Unconfirmed Reports

Al-Awja (Jordan Valley), 28 June 2010

Monday morning I went down to the Jordan Valley: a long narrow gash between Israel and Jordan, centering the Jordan River and the Dead Sea, lowest point on Earth.

It is smaller than I had realised (like the whole of Israel-Palestine, which is all smaller than I realised). You drive a winding road down out of the mountains from Ramallah or Jerusalem, and you keep going down, and down, and suddenly you come out in this long valley, the mountains on the other side not too far away. The temperature suddenly goes up at least five degrees. It is hot and dry, almost a dead valley, a strip of desert. The other side of the mountains - everywhere west of Ramallah - feels ecologically like the East Mediterranean, like Greece or Turkey perhaps. But down here feels like Arabia: sand, date palms, blazing sun.

I would like to visit the Dead Sea, and it is there in front of us, just a couple of hundred metres away, but we did not come here to visit the Dead Sea. Instead, we go to Jericho, where we are meeting a contact who will help us to help people living in the valley.

We have trouble meeting the contact, but wait meanwhile, drinking strong coffee in the main square of Jericho. Not yet 9am, and it’s already baking hot. Eventually we make our connections, and travel further up the valley, to a small cluster of houses hanging off the edge of Al-Awja village. We arrive at a wooden shack, where four or five men are already working hard on shaping mud bricks.

This shack is Bassem’s house, and we are building a new structure alongside it so that his brother will have somewhere to live too. In between, there is a simple shelter made from date palm fronds, a rectangle of shade - this is where Bassem and his brother used to live, before construction started on the shack and the mud-brick house. None of the structures have electricity or running water.

Palestinians in this area are desperately poor, and for many half-decent housing can only be achieved with help from the local Popular Committee, faintly aided by international volunteers like us. Bassem and his kin are referred to as “Bedouins”, since they have never lived in established towns of bricks and masonry; but I am told that they should not be considered a separate people from the “Palestinians”, since “Bedouin” here only refers to a difference of living conditions, and not to any ethnic distinction.

The Bedouins of the Jordan Valley have always lived simply, but now they are on the very edge of survival. The village of Al-Awja was established around a natural acquifer, and for centuries or millenia this was the basis of life here. Bassem points at the sandy gully alongside his house and tells us, “This used to be green. We used to have fields of wheat here.”

But now the wells and canals drawing on the acquifer run dry. When Israeli settlements were built in this area, they dug new wells, deeper than the ancient wells used by the Palestinians. These new wells divert the water to the settlements; the Palestinians are not permitted to dig any new wells of their own.

In essence, the people of the Jordan Valley are being subjected to a man-made drought, starving them out of the area. Without his wheat fields, Bassem has almost nothing to live off: a few goats, occasional opportunities as a day-labourer. He gets some water support via NGOs, but still the tanks of water are expensive for a man like Bassem, and can only cover drinking water, not irrigation. Meanwhile the Israeli settlements nearby are connected to electricity grids and cheap, free-flowing mains water. Further up the valley, they cultivate enormous new fields of fruit for export; they specialise in growing extra-big dates, which they achieve by pumping them full of water.

There are many places in the valley where you see the dusty shacks of the Palestinians in the foreground, and just a few hundred metres behind, a fenced-in Israeli settlement, with regular rows of new white houses, and trees lining the streets.

This is one of the most wicked things I have ever seen. This is a low point for humanity.

Bassem and his kin used to be one of four families living on this particular hillside. The others have all left now; there is a lone Israeli settler living half a kilometre away, and he pays Bassem’s family regular visits, often bringing his gun. He tells them they cannot live here any more, the land is his, they must leave. The other families all took heed, but Bassem stays.

Bassem has dark fire in his eyes. He speaks a deep local dialect, which must be translated by one of the Popular Committee into standard Arabic, then translated into English for me by an Egyptian volunteer, Yasser.

Another volunteer, Hassan, asks Bassem why he doesn’t get his own gun and fight back against the settler. Bassem says, “I would do this, I am not afraid. But if I do this it will make trouble for every Palestinian who lives here. The Army would come and kill everybody.”

* * *

We stay two days, working on the mud-brick construction. We hope to stay longer, but on the third day Bassem and his brothers are offered work as day-labourers, so our group breaks up.

Despite the heavy air of oppression, I feel strangely calm at Bassem’s place. The local settler barely shows his face, just riding past on his horse once or twice. The concept of international presence discouraging settler harrassment seems to work quite well; and to be honest, it gives us a feeling of power. But I know that this is a flimsy power, a hope or an assumption, not a guarantee.

We sleep outside the house, on the sandy hillside under the stars, waking up to every noise of passing human or animal. In the morning we are woken by Bassem’s small herd of goats prodding at our feet, the bells around their necks clanking cautiously.