Palestine: a journal of everyday occupation

First published in Labour Briefing, September 2010 Georgina Reeves asks the mayor of Bethlehem about the impact of the Israeli settlements and the way towards a peaceful settlement Dr Victor Batarseh was elected mayor of Bethlehem in 2005 and took control of a local council in debt to the tune of 4.5 million NIS (Israeli [...]

I’ve had so many conversations with people about how things are changing. Everyone seems surprised at how much money other people seem to have. There are new shops, new businesses, new restaurants. There are new cars everywhere, and cars are so expensive here. People are going on holidays abroad. There used to be two banks [...]

According to Ha’aretz, the walls around Gilo are falling. It reports the walls went up in 2002, but in fact it was before that. British photographer JD Perkins ran a story on the painted walls in 2001. The murals on these massive concrete blocks obliterate any Palestinian presence from view and shows a pretty, Arab-free landscape.

There’s a lot of talk outside of Palestine about Palestinians boycotting settlement goods. Yesterday’s Ha’aretz ran another story on it in which is mentioned 3,000 volunteers going door-to-door to explain the boycott to people. No one has been to our home, nor to anyone else’s that I know of. And we certainly haven’t had any [...]

Today, the water situation has become the worst I’ve ever experienced. And it’s important to remember that our lack of water is not because there is a drought here, there is water across the West Bank, enough for everyone. It’s a man-made problem, caused by Israel and its domination over resources and exacerbated locally. And [...]

Wadi Fukin is a beautiful village in a fertile valley, west of Bethlehem. Two of my sisters-in-law live here having married into local families. Wadi Fukin has an interesting history: it is the only Palestinian village depopulated after 1967 and the villagers were subsequently allowed to return. To cut a long story short, for a [...]

As usual there is so much to write about, I almost don’t know where to start. There’s the new supermarket: the only place in Israel and the West Bank where Jews and Palestinians are treated with absolute equality, and it’s in a settlement. Or the water shortage: there’s always a water shortage but it’s so [...]

So, less than 24 hours and already we’ve been to a wedding. It’s the height of wedding season, and as Ramadan will be in just a few weeks, everyone is cramming them in now. As I write, there are two weddings going on, one either side of the flat. How R has managed to sleep [...]