22 - 28 November 2001
Issue No.561
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 22 - 28 November 2001 Issue No.561 |
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Checkpoint in Tulkarm
There were no celebrations over Israel's "withdrawal" from Tulkarm. There was no withdrawal. Graham Usher reports from a caged-in town
Late Saturday night the Israeli army announced a "withdrawal" from the West Bank town of Tulkarm. It was news to Izzedine Al-Sharif, Palestinian Authority (PA) governor of the Tulkarm district. "The Israelis are lying," he said Sunday. "They haven't withdrawn. They've 'redeployed' their forces about the distance of a Merkava tank."
An Israeli soldier near Tulkarm following the army's "withdrawal" on Monday
(photo: Reuters)
It's news to the Israeli soldiers manning the yellow swing barrier that closes the main road from Israel to Tulkarm like a drawbridge closes a moat. "Of course we haven't left," says one reservist. "We're still there. Tulkarm is Israel."
The drive into Tulkarm from the "gate" takes you past vacated apartments raked by bullet holes and army pillboxes stacked with machine guns. An armoured personnel carrier rolls out of a field that once housed a milk factory but is now a morass of broken concrete, buckled silos and felled cypress trees, bulldozed by the army one month ago.
The vehicle rolls along the road past razed fruit trees on the left and a bombed-out Palestinian police checkpoint on the right. Patrol accomplished, it descends into the valley, next to a tilting telegraph pole that was knocked askew by passing tanks.
"The Israelis are still here," confirms Al-Sharif. "They may have moved the tanks from the streets. But they've taken over three homes in the town and every PA position on the hills. From there their guns can hit anything within a three-kilometre range."
The army "reoccupied" Tulkarm on 20 October, three days after the assassination by Palestinian guerrillas of Israeli Tourism Minister Rahavam Zeevi. Al- Sharif reels off the damage to his governorate from the three-week stay.
Thirteen Palestinians were killed, including six by extra-judicial execution. Economic losses have reached $5 million a day and unemployment rates of around 70 per cent. Ten thousand families are now living in poverty. Several PA police and security offices were destroyed by tank or helicopter shelling. Twenty-eight electricity generators were knocked out, each one costing $20,000. One hundred and twenty homes were damaged by Israeli fire. One hundred fifty families were rendered homeless and eight schools were hit by rockets.
And what was Israel's purpose, aside from the "war against terrorism"? "Sharon is terrified by the prospect of a Palestinian state," says the governor. "So he declared war to reduce us to zero. He hopes we will again become a labour pool for work in Israel and a market for Israeli goods."
So the aim is to destroy the PA? "Destroy the authority? In Tulkarm Sharon has destroyed it already. We would need $20 million just to get back to where we were on 28 September 2000, before he started the whole thing."
Others detect a darker motive. Salama Barhoum is dean of Tulkarm's Kadourie College, an agricultural school and research centre built from ochre stone and covered in purple bougainvillea, bright from the first winter rain.
For three weeks the army used the college as its tank base. Every workshop was destroyed. Animals were left to die without feed. ("It got so bad the big chickens were eating the baby ones," says Barhoum). The college's arched electronic gate was crushed into a fist of metal and masonry the day before the army left, apparently in a farewell.
"The soldiers even destroyed an old 1913 milking machine, typical of this part of Palestine. That's not about security. That's about erasing history. Ours."
How to recover it? Al-Sharif is optimistic that recent US and European moves, and especially the "Powell speech," mark the turning of the tide on "Sharon's war." Tulkarm's mayor, Mahmoud Jallad, is more sceptical and insists the Intifada will continue until Israel withdraws "not from Tulkarm but from all the occupied territories."
"Look," he adds. "We don't need money. What's the point of money if whatever we build Sharon destroys with his tanks. Give us freedom, independence and dignity and we'll manage."
The 70,000 Palestinians under his charge would agree, as they shop for this bleakest of Ramadans in Tulkarm's ancient market. What do they want from Powell apart from the hope that one day the occupation will end?
They want release from the indignity of a poverty so severe that one family says it sends its three daughters to school in three shifts because there is "only one pair of shoes between them." They want the freedom of a taxi ride to Nablus that will take 20 minutes rather than two hours and one at a cost of $4 rather than $12.
Above all, they want to be free from the Israeli siege on their lives and lands, "from this cage", says Jallad, "that is sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller, but always closed."
If Powell gets relief on any of these realities, most Palestinians in Tulkarm will welcome his initiative. In any case they will stay put and remain "steadfast," leavened by a bitter humour that is as much part of the Palestinian resistance as the Kalashnikov. Al-Sharif regales us with one tale among many about such fortitude.
"This is a true story," he insists. "Three weeks ago a woman gave birth to a boy at a checkpoint outside Kafr Sur village near Tulkarm. She called him Hajez." Hajez is "checkpoint" in Arabic.
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