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Feature
'I can't move': A Palestinian and an Israeli in the West Bank long for a home free from violence
The occupied West Bank is cleaved by walls and checkpoints. Crossing them to reach the waters of the Dead Sea or the Mediterranean, for instance, is reportedly a vastly different experience for Israelis and Palestinians.
Published 30 November 2024 6:31am
Updated 30 November 2024 6:42pm
By Gabrielle Katanasho, Zacharias Szumer
Source: SBS News
Image: Palestinian teacher Lena (left) and Israeli academic Asaf both live in the West Bank but don't experience the same freedom of movement. (Supplied, SBS / Lilian Cao)
About once a month, Asaf takes the seven-minute drive from a hotel to Kalya Beach to swim in the Dead Sea
It’s less exciting than the beaches on the Mediterranean Sea he regularly visited as a child, which are "much more happy", the 40-year-old Israeli postdoctoral researcher says.
Still, Asaf enjoys swimming there. The mud of the Dead Sea is renowned for its therapeutic qualities, and like many visitors to its shores, he enjoys smearing it on his skin.
Kalya is in the West Bank on the western side of the Dead Sea, which is Israeli-controlled.
The salinity of the Dead Sea's water irritates Asaf's son's skin, and salt overdosing can be fatal for newborns like his daughter, so Asaf mainly swims at Kalya Beach alone. Source: Supplied
People with disability, students and serving Israeli soldiers also get the 10 shekel ($4.20) discount.
Palestinians can visit too, but the price is prohibitively expensive for many.
'No-one's stopping you, you just go'
Unlike many Israelis who live in the occupied West Bank, Asaf and his wife didn't move there because of religious or nationalistic convictions, or cheap real estate — they left their home in northern Israel for safety.
They’re currently living in free accommodation provided by the Israeli government while they wait for a .
Life along the border had been relatively peaceful since the 2006 war between Israel and the .
Asaf — whose Tunisian Jewish grandparents came to Israel in the early 50s — used to go jogging in the forest along the border fence and recalls looking across at Lebanese farmers tending their crops.
But on 8 October 2023, Hezbollah started firing rockets over that border in solidarity with Hamas' assault on southern Israel.
In recent months, fighting between the Israeli military and Hezbollah has significantly expanded, killing at least 3,768 civilians in Lebanon, around 50 in northern Israel and displacing an estimated 1.2 million, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency.
On Wednesday, a , brokered by the United States and France. Both sides have since claimed the .
For Asaf’s family, it remains too soon to return.
Shortly after October 7, the family evacuated and moved to another Dead Sea holiday town in the occupied West Bank called Metzoke Dragot, where hotels were offering free rooms to evacuees.
At the time, many Israeli establishments opened their doors to people fleeing areas in both the south and the north.
"We didn't have much choice," Asaf says of the decision to go to Metzoke Dragot.
After a week there, the Israeli government made formal arrangements for evacuees and the family then moved to a hotel in Kalya, where they remain.
The mineral-rich mud of the Dead Sea is valued for its therapeutic properties and Israel has developed a highly profitable cosmetics industry from it. Source: AAP / Richard Gray/EMPICS Entertainment/PA/Alamy
"Maybe it was the same night that we got there … [a friend] told us that we're in the West Bank," he says.
"We said to him: 'What, really?'"
Israeli citizens — whose cars have different number plates to those of Palestinians — enjoy relatively frictionless travel into and within parts of the occupied territories thanks to a network of modern roads, many of which are exclusively reserved for Israelis.
"When you go from Israel to the West Bank, you go through a checkpoint, but no-one's stopping you, you just go," Asaf says.
Meanwhile, Palestinians' freedom of movement is choked by an elaborate system of checkpoints that can only be passed on foot.
A daily struggle
Lena (not her real name) is a West Bank resident who has spent her entire life in Beit Sahour — a Palestinian town near the looming West Bank wall. She describes life there as akin to "living in a small box".
The 30-year-old school teacher loves the beach, but she's never swum on the shores of the Dead Sea.
"You will not feel okay to go there," she says, describing the experience of being shut out of beachside areas, such as Kalya, by Israeli settlers and soldiers.
Although most beaches are open to Palestinians, many don't feel comfortable transiting through settlements to reach them, with reports some have even been turned away. To swim at the Dead Sea in neighbouring Jordan — avoiding settlements — would cost Lena the equivalent of an airfare in permits.
The West Bank is dotted with hundreds of illegal Israeli settlements — home to about half a million settlers — a process that has aggressively expanded since October 7, according to Israeli watch groups.
Her permit conditions only allow her to leave the West Bank to travel to Jerusalem, where she works. She has to cross a military checkpoint to get there.
Lena is among an estimated 150,000 Palestinians with Israeli work permits who travel to checkpoints within the wall before dawn each day.
She works in a part of Jerusalem claimed by Israel, where she says there's "a big difference" between the salaries Palestinians can earn as compared with those in the West Bank.
Since Israel first occupied the West Bank in 1967, its unemployment rate has ballooned to one of the highest in the world. It's currently at around 32 per cent — up from 12.9 per cent before October 7.
As a result, many Palestinians, like Lena, still opt to work in Israeli-held areas. But travel to and from those areas is complicated.
Unlike Palestinians in Jerusalem or Israeli citizens, those in the West Bank and Gaza are issued green-coloured IDs. It's the lowest class of ID in Israel's three-tier system, which mandates a permit to cross checkpoints. Costs also vary depending on permit conditions: Lena's costs 2,000 shekels ($840) a month.
But she says the humiliation she experiences at checkpoints far exceeds the cost. Palestinians are required to pass one by one through a cage-like turnstile — akin to a cattle chute.
Extreme overcrowding at checkpoints has resulted in labourers being crushed to death and women giving birth or miscarrying while waiting in line.
The issue has only become worse since October 7. Wait times have blown out despite fewer people transiting, with Palestinians at the behest of Israeli soldiers.
Human rights groups, including Amnesty International, have called this treatment "collective punishment".
"For me, I have to struggle every day," Lena tells SBS News.
"I struggle to pass the checkpoint … They check all our bodies like the airport. Then, I have to struggle with trying to find a place on the bus. My job starts at 7 o'clock and I have to be fresh with the kids."
You have to smile like nothing happened and everything is okay.Lena
Lena's permit allows transit through Checkpoint 300 into Jerusalem only between the hours of 5am and 7pm. A surveillance app called Almunasseq, which means "Coordinator" in Arabic, ensures she does not overstay — an offence punished with permit suspension.
In the past, Palestinians working beyond the Green Line would sleep at their workplaces, as deliberate delays at checkpoints would often mean they were not able to transit before curfew. Since October 7, surveillance app Almunasseq has meant Palestinians must return to the West Bank or face punitive action. Source: Supplied
Similar closures have affected checkpoints to the north of the West Bank, restricting access in and out of Bethlehem.
The Israeli military doesn't officially announce border closures, Lena says. Rather, Palestinians relay this message to each other via encrypted group chats.
These sudden closures are "the new norm in Palestine", Munther Isaac, a prominent Palestinian Christian pastor and theologian, wrote in a recent post on social platform X.
"All it takes is for Israel to close two checkpoints outside of Bethlehem and Bethlehem becomes another Gaza," he wrote.
"The West Bank is becoming unlivable."
'I can't move anywhere'
The checkpoint Lena crosses is one of many along the electronically monitored 700km West Bank wall. Fifteen per cent of the wall runs along the 1949 armistice border — also known as the Green Line — and the rest snakes through Palestinian territory to fragment communities and land.
Israel started planning the wall in mid-2002, at the height of the Second — during which Palestinian militant groups carried out a wave of suicide bombings and other attacks.
In the ten years from the beginning of the intifada in the year 2000, Palestinians killed 1,083 Israelis — 741 of whom were civilians — according to B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.
Over the same period, Israeli security forces killed 6,371 Palestinians, including 2,996 civilians.
When former Palestinian president Yasser Arafat (right) and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin (left) sealed the Oslo Peace Accords with a handshake in 1993, many viewed it as the beginning of a lasting resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In retrospect, that optimism was misguided. Source: AAP / EPA
"That's where a lot of Israelis lost trust and felt that security then needed to be the priority for them and the erection of the wall," Lesh says.
In 2004, the UN's International Court of Justice (ICJ) that the wall was illegal, reasoning that its intended permanence could result in the annexation of the West Bank and adding it was not necessary to attain its security objectives.
It ordered Israel to immediately cease construction — but instead, construction has continued.
So has the expansion of Israeli settlements, which also didn't cease after the 1993 peace agreement was reached.
As of September 2024, there were 793 installations restricting and monitoring Palestinian movement in the West Bank, including checkpoints, road gates, road blocks, road barriers, earth walls, earth mounds and trenches. Source: SBS News
For Palestinians like Lena, it is the "wall of apartheid" and the ultimate obstacle to her freedom.
"I can't move anywhere. I can't drive anywhere without checkpoints," she says.
"When you are always living around the wall or around the checkpoints, you feel something should stop you because you think, 'this is normal life'. But it's not."
Dr Michelle Lesh has worked for the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory and served for many years in Israel and the occupied territories as a legal adviser at the governmental, inter-governmental and non-governmental levels. Source: Supplied
'Water tanks aren't on every roof'
Along with numerous checkpoints and Israeli-exclusive roads, the wall is also a component of what a growing number of legal experts are calling a system of apartheid.
"It's been a long time coming that the legal term of apartheid is seen by many legal scholars as an appropriate one for what's going on in the occupied Palestinian territories," Lesh says.
The comparison between Israel's occupation and historical South African apartheid was first made in academic scholarship as early as 1975.
Israel's is another key reason the term apartheid has found resonance among both local and international human rights organisations. Several UN bodies and organs, including the ICJ, have also investigated and declared legal apartheid in the occupied territories, citing similar evidence.
An advisory opinion found that Israel is depriving Palestinians "of the enjoyment of the natural resources of the territory" and "diverting a large share of the natural resources to its own population", which it said was "tantamount to the crime of apartheid".
"If you walk through the West Bank, one of the most striking sites that you'll see is the water tanks. And the water tanks aren't on every roof. The water tanks are only on certain roofs," Lesh says.
"Israelis get three times the amount of water as a Palestinian in certain areas where Palestinians are off the grid."
Israel also maintains total control of the Dead Sea shoreline.
A 2020 paper in the Journal of Palestine Studies found that this has "prevented Palestinians from developing lucrative extractive and tourism industries, resulting in the loss of an estimated $1.4 billion ($2.1 billion) annually to the Palestinian economy".
Citing both tourism and mineral resources, the report's authors Aseil Abu-Baker and Marya Farah wrote: "At the same time, international and Israeli businesses have reaped enormous benefits."
Kalya itself first began as a potash mining venture in 1929 — almost 20 years before the declaration of Israeli statehood and when the area was still part of the British Mandate for Palestine.
At the time, both Zionists and the British sought to benefit from the Dead Sea's vast natural resources.
'A very peripheral weird area in Israel'
Kalya is in 'Area C', one of three zones created in the 90s as part of the Oslo Accords peace process. The Palestinian Authority administers areas A and B but shares security control with Israel in the latter.
Area C is administered exclusively by Israel and covers more than 60 per cent of the West Bank, including the entire Dead Sea shoreline.
Lesh explains this arrangement was supposed to be "a transitional phase" that would "lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state".
"The tragedy is that instead of being a temporary measure, it looks to be a permanent one."
Israelis are forbidden by Israeli law from entering Area A in the West Bank. Source: AAP / Richard Gray/EMPICS Entertainment/PA/Alamy
Most of the Palestinians who were working at the Kalya Hotel prior to October 7 haven't been allowed to return, Asaf says, adding that many have now been replaced with Thai workers.
Israeli authorities suspended the work permits of an estimated 200,000 Palestinians in the aftermath of October 7, claiming that workers from Gaza had provided Hamas with information that helped them carry out the attacks.
Earlier this year, Israel's Shin Bet security agency interrogated around 3,000 of these workers. While it didn't rule out the possibility of some passing on intelligence to the militant group, it found no evidence of concerted information-sharing.
'A sad place, driven by suspicion'
It takes Asaf 45 minutes to drive from Kalya to Jerusalem.
By distance alone, it's much farther than Lena's journey from Beit Sahour, but it takes Asaf less time because he drives a car with Israeli number plates and doesn't have to get out of it to cross the checkpoint.
Describing the process of crossing from Kalya to Jerusalem, Asaf says: "It's nothing. It's not [like] a border that you enter into another country."
Asaf recognises his experience is vastly different to that of Palestinians living in the West Bank.
"I hate it that it's like that; I don't know what else to say. If it was safe and no one tried to kill anyone, it wouldn't be like that," he says.
"Most Israelis don't really think about this stuff and don't care. They want to be safe, they want their families to be safe. If what's necessary for it is to build a wall, to make more checkpoints, to do more military operations, whatever, just what's necessary so we will be safe.
We live in a sad place, driven by suspicion. A necessary and justified suspicion but nevertheless sad.Asaf
A half-finished water park now sits abandoned near Kalya Beach after construction shut down during the Second Intifada. Source: Supplied
It's also a longing to feel connected to the land — and travel freely across it.
"Sometimes I wish to go to the sea, just to sit on the beach, watch the sunset, and enjoy the time," she says.
"But we stopped dreaming about anything."
She says her sense of self has also been disfigured by Israel's tightening stranglehold over the West Bank.
"It's made me struggle with my identity as a human.
"Inside me, there are borders."
