back to balata

The past week has been relatively uneventful; insh'allah (god willing) this does not mean what it can in this region---that the inevitable cliche will come to pass, that some storm will come after this period of relative calm.

And relative it is. The checkpoints still exist, the settlements are expanding at a miserably efficient pace; my friends in Balata tell me of army presence in the camp pretty much every night this week. What are they doing? Sometimes arresting people, sometimes just roaming and frightening folks. Just the other day I read a story on al-Jazeera about a man who died at a checkpoint. According to the man's taxi driver, who was attempting to get him from a small village north of Nablus into the city to go to hospital, the soldiers at the checkpoint were unconcerned: 'Let him die,' one gun-slung teenager is reported to have said. The horror: the driver also reported that the soldiers refused to call an ambulance for over two hours, until the man had died. He says that they checked to make sure he was dead and then called on their radios for a medical team to come.

I reported this story to my friends here in the camp as we were discussing the recent developments of 'the situation'. I couldn't---didn't want to---believe that even Israeli soldiers, known for their callousness and racism against Palestinians, could be so cruel. A friend of mine, Mohamed, a self-proclaimed communist and heretic in a camp composed largely of conservative Muslims, relayed a similar story. Apparently the father of a suicide bomber from the camp had a heart attack, and on his way to the hospital was detained at a checkpoint by soldiers. These soldiers did the same thing; they waited 'to make sure he was dead' before happily calling an ambulance.

The misery continues here, though movement for Palestinians in the northern West Bank has recently become substantially easier. Today, for example, I travelled from Jerusalem to Balata camp in just under two hours. This trip would normally take about an hour were it not for the occupation's matrix of control here. Still, most of my experience travelling between the cities has been a nightmare, often taking more than five hours in total. But travel is somewhat of a maze even with the relatively open checkpoints along the way I passed through unquestioned today.

Though it was easier today, the trip's many detours and taxi changes can be tiring, even for a healthy young person, on a GOOD day like this one. From Jerusalem's Palestinian section one takes a minibus to the Kalandia checkpoint outside of Ramallah---where, incidentally, the Israelis are constructing what appears to be an international border crossing like those between Israel and Jordan and Israel and Egypt. At Kalandia one exits their minibus and walks perhaps a quarter of a mile through a checkpoint into the Ramallah district. There one takes a taxi or service (a shared taxi---much cheaper) into the city. So far the journey has taken about a half hour, again on a good day. From Ramallah one either takes a big bus or another service to the Huwarra checkpoint, which lies just northeast of the Ariel settlement and directly south of Nablus city. This leg of the trip takes about an hour.

Arriving ar Huwarra one finds a most interesting relic of the occupation and its many checkpoints: lining the walkways near the taxi stands on both sides of the checkpoint are vendors. Today it looked like a veritable market, with people selling clothes, food, random electronics---whatever one would find in any other market in Palestine. Finally, after walking the quarter mile distance throgh the checkpoint one arrives in the Nablus city region and from there can take a taxi to whatever destination inside or around the city. I happened to walk straight through the checkpoint without any questions from the two Israeli soldiers manning that particular gate.

I have not been so lucky in the past; the last time I visited Balata I was turned away from the checkpoint---the soldiers telling me that 'The Arabs are dangerous, you cannot enter', asking me why I don't 'just go to Tel Aviv or something' and why the hell I would want to go into Nablus (in one soldier's stated opinion the dirtiest and foulest place on earth). So I did what Palestinians do; I turned around, took a taxi to a neighboring village and climbed for two hours through the mountains until reaching my destination.

The situation has been better lately. According to a British friend who has been living here in Balata for over a year, tourists have recently begun to return to Nablus. He said it with somewhat of a grimace. Confused, I asked him whether he thought this was a good or bad thing. 'It's neither good nor bad,' he said. 'It's positive for many people here because of the relative ease with which they can move, and because perhaps some money will begin to trickle back into the tourist economy [that has been absolutely crushed since the beginning of the al-Aqsa intifada in 2001]. It's really a false sense of optimism, though,' he continued, 'because people on the outside will start to assume that the occupation doesn't exist anymore.'

That is true, I thought, recalling the first time I came to Nablus. Though I was beginning to understand the ways in which Israel controls the Palestinians in its occupation, I hadn't developed an understanding of either the language or the landscape of occupation. To an untrained eye the trip between Ramallah and Nablus seems picturesque at best and slightly off at worst. With a better understanding of the architecture of occupation and the history of displacement and oppression, however, each stone, red-roof and demolished greenhouse takes on entirely new meaning.

The people in Balata continue to go about their lives. Some things don't change: as I walked down into the camp from the road above, which leads to Nablus city, energetic children in school uniforms stared, confused at the presence of a strange-looking foreigner. Others yelled the only English any of them seem to remember from school; choruses of 'What's your name? What's your name?' followed me down the dusty street.