the taxi driver took us to the top of the hill where there is the famed biblical colony of Samaritans. These are Jewish people living here from early times however with a completely different Jewish religious dress. They wore the "pheta" a long red cap which is generally considered to be Turkish. Living very well amidst a completely Arab population. We left back for Haifa since the driver had to be back in the territories before 7:00. We passed a town which was cordoned off by a huge fence. The driver explained it was to protect the Israeli military trucks and vans from an occasional stone. Maybe it would have been more interesting if I could understand Arabic graphitti written off the walls. Several questions arose.... which we asked the driver What kind of passports did they have? How would they leave the country if they wanted to? What kind of jobs they had? How did they sell what they produced? Most Palestinians have a Jordanian passport.They could get if they wanted and accept an Israeli passport. The most common outlet from the territories is the bridge to Jordan. It is from here that most people travel to other countries(Saudi Arabia, Egypt..etc) There is essentially no jobs which are supported from within the territories. This is because the infrastructure is lacking. So they have to travel to "Israel" for working in fields. A lot of the menial labour in Israel is provided by the Arabs. This makes them heavily dependent on the work provided in Israel. There were some soap factories we saw in Nablus. I wonder where they would get the materials from? This makes it interesting to wonder what would happen if they would get the autonomy they are demanding. What would happen to the new Jewish settlements presently in the west bank. These settlements originated under the previous rightist prime minister and now Itzhak Rabin has completely banned new settlements in the territories. This is probably shows his seriousness towards really wanting a long awaited solution. An interesting comment he made was that he would like to make Israel a "boring" country. We did not visit the other part of the triangle Ramallah essentially because there was no time. We would like to go to Wadi musa in the west bank and visit the St. George Monastery. We spent one day in Jerusalem with Rajashree Bhagwat who was visiting Israel. Spent some time near the via-dolorosa the area from which Jesus is supposed to have carried the cross. The pilgrims were carrying the cross from the 1st station to the 12th(?) station which ends in the Church of Holy Sepulchre. Plans are to visit Meggido this weekend and investigate possibilities of going to Jordan most importantly see Petra(Indiana Jones of the last crusade is filmed in this area)