Report on a Trip to Israel and the Occupied Territories

20-28 April, 1992

F. James

This was my first trip to Israel/Palestine, but as I have studied a lot and discussed with
many people who have visited, I was in general not very surprised by the shocking things I
saw and learned.
The Swissair flight Geneva-Zurich-Tel Aviv was without incident and, apart from the
additional baggage identification before entering the airplane in Zurich, was like any normal
flight. Upon arrival in Tel Aviv, I was not questioned and my baggage was not searched.
I have a recently issued Swiss passport with no stamps from Arab countries except Egypt,
and the Israelis issued my visa without putting any stamps in my passport. I got my first
mild surprise when I changed some money at the bank in the airport. As I had no shekels
at all, and as there was no queue at the bank, I thought I should get a few while waiting
for the luggage. For 100 Swiss Francs, the exchange rate was 152 shekels, but then they
deducted 19 shekels commission, so I only got 133. I suddenly understood why there was
no queue. The next morning in Jerusalem, an Arab money changer gave me 153 shekels, no
commission.
I spent the first three nights at the Al Ahram (the Pyramids) Youth Hostel inside the
Damascus Gate in the Arab quarter of the old town of Jerusalem. The standards are minimal,
but so are the prices, and Walid who runs it is very helpful and knows personally several
of the people I wanted to visit. I immediately contacted Jad Is’haq (also spelled Isaac) and
Ghassan Andoni, who live near each other in Beit Sahur near Bethlehem in the Occupied
Territories. Jad is former professor of Biology at Bethlehem University, now director of
the Applied Research Institute, and Ghassan, his brother- in-law is professor of Physics at
Bir-Zeit University near Ramallah, also in the OT. The next morning Ghassan picked me
up at the Damascus Gate on his way to work and took me to see the temporary quarters of
Bir-Zeit’s science faculty.
Bir-Zeit has been closed by military order since two months before the Intifada, that is for
nearly five years. The closure order was issued after an incident in which the Israeli military
invaded the campus and killed two students. The military claimed that the university was
being used to hide arms, and that the university was closed to prevent violence. However
they never were able to produce any credible evidence for their claims, and my investigation,
especially an interview with an American physicist from my own University (Yale) who has
been working at Bir-Zeit for ten years, indicates that all the violence was caused by the police,
and the closure was only intended to discredit the university and to deprive Palestinians of
the right to education.
When I arrived in Ramallah, the temporary university quarters were swarming with
students registering for the spring term. Classes are allowed, but not on the two main
campuses, so they have to rent or borrow whatever buildings they can. The day I arrived,
the news had just broken that the Bir-Zeit Science and Engineering campus would be allowed
to open finally on 29 April, and people were already busy packing their things in cartons
to be moved to the “new” campus which has been unused for so long. With the opening of
Bir-Zeit, all Palestinian schools and universities would now be functioning normally, apart
from the other Bir-Zeit faculties which the Israeli authorities indicated they would open if
they were satisfied with the “behavior” of the science faculties.

1
 Prof. Andoni took me to visit the new campus, still officially declared a closed military
zone, but in fact there were no soldiers around and we had no problem visiting. The five
or six main buildings are all new, beautifully designed and well equipped. The library is
especially impressive, but I was told that there are few new books and journals since most of
the financial support from the Gulf states was interrupted after the Gulf war. The library has
been maintained very well during the closure, but most of the classrooms and laboratories
are covered with dust and will need a good cleaning. There were no students around, but
a few physicists had continued doing research in spite of the closure, and we discovered two
of them working in the otherwise empty building of the physics department. One was the
American who has been working and teaching there for ten years. Since the closure, he could
not get his work and residence permits renewed, since you can’t work for a university that is
closed, so he has had to leave the country every three months in order to stay as a tourist.
He hoped this would no longer be necessary after the reopening, but he had learned not to
be too optimistic about these things.
Prof. Andoni was especially pleased to show me his machine shop, which was active with
four machinists working on preparing experimental equipment for lasers, vacuum chambers,
and low-temperature apparatus. They have given up trying to do publishable high-level
research, but want to be self-sufficient for producing the equipment necessary for teaching
and student research.
We then drove back through Ramallah and Jerusalem to Bethlehem. Since Prof. Andoni
lives in Beit Sahur, south of Jerusalem, and works in Ramallah, north of Jerusalem, he must
cross every day through the area which has been annexed by Israel, and where residents of
the Occupied Territories are not allowed to travel unless they are Jewish or unless they have
a permit. He has to queue up for about one whole day in order to obtain his permit, which is
then valid for three months and allows him to travel through the annexed part of Jerusalem
only along a direct line between his home and work. On one such trip, we left this straight
line so that he could pick up a part for his car which he could not obtain in the OT, and
he was lucky that the authorities did not catch him doing this dangerous operation, for the
standard penalty is a fine of 350 shekels, and cars from the OT are easy to spot since they
have blue license plates whereas the Israeli cars have yellow plates.
In Bethlehem we stopped by Jad Is’haq’s Applied Research Institute. Jad is a biologist
who became rather well known during the Intifada when he was harassed by the authorities,
apparently because he was teaching his friends how to grow their own fruits and vegetables
so they would not be so dependent on the Israelis. For this, he was arrested several times
and finally put in an animal cage for a few days before being taken to a prison camp in
the Negev for five months, during which time he was adopted as a prisoner of conscience by
Amnesty International. I spent the afternoon and evening with Ghassan and Jad and their
families in Bethlehem and in Beit Sahur.
The next day was largely devoted to trying to make contact with Israeli physicists in
Jerusalem (from Hebrew University). Because of the Jewish holiday Passover, the university
was closed all week, but I managed to find Dan Rohrlich and Hillel Bardin. Dan is an
American who follows the Jewish religious practice rather strictly; he has been working at
Hebrew U. for three years and would like to stay indefinitely. Hillel is an Israeli citizen
who spread the alarm to Western physicists in November, 1989 concerning Ghassan Andoni,
who had just been sent to prison for three months without charges after being submitted
to severe harassment for several months. I knew that both Dan and Hillel had contacts
with Palestinian physicists, and that Hillel had even started an informal discussion group
between Israeli and Palestinian physicists called “Rapprochement”. This sort of activity is

2
rare, and can even be punishable under Israeli law, so I was curious to know more about
their activities and their feelings. This turned out to be more revealing than I expected.
I met Dan and an American couple at the Jaffa gate and we toured the Jewish Quarter
of the Old City together. We stopped for a while to listen to a string quartet obviously
composed of recent Russian immigrants who were playing Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nacht-
musik”. Dan especially wanted to visit the City of David, which I discovered was the Jewish
appelation for Silwan. For the Jews, this is as archeological site dating back to the time
of King David. However, the area is densely populated with Arabs who have been living
for centuries in this old part of Jerusalem just outside the south wall of the old city. It is
clear that the Israelis intend to expell the Arabs in order to do their archeology, and this
process has already begun quite seriously. As has been abundantly reported in the press,
several Arab houses have been occupied by Jewish settlers, and others are being demolished
for being built without a permit.
We reentered the Old City through the eastern gate which leads into the Moslem Quarter
down the Via Dolorosa and turned right under the house which has been expropriated by
Ariel Sharon (easily distinguishable by the giant Menorah on the roof and the contingent
of soldiers who mount a 24-hour guard outside the entrance even though Sharon has not
been in the house for the past year). On the way through the Damascus Gate we lost Dan’s
friends when he stopped to buy some vegetables and herbs from the Arabs in the market.
Then we took a taxi to the house of Hillel Bardin who lives in a residential neighborhood
inside the area south of Jerusalem which has been annexed by Israel as part of the city.
From his living room there is a splendid view of the Occupied Territories which start just
a few hundred meters east of his house. We could see all the way to the Dead Sea, a small
corner of which is visible between the hills. As Hillel served coffee, his cat climbed into my
lap where he stayed throughout our three-hour conversation.
The practical problem I was trying to solve, and for which I needed their help, was how
to get the Palestinian universities hooked up to the international computer networks so they
could use electronic mail just as the rest of us do. I thought it would be easiest just to
connect to the Hebrew University node, but this requires acceptance by some Israeli body
involving all the Israeli universities, and Hillel was pessimistic about whether this would be
forthcoming. I then realized why the Palestinians want to have their own international link
independent of the Israeli link, even though it is more expensive and not a very rational way
of doing it. Finally we could make no headway towards a practical solution to the problem,
and I realized that the best I could do was to make Dan and Hillel aware of the urgency
the Palestinian physicists attach to their getting electronic mail, but I saw little hope in
anything concrete getting done, even though I still believed they were sincere about helping.
As the conversation developed, it became more revealing. Bardin kept bringing up the
Palestinian violence: “Why do they continue to throw stones at us?”, never mentioning
the violence of Israeli soldiers and settlers, which by any possible measure is far worse. I
asked him what he expected the Palestinians to do if their land was confiscated, their houses
dynamited, their leaders imprisoned and tortured, and they could get no justice from the
Israeli police or judicial system. He had to admit that justice was not exactly fair, and he
pointed out himself that a recent incident in which a Jewish settler dropped a heavy stone
on a Palestinian car, killing its two passengers, resulted in only a conviction for disturbing
traffic and the guilty person was let out of prison after a few weeks, whereas a Palestinian
caught throwing a stone at a car would get years in prison and perhaps have his family home
dynamited as well. He didn’t say how he thought Palestinians should defend themselves,
but he thought they shouldn’t throw stones. He did not seem to believe that settler and

3
soldier violence was a problem.
We discussed the incarceration of Jad Is’haq, and Hillel remarked that he was most struck
by Jad’s statement that the torture was easier to bear than the filthy hygienic conditions
in which they were forced to live, especially the fact that they could only take a shower
once a week in spite of the desert heat. He was genuinely surprised that cleanliness was so
important to Jad. Later he described how the land in the Occupied Territories was being
managed by the Israeli authorities. He explained how, for each isolated Arab village, an
imaginary line was drawn around the inner part where the houses are, and the Arabs are
only allowed to build more houses inside this zone. Meanwhile, most of the Arab land outside
this line was being confiscated by the state and used to install Jewish settlements on the
hilltops between the Arab villages, cutting them off from each other. I already knew that
this was happening, but somehow hearing it described by someone like Hillel Bardin as if
it was normal and even desirable, was shocking. I realized that if I brought up the obvious
analogy with South African townships, it was unlikely to help, and I thought it best to leave
on friendly terms. These were after all the best friends of the Palestinians that I could find
among the Israeli physics community, and I had had my lesson in practical Zionism.
The next day Ghassan picked me up again on his way to Bir-Zeit as my seminar was
scheduled for that morning. Driving between Jerusalem and Ramallah, he explained some
of the things we saw along the way. There was quite a bit of new house construction, which
I was surprised to find out was for Arabs, since I knew that a lot of Arab houses were
dynamited for lack of a building permit, but in this area it was apparently not so hard to
get a permit. These very comfortable-looking houses were being built largely by Palestinians
from the West, mostly the US, who were the only ones who could afford the high land prices
in the area. Usually the new houses were inhabited only by one or two old people, often the
parents of the one who built the house, since the real owner was absentee. It was not clear to
me whether these absentee owners would be allowed to come and live in these houses some
day. In any case, it was a bit grotesque seeing these big empty houses and knowing that in
poorer areas Palestinians were living five or ten people in a single room. We also saw several
Jewish settlements, typically perched on hilltops and looking very different from the Arab
houses and villages. One of these settlements turned out to be not for Jews, but for Arabs
who lived in the Old City and were being “resettled” outside in order to establish a Jewish
majority in the Old City.
Before my talk, we had time to drive out to El Bireh to Inash-el-Usrah, a Palestinian
social and cultural organization which runs all kinds of activities from an orphanage to a
museum of Palestinian folklore and history. They also organize a programme for sponsoring
underprivileged Palestinian children, and I had some small gifts to bring to one of these
children from her sponsors whom I knew in Geneva. I met the girl and her mother, who
looked exceptionally sad. I knew that both the father and the older brother were dead,
but only later I learned the additional reason for their sadness. It seems that the older
brother was killed as a collaborator, having probably turned informer under torture. Thus
the family now has to suffer not only from poverty and mourning, but also rejection by the
other Palestinian families.
We then went to see the offices of Al-Haq in Ramallah. This Palestinian human rights
group, affiliated with the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva, supplies some of the
best documentation available on the situation in the Occupied Territories. In particular, their
extraordinarily well documented report on the first year of the Intifada, entitled “Punishing
a Nation”, was most important to me in understanding the enormity of the human rights
violations by Israel. Mona Rishmawi, a Palestinian jurist and one of the founders of Al-

4
Haq, now works for the parent organization in Geneva, and her younger sister seems to be
running the Ramallah office, which has now expanded to fill several rooms full of documents
upon which about ten researchers were working at the time of my visit. I wanted to meet
Joost Hiltermann, a Dutchman who had written a thesis on Palestine for the University of
California and then come to work at Al-Haq and was most helpful to me when I was starting
serious study of the Palestinian problem. But he was no longer working there, and I did not
know any of the new people.
My seminar was given in the YMCA building in Ramallah, one of the many buildings
used temporarily by Bir-Zeit while awaiting the end of the closure order. I expressed the
hope that his would be the last physics seminar given at Bir-Zeit under those conditions,
since the science and engineering faculties were due to move back to the new campus in a
few days.
I had some free time the next morning to walk around East Jerusalem and admire the
wonderful old houses, trying to imagine how glorious this part of town must once have been.
It was now in an advanced state of decay, since nearly all the tax money was being spent in
Jewish West Jerusalem since the “reunification” of the city in 1967. One of the most recent
buildings, dating from the period of Jordanian occupation, is the East Jerusalem YWCA,
where I had an interview with the director Doris Salah. She is a splendid example of the
well educated Palestinian, speaking fluent French and English as well as Arabic and Hebrew.
Her family owned and lived in one of the magnificent Arab villas of West Jerusalem which
were taken over by Jewish residents in 1948. She recognizes it when she drives by, but has
not had the courage to try to go back inside it. In any case she has plenty to do in managing
the YWCA, which acts not only as a major hotel, but organizes all sorts of cultural and
educational activities for both visitors and the local population.
That afternoon I contacted Marion Sigaut, a French woman, author of “Les Deux Coeurs
du Monde: Du Kibbutz a l’Intifada”, who was visiting the kibbutz where she had previously
lived and worked for many years before learning the history of the land and the suffering
caused by the discrimination in Israel, not only against Palestinians, but also Oriental Jews,
Russian immigrants and others whom one might call “refuseniks”. She told me to take a
taxi to Masmiya where she would pick me up and take me to her kibbutz. I bargained
with some Arab drivers at Damascus gate and got one down to 60 shekels, which was less
than the standard rate from Jerusalem to the airport, so that seemed more than fair. As
we drove, I tried to find Masmiya on my map, which is a much better one than those you
can get in Israel, since it has many more names of Arab villages, but I still could not find
Masmiya. No road signs indicated Masmiya either, and yet everyone seemed to know where
it was. Suddenly, we got to a road crossing in the middle of nowhere, and the driver said
that this was Masmiya. I could see where we were on the map, but there was no name.
Anyway, I needed to find a telephone, so I asked the driver to go on to the next place
with a name, Qiryat Mal’akhi, where he left me and I called Marion who picked me up
and explained that Masmiya was the name of the Arab village which had been destroyed in
1948. Consulting Benny Morris’ book later, I confirmed that the Arab inhabitants of the
twin villages of Masmiya al Kabira and Masmiya as Saghira were evacuated by military force
and the villages destroyed by the Israeli army on 8-9 July, 1948. The name of the nearest
Israeli town, Qiryat Mal’akhi, is the Hebrew translation of the Spanish term “Los Angeles”,
generous donations for the town having been received from residents of southern California
who probably did not know about Masmiya.
The oldest buildings of the kibbutz, in a rather rundown state, were the only wooden
buildings I can remember seeing in Israel/Palestine. They have largely been replaced by

5
modern houses which resemble something like modern French suburban. In the middle of
the older part of the kibbutz is a tiny isolated building with no windows; it contains the
stock of arms and ammunition.
The old idea of community living is quickly disappearing as families move into private
houses and take fewer meals in the collective dining room (it seems that the food there
was never good, but it was tolerated when the collective spirit was still strong). There is
a magnificent olive grove, and they produce their own honey and dairy products as well as
vegetables. Their principal source of income seems to be the sale of jewellery which is made
by the residents and sold in a showroom at the kibbutz entrance, which was full of tourists
when we arrived.
We didn’t have time to visit the destroyed Arab village which Marion mentions in her
book, but on our way back to Jerusalem we thought we would try to find another one,
in spite of the encroaching darkness and the 45 years which had passed since most of the
villages had been so thoroughly razed. We spotted a likely area where the trees were of a
kind which do not normally grow wild, and walked into the fields to see what we could see.
At the lowest spot, just below the suspicious trees, I thought it was the most likely place
for the well, and sure enough, masked by the underbrush was a round concrete platform
with a round hole in the middle, and a big olive tree growing out of it which made it almost
inaccessible. If it was a well, it obviously had not been used in a long time. Going up the
hill to the area of the suspicious trees, we found lots of big holes in the ground, and Marion
warned me that the area was full of caves and very dangerous, that people had been killed
falling into them. As it was getting very dark, we decided to leave, even without concluding
whether these holes, whose walls had obviously been reinforced by humans, were actually
part of a former village or not. On the way back, however, we did take the time to pass
again by the suspected well, and tossed a stone into it. It splashed.
Back in Jerusalem, I was now staying at the Jerusalem Hotel just behind the bus station
outside the Damascus Gate, where Walid had sent me when a big group came and filled up
his youth hostel. The Jerusalem Hotel turns out to be a great place where nearly all the
clients have something to do with human rights or education or medical aid to Palestinians.
The first night I went to the desk to call Jan Abu-Shakra, head of the Palestine Human
Rights Information Centre. I asked “Is Jan there?” and Jan wasn’t there, so I said I would
call later and hung up. The woman standing next to me at the desk asked me if by any
chance I was calling Jan Abu-Shakra. That woman turned out to be Jean Butterfield, head of
the American Coordinating Committee for UN Non-Governmental Organizations concerned
with Palestine. When I said “Yes”, the man standing on the other side introduced himself
as Jeff, who works with Jan at the P.H.R.I.C. and he said she was in Holland and would be
back on Monday. I knew I was in the right hotel.
At dinner in the hotel we met several interesting people including an Italian journalist
and a young American who with his sister has founded a tiny organization which takes care
of Palestinians in need of specialized medical care which they cannot obtain in the OT. He
gets the necessary permissions and escorts them to the US where they can undergo surgery
which require equipment and skills not otherwise available to Palestinians. The previous
night I had met another American working for Save the Children Foundation who was doing
the same thing. In the course of their work they had learned a lot of first-hand information
about the horrors of living under the occupation.
The next day was reserved for meeting some Russian immigrants in Haifa, but we got
some surprises along the way. We wanted to visit the infamous Canada Park, just off the

6
Jerusalem-Tel Aviv motorway not far from the airport. It now occupies the site where the
Israelis destroyed the village of Amwas (Emmaus) in 1967. This village is believed by many
to have been the site of the Last Supper, and its destruction under atrocious conditions was
described by an Israeli journalist who happened to serve in the military unit that carried
out the act. Money to install the park on the site was supplied by Canadian donors, hence
the new name. Marion said there were big signs on the motorway announcing park at the
appropriate motorway exit, which is the Ashqelon-Ramallah road, but it seems that these
signs have now been removed. We later verified that indeed there are no more road signs
indicating the park until you are actually there. We speculated on the significance of this.
The park itself looks like a typical American national park, full of picnicking tourists, and
we were unable to find the exact site of the destroyed village, even though both of us had
seen pictures of it.
On the way to Haifa, we also wanted to stop by Umm-el-Fahm (Mother-of-Coal), one
of the biggest Arab towns in Israel proper. Marion knew some Palestinian lawyers there,
and as the Russian immigrants needed legal help, and as they could not find any Jewish
lawyer who would help them, we were trying to get them in contact with an Arab lawyer.
We got hungry along the way and stopped at a typical roadside snack bar where we got
some delicious felafel and Marion told an interesting story: Along this road, as along any
other major road, there were many petrol stations and snack bars, often arranged in pairs,
with the filling station on one side of the road and the snack bar on the other; the petrol
station was usually Jewish-owned, whereas the snack bars were typically owned or operated
by Arabs in this region. A friend of Marion’s who often drove on this road had noticed
a curious phenomenon concerning the lane markings: invariably and inexplicably the lane
markings allowed cars to turn left into the filling stations, but traffic coming the other way
was not allowed to turn left into the snack bars. He reckoned that this was done on purpose
in order to give business to the (Jewish) petrol stations and take it away from the (Arab)
snack bars. Marion laughed and did not believe a word of it, so he offered to drive her
along the road to verify. Sure enough, the first three cases they saw agreed with her friend’s
observation, but the fourth case did not, since in this case it was allowed to turn left from
both directions. So they turned into the snack bar to congratulate the Arab owner only to
discover that this one was in fact Jewish-owned. Marion was convinced.
Perched above the sprawling town of Umm-el-Fahm is a Jewish settlement/kibbutz named
Mee-ammi. The name has a meaning in Hebrew (something to do with running water
as I remember), but it is certainly not a coincidence that it was financed by Jews from
Florida. From the outside it resembles a military camp, with high barbed wire and an
armed guard. We decided to take a roundabout route from there down to Umm-el-Fahm,
and we inadvertantly drove over the green line into the OT, as we discovered when we came
around a bend and were face-to-face with a gang of about ten boys barring the road. They
hollered at us in Arabic that this was the Intifada and their village was closed. The youngest,
who could not have been more than three years old, picked up a small stone and threw it
at our car, which had yellow plates and was clearly marked as a car rented in Enemy Israel.
Although he threw it with some conviction, the stone hit the ground about halfway to the
car and rolled along the road coming to a stop well before reaching us. Marion rolled down
the window and told them in Arabic that she was all in favor of the Intifada, at which point
they came up to us and we started talking. As I don’t speak Arabic or Hebrew, I just got
out of the car to get some of the gifts I had brought along with me. I found some cassettes
and books with fairy tales in Arabic which I had bought at the Arabic bookstore in Geneva
and started distributing them to the younger children around me. The scene turned to one

7
of joy, with Marion taking the youngest boy in her arms and the others posing for pictures,
two of them on a donkey. The two oldest boys explained to us where we were, and offered
to accompany us to Umm-el-Fahm.
On the way, the boys showed us where the green line went (there was no indication for
those who didn’t know) and we drove past Mee-ammi again before turning off onto a tiny
dirt road leading into a magnificently beautiful valley where one of the boys lived and which
Marion had decided to visit. The boy explained how the whole valley had once belonged
to his family, but nearly all of it (4440 out of 4500 dunums) had been confiscated for Mee-
ammi. We stopped at a gaping hole by the side of the road and got out to look at his house
nestled down at the bottom of the valley. It turns out that the gaping hole was once the
spring which supplied them and two other nearby houses with water. The two other houses
had been destroyed by the Israelis with dynamite and they had also dynamited the spring,
which left the gaping hole. Water still flowed generously, but the hole was now filled with
algae and the water was no longer fit to drink. As we were talking, the father drove up
and stopped to join us. The story got more and more horrible. It seems that they are not
allowed to clean their spring, and whenever they start to work on it the settlers stop them.
Just below the spring is a beautiful cistern which dates from the Ottoman occupation, and
is still maintained in clean and working condition, but empty since they are not allowed to
fill it. The real village was a few hundred meters away on the side of the next hill, but only
a few walls were now visible since it had been destroyed by the Israelis in 1965. Their family
house had been spared since it was outside the village, but it quickly fell into disrepair as
they were not allowed to replace the stones as they fell out of the walls, and they were soon
forced to build a makeshift house for their large family next to the one that was falling down.
Now this new house, built of course without a permit, is in turn threatened with demolition.
They have been allowed to build a house in the town of Umm-el-Fahm, which they are doing
because the family needs more room, but they don’t want that to be an excuse to force them
off of what is left of the family domain. They have a local lawyer to defend them, and it is
one of those Marion knows and we were on our way to visit anyway, so we went off to his
office.
We visited several people in Umm-el-Fahm and managed to convince one of Marion’s
lawyer friends to go with us to Haifa to interview the Russian immigrants. The first family
we found in Haifa was composed of a Jewish father, a non-Jewish mother and two non-Jewish
boys around 8-10 yrs. old. They were living in two small rooms with practically no furniture
except that upon which they slept. This was one of the families that had sought asylum
in Holland and had been sent back to Israel. They spoke enough Hebrew to get along, but
no English. They told us why they had tried to leave Israel, mostly it boiled down to anti-
non-Jewish discrimination they met everywhere. At the boys’ first school, the toilets were
exposed, so the other boys at the school discovered that these two were not circumcized,
which made their lives intolerable at the school. Since coming back from Holland the boys
are in another school with hidden toilets so it is not so bad for them. We asked them to
describe the way they were brought back from Holland, since the Netherlands Minister of
Justice had denied to me that they had been tied or badly treated in any way. In fact, not
only had this man had his hands tied behind his back, but they had broken his thumb in
the process, a wound which was still visible. He said that he had refused to leave his room
in the refugee camp near Eindhoven, but the Dutch police had strangled him (in front of his
family) until he let go of the bed he was hanging on to, which allowed the police to carry
him away. He was wearing only underpants but was taken out into the winter night as he
was, and trundled into the Israeli plane with his family. In the plane, some of the men were

8
handcuffed. The Israelis went through the few belongings they had taken with them, and
took away everyone’s money, claiming that it was in payment for the airplane ride. When
they arrived at Lod, each family was given enough money for a taxi ride, and abandoned.
As they had not planned on returning, many had no place to go.
We took the two parents and our Arab lawyer to the place where two other Russian
immigrant families were living, in a cheap development along the coast south of Haifa. These
families were also living in crowded and underfurnished conditions, but somehow managed
to make a Russian meal for us, which was welcome since we had not eaten anything since
the morning. The sweet Kosher red wine was not to my taste, but the food was delicious.
Living nearby was a Russian woman who had immigrated eight years ago, so she was able
to translate between Russian and Hebrew for Marion and the lawyer. The lawyer was
unprepared for what he learned and could hardly believe it.
After we had interviewed the Russians, we brought the lawyer home and went back to
Haifa to visit Arna Mer. She is a Lithuanian Jew who emigrated to Palestine before 1948
and joined in the armed struggle for a Jewish state until she saw the horrors of the 1948
war, and she has been working for Palestinian children ever since. She married an Arab and
founded the organisation “Care and Learning” which specialises in teaching young children
in the OT, especially in the Jenin area. Her work has been extremely important during
the closure of Palestinian schools by the Israeli authorities. I had brought all the way from
Geneva a big sack full of teaching materials, colored pencils, etc., which I was glad finally to
get rid of, and which she was glad to receive.
The next day we made our way back to Jerusalem, stopping in Netanya, a Mediterranean
beach resort, with superb beaches and lots of high-rise hotels and apartment buildings which
I found oppressive. It was one of the few places I visited which had attained the Zionist
ideal: There was no Arab presence whatsoever. It was totally Western and seemed very
artificial, although that is not very surprising since it is true of most beach resorts anywhere
in the world. We found some good Yemeni food for lunch.
In Jerusalem, I made my third attempt to find Ali Jeddah, a Palestinian who runs El
Heiat, a kind of information and guide service for the Occupied Territories, since I had not
yet visited any real refugee camps or Gaza, and I knew that it was a good idea to have a
guide in such places. On my second attempt, I had found someone in his office, but they
didn’t speak much English, and this time there was no one, perhaps because it was after
three o’clock in the afternoon, and even though fewer and fewer Palestinians actually strike
any more, they seem to have got used to the Intifada closing hours, and the Eastern zones get
pretty quiet in the late afternoon. A common technique for shops is to close their shutters
symbolically at the prescribed hour (currently 3 p.m.), but leave one of them ajar so that
customers can in fact get in and do business. This makes the desired protest effect without
penalizing the economy too much.
Since it did not appear possible to visit a camp that day, and as I had left my jacket
with some papers and my sunglasses in Ghassan Andoni’s car a few days earlier, we decided
to visit my friends in Beit Sahur. Along the Jerusalem-Bethlehem-Hebron route there are
both “Arab busses” (which cost one shekel) and Israeli busses which are less crowded and
cost two. We happened to be at the Arab bus terminal, so we took one of those. From the
end of the line in Beit Sahur we walked down to the Andoni’s house, but as I had expected,
they were not there (they are Orthodox, and it was Easter Sunday for them). So we walked
a little further to Jad’s house, where there is usually someone, since it is a sort of gathering
place for half the town. Jad was not there, but we were welcomed by his wife and mother

9
and several other family members I had met before, and we immediately felt right at home.
In the kitchen, the boys were watching a basketball match, I think between North Carolina
State and Nebraska. It was the first time I had seen college basketball on TV with the
commentary in Arabic.
In the living room, Jad’s wife was serving some oriental delights and I was mostly playing
with his 9-yr-old daughter who speaks quite good English. She is very pretty but has a
strange skin condition: the right side of her face is slightly swollen and bright red. I didn’t
dare to ask what it was, but Marion did, and it seems she has had it since she was five years
old.
Marion brought up the subject of the Deheisha refugee camp, which is just outside Beth-
lehem and which she had visited before because it is one of the camps where the Palestinians
went who were chased from the village where her kibbutz was built. She had once managed
to find someone in the camp who had fled the village, and she wanted to see her again. While
we were talking, one of the boys went to the Andoni’s house and fetched my jacket for me.
He also fetched a young man from the Deheisha camp who in fact lived in Beit Sahur and
acted as a guide to people who wanted to visit. Unfortunately, it was too late to go that
day, but Marion made an appointment to come back in two days. I was not able to join,
since I was returning to Switzerland that day.
The hospitality was so great that we hardly noticed how late it was getting, and the last
bus for Jerusalem had already left. Jad’s wife drove us up to Bethlehem where we could
get a taxi, and we took some time to do a little standard sightseeing in the Church of the
Nativity, a Greek Orthodox church dating from the 3rd century, with a magnificent sanctuary
beneath the main altar marking the spot where Christ is supposed to have been born. The
aroma of sixteen centuries of incense and candles was enebriating. It was Orthodox Easter
Sunday, but all the festivities were over. Our friends said they estimated the attendance at
the Easter ceremonies this year at about a thousand more than usual, which they attributed
to the Russian Christians among the new “Jewish” Russian immigrants. This agreed with
what we learned the next day when we went to see Michel “Mikado” Warschawski who runs
the Alternative Information Centre in West Jerusalem and edits the excellent publications
“The Other Front” (weekly) and “News from Within” (monthly). He said he didn’t have
any real figures, but ALL the new Russian immigrant families he had met were of mixed
religions, and he was sure that the often quoted figures of between 30 and 65 percent mixed
(depending on how you define a Jew) were low. In fact, considering that the children are
often not brought up Jewish, it is likely that a considerable majority of those immigrants
are not really Jewish.
The way back to Jerusalem took us by the “Holland Village”, so we asked the driver to
stop for a minute. We had heard of this in Geneva when the General Union of Palestinian
Women protested to the Middle East Council of Churches that some Dutch church group
was sponsoring a settlement for Russian Jewish immigrants in the Occupied Territories, i.e.
on confiscated Palestinian land. Upon investigation, it turned out that the Netherlands
Council of Churches knew nothing of it and was of course opposed to any such thing, so
it was apparently some independent church, probably a fundamentalist Zionist Christian
church (yes!). Anyway, here it was, occupying a beautiful site overlooking Jerusalem from
the south. We talked to some of the construction workers who explained that we were just
over the green line in the Occupied Territories, and this had been the site of a Jordanian
military camp between 1948 and 1967, parts of which were still being demolished. The
“village” consisted only of temporary housing, basically a large number of barracks rather
like house trailers on cinder blocks. It was not yet ready for occupation, but would soon

10
house Russian and Ethiopian immigrants as well as an unknown number of “Israelis”.
By the time my last day in Jerusalem had arrived, I was so exhausted from a week of
non-stop information gathering that I did not have the energy to go to the Post Office to
mail back to myself all the documents I had collected. I was warned that I would probably
get the worst treatment if they found such human rights information in my luggage as I left
at the airport, so I asked the people at the hotel to mail it to me. As we had got to know
each other quite well by then, this posed no problem. I began to regret having to leave this
pleasant hotel where I had spent several evenings meeting the interesting people who form
their clientele. I will particularly remember the pianist, whose name is William James, who
entertained us with his jazz (strongly influenced by Thelonius Monk) and occasionally some
Chopin; and a blind Palestinian girl who teaches at Bethlehem University and also works
for the YMCA; and an Australian girl who came with a group on a study tour of religious
sites but fell in love with Jerusalem so much that when the rest of the group left for Rome
she just stayed behind; and of course the manager and his wife, a young Arab couple who
seemed to know everyone and were so helpful.
The next morning I had to get up at 4:30 as the collective taxi was to pick me up at 4:45
to get to the airport at 6:00 for the flight at 8:00. (I thought this was pretty early, but I met
some people whose plane left at 7:00.) The taxi began its pickups in East Jerusalem so I
was first, followed by a Swiss archeologist who was staying in the Old City near Jaffa Gate,
and who had been making trips to Israel for 30 years. Then we stopped by the American
Colony hotel, which was good since I had told the Israeli authorities I was staying there,
so I wanted at least to see what it looked like. It is the most charming hotel in Jerusalem,
a lovely old building with lots of trees near the East Jerusalem American consulate. Then
we started picking up people from the Jewish part of Jerusalem, and the Swiss archeologist
had to change his conversation a bit to avoid any possible provocation. One of our new
passengers was actually wearing TWO of those big black hats – at first I thought my eyes
were a little tired in the early morning, but apparently he needed a spare on his travels, and
you can’t pack them in suitcases very easily.
At the airport, the procedure went exactly as I expected. Being a male travelling alone,
I was singled out for additional questioning, and they did not really believe I had come
only for sightseeing. They wanted to know why I had had two suitcases coming in, but
only one going out, and I didn’t really want to tell them I had brought all those gifts for
underprivileged Palestinian children, so I just said that they weren’t full and I managed to
get them both in one. They undertook an exhaustive search of my small suitcase and hand
luggage (I estimate that if I had tried to sneak out a postage stamp, they would have found
it), which in fact uncovered a tiny screwdriver I used for my glasses and which I had lost
two years ago, for which I was grateful to them. The whole procedure lasted exactly one
hour, but I was prepared for it and I knew they wouldn’t find anything, so I didn’t lose
my temper (as some people do). When they were finished, they politely escorted me to
the checkin counter, helped me to jump the queue, and offered me a printed apology and a
fancy ball-point pen as a gift. I resisted the urge to insert their gift in a posterior part of
their anatomy, smiled, and went upstairs to the final passport check which was fast. I later
learned from friends at the World Council of Churches who travel often to Israel that the
REAL searches take place at that last passport control, so I was lucky I resisted the urge to
insult them at the point where I thought it was all over.
In the departure lounge, the tax-free shops only accept foreign currency, but there were
a couple of souvenir stands with big signs reading “We accept shekels”, where I got rid of
most of my leftover shekels for some mango juice which my younger daughter likes. The

11
Swissair flight is very popular, and the stretch Jumbo was full. There were even quite a few
guys with the big black hats, which I would have expected to fly El Al. That was my last
surprise in Israel.

12