ON EITHER SIDE OF THE DIVIDE
I’m going to wash that man right out of my hair!
Household goods shop in East Barta’a
The Wadi Ara Arab Muslim village of Barta’a is less than a five-minute drive away from Route 65, one of the busiest roads in Israel.
I first visited Barta’a in the mid-1980s when the off-the-beaten-track village tucked away in a corner of the Dotan Valley and hugging the lower slopes of the Amir mountain range was a fine example of a more than sleepy hamlet.
Two decades, two wars and two intifada’s later practically nothing has remained the same.
Involved in the nearby educational center Givat Haviva’s efforts to build up a department offering seminars in different languages to kibbutz volunteers and visiting groups from abroad dealing with what could generally be called the Middle East conflict, I visited Barta’a and many other large and small Wadi Ara and West Bank Palestinian villages and Jewish settlements in my quest to find interesting people, places, relationships and physical vantage points one could incorporate in such seminars and tours.
As a journalist I was also hoping to find relevant ‘items’ to write about. On that score and many others it has been and will surely continue to be, an overwhelming experience.
Wadi Ara is also known as the Little Triangle, the three points being Umm-el-Fahm straddling one side of Route 65, Kfar Kara on the other side of the major highway and further inland the third point, Baka al-Gharbiya.
Twenty years ago Makor, the Givat Haviva department set up for the intended seminars, worked out of a little wooden hut hugging the periphery fence of the sprawling campus.
Twenty years ago Barta’a was roughly one quarter of what finds today and boasted just a couple of shops, couple of mosques and was very quiet during the day as most of the men folk left the village to work out of the area.
Over those same 2 decades Makor gradually developed and became the International Department, Givat Haviva. Offices and classrooms were constructed, innovative programs devised attracting thousands of youths, students and adults from overseas annually to seminars dealing with Arab-Jewish relations in Israel, particularly in the Wadi Ara region – and having them meet with the regions Arab and Jewish residents when out and about on guided tours.
WALKING THE LINE
Barta’a was split by the 1949 Israel-Jordan brokered Armistice Line. What begins as a deep ravine peters out to a ditch running diagonally through the village. With the stroke of a pen on the Mediterranean island of Rhodes, that ravine cum ditch became a divide between the State of Israel and the Jordanian annexed West Bank. The Muslim residents, members of the same extended Kabha family, ended up in two different countries, bestowed with different citizenship and possibly the harshest situation of all being that those two countries continue to be at war with each other.
In 1967 the Green Line as a ‘border’ was somewhat rubbed out, but then again wasn’t. However, residents were free to visit each other and other extended family living deeper inside the West Bank and of course, inside the State of Israel.
In 1987 the Kabha clan once more found themselves in the eye of the storm with the outbreak of the first uprising (intifada).
Palestinian East Barta’a participated to the fullest in the uprising whilst their Israeli citizenship holding West Barta’a relatives were caught in the middle, emotionally torn bystanders as Israeli soldiers fought with members of their immediate family on the other side of the rubbish filled ditch running through the middle of the village, a not-so-green line and former border between as the local population phrase it – “over here and over there.”
Same expression used whichever side of the line one might be standing and also goes for another oft heard phrase, “us and them.” If you are “over here” then “they” are “over there.”
The 1993 Oslo Accords brought new hope with Jericho and Gaza First, autonomy areas for the Palestinian people to run their own lives. East Barta’a ends up becoming a ‘B’ area, in other words the Palestinian Authority responsible for infrastructure but Israel has the final say as far as security is concerned.
As more and more areas change from ‘C’ (under Israeli control) to ‘B’ and the majority of Palestinians already living in autonomous ‘A’ areas, the State of Israel is struck by a wave of horrific terrorism, closures slapped on the West Bank – particularly around the autonomous areas - for long periods of time.
The government decides to build a security fence, a decision supported by the majority of Israelis. The beginning of 2008 and the security fence is completed from the border with Jordan, across the Beit Shean Valley, up and over the Gilboa Mountain range, across the Jezreel Valley and then ascends the Amir Mountain range to Umm-el-Fahm, more or less on the Green Line all the way.
At Umm-el-Fahm the security fence suddenly veers off the Green Line course
and cuts a few kms in to the West Bank, passing behind a block of four
Jewish settlements, Shaked, Hannanit, Tal Menashe and Reichan.
‘B’ for BARTA’A
Back to East Barta’a, now Area ‘B’ – and the security fence constructed 2 kms behind them.
With the realization that customers from Israel, Arab and Jew alike, would no longer forage in to the West Bank to do their shopping – considerably cheaper than in the State of Israel – Palestinian shopkeepers, businessmen of all descriptions as well as laborers no longer allowed across the Green Line, began to move themselves to sites as close as possible to the former border as soon as construction of the security fence began. In Barta’a they not only encamped on the east side of the divide, but also placed shipping containers cum ‘shops’ across the ditch over which passes the central road.
Over the last 7 years, since the outbreak of the second intifada in the year 2000, East Barta’a has become a honky-tonk boomtown boasting over 600 businesses and thriving industrial concerns where Palestinians manufacture garments and bed linen for export and a multitude of other merchandise up for sale to the bargain hunting and tough bartering customers.
The majority of workers in the East Barta’a sweatshop factories of the new millennium are women from Palestinian West Bank villages such as Yabed on the other side of the security fence. The cutters, machinists and packers have permission to pass through the Reichan checkpoint behind Barta’a on a daily basis to work in Area B - but not to cross over the Green Line.
Hundreds of men take the same route daily clutching their papers allowing them to work in the portion of land between the Green Line and Israeli side of the fence, which these days I refer to as ‘Limboland’ – neither here nor there and where one can find both Jewish settlers and Palestinians in small villages living side by side.
Not a small number of Palestinian men also have permission to work over the Green Line and cross daily to labor in agriculture or construction in Israeli towns and villages. Many of the men arrive back at the checkpoint in the afternoon carrying sacks of oranges or grapefruits on their backs as they amble through a mesh tunnel leading to those who physically check their papers, personage and packages.
Reichan checkpoint – Palestinian laborers going home
at the end of a working day
Some of the Palestinians who pass through the checkpoint actually have Israeli citizenship as they are married to Israeli Arab women, many from villages in the Wadi Ara area – particularly Barta’a. The majority cannot pass through the checkpoint in their own vehicles thus leading to lines of waiting taxis on the ‘Limboland’ side of the facility. Some are official Palestinian Ministry of Transport green plated yellow taxis but the majority private cars with white Palestinian plates, or yellow Israeli plates if the driver married an Israeli citizen. They all charge 5 shekels a head for the six-minute ride to or from East Barta’a.
NO TAX TODAY
Israeli Arabs have also crossed the line to open up businesses “over there” in East Barta’a, employing Palestinians and enjoying the unusual situation of not having to pay any taxes in Area ‘B’ under the Palestinian Authority. Nobody does.
Both sides of the divide in Barta’a are complicated - the people and the relationships between them. The physical vantage points from where one can see, hear about and also experience the multi-layered complexities caused by the stroke of a pen on a map in 1949 show how Barta’a developed in to a village literally with a split personality.
The hustle and bustle, condition of many of the buildings, ‘roads’ and lack of infrastructure in general in the present times boomtown of East Barta’a is somewhat reminiscent of the early days of the Wild West. On a shop door here and there remain somewhat faded posters of a waving Yasser Arafat, a huge also somewhat faded poster of the army uniform and keffiyah clad Arafat hangs from the top of a large wooden pole, looking down on a busy and dangerous T-junction. A prayer rug with Arafat’s image hangs on a hook outside one of the carpet shops, and posters of Saddam Hussein spotted on the wall of a busy barber’s shop.
Waving in the breeze above East Barta’s girl’s high school, a black, white, red and green Palestinian flag boldly stands out against the background of the yellow domed mosque behind.
Posters of Arafat and Saddam Hussein nor Palestinian flags can be seen in the streets of West Barta’a, but no Israeli flags are flying either.
Barta’a has become the Dizengof Center of Wadi Ara attracting mostly Arab shoppers from as far away as the Upper Galilee and hoards from the local Israeli Arab villages and 2 cities in the immediate area, Umm el-Fahm and Baka al-Gharbiya.
What started as my quest to gain more knowledge and build up a relationship with the people of the Wadi Ara region – down the road and around the corner one could say from my kibbutz abode, and as the crow flies minutes from Givat Haviva my place of work – has become a 20 year sojourn in to what seems to be a never-ending story.
A tale of two mosques
The yellow domed mosque to the left of the photo is in East Barta’a in the West Bank,
the green domed mosque to the right, in the State of Israel.
The city of Hadera and the Mediterranean in the near distance.
Photos and Text: Lydia Aisenberg
