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I am currently sitting at an Israeli military checkpoint in standstill traffic on assignment with ONE magazine to cover Israel’s E1 settlement expansion plan. I left Bethlehem this morning very early to plan for this exact scenario, which can never really be planned for because the military checkpoints open and close arbitrarily, and we’re currently sitting here and we don’t know if we’ll be sitting here for five more minutes or five more hours, as per the nature of these military barriers, of which there are about 900 scattered across the West Bank. These checkpoints severely limit and restrict Palestinian freedom of movement across the territory, and the situation is only expected to get worse if Israel’s E1 settlement plans go through.
They entail essentially splitting the West Bank into two different halves: Bethlehem being in the south and the Ramallah area being in the north. And people are really scared and worried about the prospect of this getting even worse because the situation with movement is already dire. And residents in Palestine say that they feel like they’re being suffocated under all of the gates and restrictions that they face.
And as we sit here and wait, the thing that really strikes me about the story that we’re about to go cover in the Bedouin village of Abu Nuwar, east of Jerusalem, is that the community who lives there, as with most of the Bedouin communities east of Jerusalem, is that they’re already refugees from the Negev Desert who were kicked out of their homes by Zionist militias in 1948 as a result of Israel’s establishment.
And so, following that, they moved to East Jerusalem, where they’ve set up their communities, where now they’re facing the risk of forcible transfer yet again in the form of violent Israeli settler attacks, racist building policies, constant home demolitions and several other factors that make living there almost impossible.
And yet, based on my previous visits to these areas, it’s clear that they are determined to remain resilient on their land and refuse to be forcibly displaced and become refugees for the second time.
Read more about how Israel’s E1 settlement could affect the West Bank, and how local residents are responding, in “Piece by Piece,” in the December issue of ONE.