SHEIKH SAAD, West Bank, 5 May 2004 — Residents of Sheikh Saad say they cannot live in their West Bank village, but they cannot die there either.
Not only do they depend on Jerusalem for their livelihood, even their cemetery is in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Jabal Al-Mukaber, opposite the village.
The Israeli Army put up a pile of dirt at the western entrance to Sheikh Saad 18 months ago, enabling only pedestrians to cross.
Soon the security barrier which Israel is building will run between the village and Jerusalem, and a gate in it will replace the sand roadblock. Bulldozers have already flattened the ground and dug a narrow foundation trench where the fence will go up.
“We belong to Jerusalem,” says Nasser Shkarat, 33. “Our cemetery is there, our hospitals. Our children go to the municipal school in Jabal Al-Mukaber.
“They don’t give us (entry) permits at all,” he complains. “Sure, we go without a permit,” he adds.
He and others of the about 2,000 residents in the village fear the security barrier will make it impossible to do what they have done thus far — cross into Jerusalem without the permits Palestinians need to enter Israel from the West Bank.
The permits are obtained at the Israeli Army’s civil administration office, located in a settlement to the northeast. The only accessible way to get there is over the village road leading west, where to climb over the sand roadblock means to cross the Jerusalem boundary.
But the villagers are not allowed to enter Jerusalem without the permits they are entering Jerusalem to get.
“So basically, it’s a Catch 22 situation,” says Noam Hoffstater, of the Israeli B’Tselem human rights group.
The only other road out of Sheikh Saad, in the opposite direction leading to the West Bank on the east, is a dirt track so steep that the village donkeys having to zig-zag laboriously up it. Two valleys border the hilltop village to the north and south.
The village has a basic clinic, but Shkarat regularly takes his mother, who he says suffers from high blood pressure and liver problems, to a hospital on the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem.
“Two weeks ago my son was bleeding from his mouth,” the father of four recounts. Israeli soldiers caught him on the way to hospital in East Jerusalem without a permit, but he told them: “You can kill me if you want, I am going in with my son.”
The soldiers let him through and the doctors removed a small bone from his son’s throat, which he had swallowed.
But when caught another time, Shkarat says, he had to sign a 21,000-Israeli-shekel ($4,700) guarantee that he would not enter Jerusalem illegally again. “If they catch me again, I will get six months jail,” he says.
Not much more than three years ago, before the Palestinian uprising erupted, the reality was different, he recalls. “I used to work for a Jew. We would invite each other to parties.”
Since then an unprecedented 118 bombings, almost all launched from the West Bank, have shaken and shattered Israel. At the height of them, some 18 months ago, the Israeli government decided to build a barrier along the entire West Bank, with the stated aim of stopping the bombers from reaching Israeli cities.
Thus far, about one quarter has been completed, including some 22 kilometers of a 50-kilometer envelope around Jerusalem.
Shkarat, who used to paint houses, now has not worked a day for more than a year, nor have his father and four brothers.
He says he has built up a debt of “maybe 25,000 shekels” (roughly $6,000) at the local grocery store and lives mostly off bread and olives. “Once a month we buy vegetables,” he says. “Meat? No way! Where is there money for meat?”
The Jerusalem municipality and the Israeli government electricity company have continued supplying the village with water and electricity, even though none of the inhabitants have paid for more than a year.
Every once in a while, the electricity company sends someone over to disconnect them, but the villagers simply do not let them. “We tell them, don’t get near that electricity pole,” states Shkarat.
Those villagers who do have jobs all work in Jerusalem, either legally or illegally. They are picked up by a shared mini-bus taxi on the other side of the dirt-littered sand heap each morning.
Murad Allan is not one of them. He owns an unregistered car, which, unable to enter or leave except via the steep dirt track on the east, is confined to the village.
The 22-year-old makes his living driving people around from one edge to the other when they are dropped off at the road block with heavy bags or supplies.
“On a good day (I make) maybe 30 to 40 shekels (seven to nine dollars),” he says.
