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Forty years later, two views from the West Bank's Road 60
An Israeli and a Palestinian reflect on the impact of the Six-Day War that began 40 years ago Tuesday.
from the June 5, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 4
Forty years of occupation
The people in Sinjil and Shilo can hardly be said to coexist. Rather, they partake in a hope that the other will eventually go away and stop making their lives miserable. They are dedicated to the absolute truths of their narrative, which, were they to exist in a vacuum, would be unassailable.
But nothing here happens in a vacuum. And so, when the Israeli army decided just a few years ago that one way to control militants or suicide bombers from leaving the West Bank was to seal most of the access roads leading to and from their villages, it meant that the people of Sinjil found themselves all but stuck. There were six entrances to the village, but the Israeli army put barriers up in all but one of them.
The field work manager for Btselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, says this is a typical state of affairs for Palestinian villages along Road 60. The fewer entrances to any village, the easier it is for Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to maintain control of who and what is traveling Road 60. The army says this has been effective in decreasing terrorism. Palestinians says it simply embitters and impoverishes.
For Fathi Shabaneh, it means that eking out a living in agriculture is increasingly difficult. Whereas he used to be able to take his produce into Ramallah in 15 minutes, now he can depend on it taking one to two hours, given the difficulty of travel for Palestinians and various checkpoints.
"As a farmer, I have a lot of land I cannot reach," says Mr. Shabaneh, pointing to an olive-tree grove that belongs to his family and sits just outside an IDF camp on an adjacent hill. He also has trees due north, just outside the Israeli settlement of Maale Levona, to which he occasionally walks.
"I go even though it's dangerous for me. But my land is more important than my life," says Shabaneh, a father of four. On many occasions, he says, he and other farmers have had their crops damaged by nearby settlers. They don't expect intervention on their behalf from the army, which remains in control of this area until further notice.
There was a time when most of the residents would have survived on farming. But post-1967, Palestinians here found themselves with less water for agriculture, says Khalil Shikaki, a political analyst in nearby Ramallah, and encouraged to work as laborers in Israel. But with the advent of suicide bombings in the 1990s and the start of the last intifada in 2000, Israel stopped allowing large numbers of Palestinian workers to come in from the West Bank and Gaza.
And no one here is interested in working in Shilo anymore after an Israeli settler in Shilo shot dead four Palestinian workers from Sinjil. The potential for common interests, even economic ones, has largely died. To Shabaneh, the answer is for Israel to evacuate Shilo and its other settlements, and leave them empty for the return of Palestinian refugees.
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