Walking through the old city of Jerusalem is a mesmerising experience. As soon as you enter the old city’s walls through Damascus Gate, you are thrown right into the mix of thousands of tourists.
The more adventurous will ventures into the bowels of the city, down the winding alleyways and dead ends. As soon as you get away from the tourist hotspots of the Holy Sepulchre Church and the Via Dolorosa and the thronging junk shops, you come to a realisation. In this city, in the middle of a hotbed of unrest, instability and contention, you have a mix of people living together harmoniously. There’s the Orthodox community, the Christian community, the Jewish community and the Muslim Community. All live side by side and without incident. It is only when you go right to edge of the walled city that you actually realise that politics and religious divide can overcome the human spirit. And that is at the Arab crossing to the Al Aqsa Mosque. It is only here that you can see the underlying problems that spill out as soon as you leave the city and venture into the heartland.
The first thing that strikes you is the border crossings and the immense concrete walls that enclose the Palestinian people. The crossing into Ramallah is fairly nondescript. Your papers are checked and your car is checked and the wall encircles countryside. It is only when you see the sign “Entry prohibited to Israeli citizens, it is dangerous to cross into Palestinian territory and it could be a threat to your life,” that you realise that this is not what you expected it to be.
The cities in the Palestinian administered zones are much like any North African cities. Actually they are quite normal. There are restaurants, cafes, shops, monuments and everything else you would expect to find.
But the refugee camps in the Israeli administered refugee camps are a totally different story.
When you see images of these camps on the television, you might be moved. You might think “how sad, how unjust”. But it stops there. It is only when you set foot inside them and see for yourself that you truly understand the meaning of being a prisoner in your own village.
I visited the Aida camp, not far from Bethlehem. Getting in is a security headache. You pass through a gate and you think “this is not so bad”. There are houses made of stone and concrete, but as you continue your drive through, you see idle men and women sat in the street, doing nothing. You see graffiti on the walls that encircle the camps. All are provocative and indignant – all say Palestinians will triumph in the end. You see sniper guard towers that have been blackened by petrol bomb attacks. Rubbish lies in the street because there is nowhere else to put it. You see the odd emaciated cat, and it makes you realise that the animals have the freedom to enter and leave the camp, yet the residents don’t.
I listened to the story of the camp, as told by resident Mohamed. He is 41-years-old and was born in the camp. Some 5,000 Palestinians live in the Aida Camp in a total area of some 6,000 metres squared.
“We are refugees in our own country. We all came from 46 villages that had been destroyed when Israel took over our land,” said Mohamed. He explained that the villages were all in an area that was turned into a ‘buffer zone’. The villages were demolished following the 1967 war. In driving around the camp, you can see murals of each and every village with the names painted on in English.
The style varies drastically from the ‘uprising’ graffiti that is sprayed onto the concrete curtain that surrounds the camp. The reality of it all hits you as soon as you go into the camp’s primary school. Kids are packed into classes of 45 each. The library – though stocked –is full of old and tattered books. A UN appointed school manager says: “It is tough. They don’t have the materials they need and life is very hard for them. The school’s structural state has been compromised and we need to rebuild it from scratch. But we do not have the money,” he said.
He also explained that children were afraid to come to school because it is located in an area where there are frequent clashes between Palestinians and Israeli Defence Forces. “We had to wall it off and construct a heavy gate, at least that offered some security,” he said.
We were taken onto the roof of the school which allowed you to look into the back streets and alleyways. The squalor and overcrowding immediately hits you and you ask yourself, “How can people be made to live like this”. And therein lies the problem. Mohamed spoke to me about the feeling of dehumanisation. “We try to live with dignity, we try. But people are so desperate that they are willing to die. We want our young people to live, to live. But they feel as if they have nothing to live for,” he said.
On the roof of the school, we are shown an olive grove. “Those trees and that land belongs to the people in this camp. Yet to get to it, they have to get permit after permit. The land is just 500 metres away, behind the wall, yet they have to get a permit from here and elsewhere in the occupied territories.
But as with everything in life, children make it simple. As we toured the school, we were shown examples of handiwork by the pupils. Many of them were pictures and drawings of places they would like to go, or the life they would like to have. Children’s innocence and hope shine through, but it makes you wonder, how long will it take them to become radicalised and full of hate?