The tortuous route to Zabuba
By Danny Rubinstein
Haaretz, December 7, 2003
The villages along the way are all suffering from the closure. The fence, the walls and the collective punishments have turned everything topsy-turvy Zabuba is a relatively small West Bank village with
a mere 2,000 inhabitants. It is located in the Jenin region and can be reached by traveling north on the Wadi Ara (Iron Valley) highway and turning
right at the Megiddo junction. After Kibbutz Givat
Oz and the Israeli-Arab villages of Zalfa and Salem, there is an Israel Defense Forces facility alongside the big iron gates that close off the road east to Zabuba. The houses of the village lie beyond the separation fence, which, at this point, more or less runs along the 1967 border.
Mohammed Issa Obeidi, head of Zabuba's agricultural association, who is better known as Abu el-Abed, last weekend invited guests to see what the fence has done to his village. But a jeep carrying border policemen, who arrived at the gates, announced it is absolutely forbidden for Israelis to cross over into the Palestinian territories.
Abu el-Abed, who was standing a few hundred
meters away, said via his mobile phone that it
would probably be possible to cross at the Tura
roadblock. To do so, it would be necessary to
drive south on the Wadi Ara highway and turn in
the direction of Katzir and Harish. There the fence goes into the West Bank to effectively annex the settlements of Shaked and Hinanit to Israel and the roadblock at that point allows limited access for Israelis into the West Bank. Most of those who want to cross are Israeli Arabs who have family in the villages on the other side, and the remainder are settlers who wish to reach far-off settlements that do not have bypass roads.
Crossing at these roadblocks requires special
caution. Cars have to approach the roadblock at
a slow speed and must be waved forward by the
soldiers. All the vehicles, therefore, stop several dozen meters from the crossing point, waiting for the soldiers to call them forward when they have examined the previous vehicle. It is a long wait. In the past, there have been many attacks at the roadblocks and the soldiers are suspicious of any movement that is contrary to orders. If a car approaches the roadblock without being waved forward by a soldier, it could come under fire. Every month, Palestinians are killed in this way at
roadblocks and two lost their lives in the past
month while trying to bypass the crossing point. The soldiers propose, and sometimes demand, that the Jews traveling to the settlements wait until there is a convoy that can be accompanied by the IDF, but if one insists, they usually let one go.
After crossing, we stopped at the entrance to a
small village on the main road, where the owner
of a grocery store warned us not to attempt to
reach Zabuba through the hills in a regular car. He said the vehicle could get stuck but that it was not dangerous from other points of view. We therefore traveled in a Volkswagen van, passing a tiny point known as Hirbet el-Turam, where the large village of Yabed used to dump its garbage. The spot cannot be missed since there is a pall of smoke there, although an order from the Israeli authorities forbids the Palestinians from bringing their waste
matter there now. According to the van's driver, Israeli garbage trucks, accompanied by IDF troops, come every few days to unload garbage from the settlements, as well as from inside the Green Line. "We are good enough to collect your garbage," he explains.
It is a 20-kilometer ride to Zabuba along tortuous roads. Last Saturday, it took an hour and a half. Many of the village roads were covered with pits, and in some places, the soldiers had placed piles of rocks. Olive and almond orchards lined the dry river banks and the paths through the fields we passed. From time to time, we had to stop to let yellow minibuses pass. With a little imagination, you could think you were in the Sahara on an
adventure ride, except there were no sportsmen
enjoying the fun but simply regular passengers,
including women, children and elderly people.
This is how one travels in the West Bank these
past two years or so.
What strikes one in Zabuba, as in many places in
the West Bank and Gaza Strip, is that all the older men speak fluent Hebrew. Abu el-Abed, like his friend the council head Mohammed Yussef Jarradat, worked for years in Israel and had many Jewish friends and acquaintances.
Zabuba lies close to the main road, about four
kilometers from the Megiddo junction, from where there is easy access to Afula in the east, Hadera in the southwest and Haifa in the northwest. In fact, all the men in the village had worked in Israel, most of them in construction or some other manual labor. The younger men know less Hebrew. The 25-30 age group, for example, has hardly visited or
worked in Israel and therefore knows little Hebrew. In the first years of closures after the Oslo Accords, most of the villagers still worked for Jewish employers, even though they did not have the necessary papers. Their number diminished over the years, however. Now that the fence is in place, no one works in Israel any more and all of them are unemployed.
The only solution is for the villagers to try to live of agriculture. The village used to have almost 14,000 dunams of fertile land at the southern tip of the Jezreel Valley. According to the Arab lexicon, "Our land, Palestine," written by Mustafa Dabbagh, most of the village's lands belong to the Christian
el-Moutran family from Lebanon. They lost their
lands in 1948 since most of them fell inside Israel and the Ta'anach region villages were set up there. The home of the effendi, Najib el-Moutran, still stands in the center of the village, a little palace. It was recently refurbished with the help of a Jerusalem Christian fund and now houses the village council and a computer room for youngsters.
A large banner hangs from the wall of the council chamber: "Stop the cancer - the racist separation fence." Some 200 dunams belonging to 95 Zabuba families were confiscated for the construction of the fence. On most of these lands were olive groves that had been the main source of income for the families over the past few years. Prior to that, large tracts of land had been taken over by the IDF for military
purposes, such as the setting up of the nearby
roadblock and facility. Today all the villagers
have left is some 500 dunams and some of these
are across the border and a special permit is
required to reach them.
The fence has effectively shut off Zabuba since the eastern access to Jenin or the southern access to Nablus are fraught with numerous difficulties. Those few villagers who have permits to work in Israel have problems getting through the various roadblocks. They first have to pass through the one at Arrabe, which opens only at 6 A.M., and then get to Jenin and the Jalemeh roadblock, so that they arrive in Afula only at about 10 A.M. "No one wants workers who arrive at 10," the council head says.
There is no clinic in Zabuba, for example, and it is extremely complicated to get to a doctor in Jenin. Two villagers who recently made a pilgrimage to Mecca say the road from Zabuba to the bridge in Jericho took them 16 hours, almost as long as the 1,200 kilometers from Jericho to Saudi Arabia.
The road back to the Tura crossing point, through the mountains, is equally tortuous. The villages en route are all suffering from the closure. The fence, the walls and the collective punishments imposed on the Palestinian population may have lessened the number of bombings inside Israel but they have
turned everything topsy-turvy inside the territories. The entire population, according to the Nablus economist Hisham Awarthani, "is busy night and day trying to survive and dreaming of revenge."
Indeed, the impression one gets from a visit to
Zabuba is that no one cares about the Geneva
Accord or Abu Ala's new government and all that
interests them is the degradation they are undergoing and the desire to inflict similar pain on the Israelis.
