Te gast: Amira Hass
Haaretz
NABLUS – Out of the dark appeared a taxi, and behind it another and then another. Each of the drivers in turn slowed down, waved to the driver coming from the opposite direction, from the east, and told him that there was no point in driving any further. Even without him saying, they knew what the cab driver between the villages of Tel and Sara to the west of Nablus was doing: Like them, he was looking for fuel there last Monday. Yakub the driver had two passengers, young men holding empty jerricans in their hands, hoping to find a single gas station that would sell them 10 or 20 liters.
The drivers on their way back related that at one station there were 200 liters left and 20 cars waiting in line. The proximity of Tel and Sara to the main road (which is blocked with concrete cubes) that leads to the Jewish settlements in the West Bank sometimes makes it possible to bring in a bit of fuel from one of the Israeli gas stations.
I’ll bring you gas tomorrow, promised Yakub to the two disappointed passengers who had paid NIS 30 for the fruitless trip. He has a friend who has a friend outside of Nablus, who can buy at the Kedumim gas station, and he’ll bring it to Nablus, via the Beit Iba checkpoint west of the city. This, in any case, is how Yakub will obtain diesel fuel for himself.
For more than a week now, there has been an acute shortage of fuel in Nablus. The Palestinian Authority has not paid its debts to Dor Energy, and the latter has suspended the fuel supply. In parallel, the Palestinian fuel company has cut back the quantities it distributes to the various cities. In Nablus, more than any other town in the West Bank, a drop in the fuel supply is felt immediately. Nablus is under a prolonged “encirclement,” as military jargon calls the siege. The city is surrounded by six checkpoints manned by soldiers, who strictly supervise traffic in and out. About six or seven other routes out of the city are blocked by iron gates and concrete cubes or inspected from observation towers and by army patrols.
At three of the manned checkpoints, entry and exit is permitted only to inhabitants of certain villages, and prohibited to everyone else. The Israel Defense Forces allow only a few hundred cars that have special permits to enter and leave Nablus. Thus, unlike Ramallah, for example, where departure through most of the manned checkpoints is not contingent on a special permit, people cannot leave Nablus, fill their gas tank at the gas station of the nearby Jewish settlement and return.
For several months now, the IDF has again prohibited men between the ages of 16 and 35 from leaving Nablus, so that people 35 and under cannot do what people over 35 do: stand in line at the Hawara checkpoint at the southern exit from the city for an hour or two, behind the turnstiles, holding a jerrican or two in their hands. When the soldiers finally let them through, they walk to the gas station located 80 or 100 meters from the checkpoint. This shabby-looking gas station is operated by Palestinians, but owned by Israelis.
The young men of 35 and younger wait at Hawara – the southern end of the world for them – with empty jerricans: They wait for someone they know who is going through the roadblock anyway and will agree to fill the jerricans for them and come back. Another possibility is to wait until one of the two or three porters who have a work permit from the Civil Administration passes from one side of the checkpoint to the other, collects a few gallons worth of containers and trundles them in their carts to the gas station.
Life without salaries
Siham takes no interest in the fuel shortage. The few thousand shekels she managed to save up last year to buy a car for her family – parents and two children – were eaten up long ago. She and her husband are officials in offices of the Palestinian Authority. Eight months without their average salaries (about NIS 2,500 a month). Their comfortable rented apartment has an average middle class atmosphere; it does not at first glance disclose the meaning of life without a salary. They have not paid rent for four months now. Nor have they paid the school registration fees. Nor the monthly payment to the private school, which is run by a church. Their bills for electricity and water have not been paid. The municipality is not cutting off the power supply to them and thousands of others like them, and is getting deeper and deeper into debt – because it pays Israel for the electricity.
Their son, who is 8, gets an allowance of one shekel instead of two. Their daughter, who is 11, has relinquished her pocket money. Two gas canisters stand on the balcony, empty. When it starts getting cold outside, they will not be replaced by full ones to heat the apartment. A faucet that is broken has not been fixed.
“And our situation is still better than other people’s,” says Siham. A work colleague of hers is lucky: He managed to borrow money from the bank before the salary crisis. Now the banks are not lending to public servants, as though they were lepers. The friend started to lend to his friends, among them Siham, the money that he had borrowed himself, until it ran out. Heartbroken, Siham cancelled her daughter’s violin lessons. When relatives invite them now for a Ramadan meal, she accepts. It used to be that she was choosier. Now she calculates the savings of a meal. She never thought that she would need a donation of a sack of flour, but last week she overcame her shame and took a sack that was distributed at her workplace (which is half empty, as in any case most of the employees are on strike because their salaries have been withheld).
In recent weeks, several thousand civil servants whose salaries have been withheld had to overcome their shame and go to receive food coupons given out by various institutions: the churches, the telephone company and charitable organizations that had received money from Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. After it emerged that distribution at a single central place creates an uproar and tensions, it was decided to distribute the coupons, which are worth between NIS 200 and NIS 500, among the houses. One of the conditions: Cigarettes and cards for mobile phones must not be purchased with these coupons.
Quarrels and shooting
Among the donors from abroad, there is a Turkish Islamic organization called There Is No One. Siham finds that this name is particularly apt in expressing the public’s feeling: No one understands. Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh doesn’t understand what it is to live without a salary, nor does PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen). Nor does the Hamas leadership or the Fatah leadership, which are quarreling with each other at everyone’s expense.
As usual in Nablus, rounds of shooting are heard continuously. Sometimes they are from the IDF position on Mount Gerizim, sometimes from the direction of the Balata refugee camp or the Old City. Later the meaning of the shooting becomes clear: IDF soldiers have killed an activist of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade; somewhere else in town armed men were greeting their comrade who had been released from prison; in a third place a memorial evening was held for another armed man who had been killed.
On Tuesday afternoon, some of the firing accompanied the funeral of a young man, Muhammad Sa’adeh from the village of Tel, whom soldiers had killed the previous day at the Hawara checkpoint. According to the IDF, soldiers shot and killed him because he tried to knife a soldier. Palestinian witnesses reported different versions. Bassem, a restaurant owner who was at the scene, related that t he young man was traveling in a taxi in the direction of Ramallah. He worked for the Palestinian police, and expected that despite his youth and the prohibition on going through the checkpoint, his job would convince the soldiers to let him through.
At the checkpoint, passengers get out of their cab and wait for it to be inspected in the line of cars, at a distance of several meters from them. Then the soldiers inspect them, one by one, including their possessions, their clothing and their documents. He forgot his briefcase in the taxi, and according to Bassem, he ran toward the taxi in order to take the briefcase, and then the soldiers shot him. Three at once, according to Bassem, before the eyes of the stunned onlookers.
Sa’adeh is the 18th Tel resident to be killed in this intifada. The village has a population of 5,000. Eight were killed in incidents and battles with the IDF, and the others, according to residents, were killed when they tried to leave the village via the hills because it was blocked from every direction. In the village, they remember the date when the roadblock that separated Tel and Nablus was removed, just as they remember a birthday or a wedding anniversary: March 9, 2005. Until then, for five years, people risked their lives whenever they went to Nablus via the hills. They would load a few cheeses on donkeys and go out to sell them in Nablus to earn a few shekels.
The village of Tel is famous for its figs – for the 12 different varieties that grow there, the sweetness of the fruit, the bountiful crop and the springs that water them. The picking season begins on August 1 and ends on October 1. Six hundred tons of lush, juicy figs were picked this season. But there is nowhere to market them. The varieties that grow in Tel are not suitable for drying. Fresh figs must not tarry along the way, but the only way it is possible to get agricultural produce out of Tel – as from other villages in the environs of besieged Nablus, is at a distant goods checkpoint, Awarta, to the west of Nablus, where crates are transferred by the “back-to-back” method from one truck that waits for hours, to a second truck that waits for hours. All the fast, direct, short routes along which the villagers traveled in the past to market figs in Tel Aviv (and afterward heard that they had been sold as Israeli produce abroad) or in Ramallah – are blocked. And thus the inhabitants of Nablus can buy figs cheaply – a kilo for NIS 3, and make a lot of jam.