“Networks Disrupted: a Study of the Impact of ‘Walling’ on Contiguous Communities in Israel/Palestine and Cyprus”	

	The escalating tendency of states and communities to build walls separating populations is becoming an endemic aspect of contemporary life. 'Walls' of various forms now divide Mexico and the United States, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, the Spanish Protectorates of Ceuta and Mellila and Morocco as well as numerous other countries, and as I write the practice of walling is proliferating with, for an extreme example, a French company recently contracted to wall the entirety of Saudi Arabia's land borders. Inter-state walling is paralleled on a micro-level by the proliferation of gated communities, enclaves and other spaces within national territory which are divided from the surrounding landscape and its peoples. Although walling to exclude 'other' populations has a long genealogy stretching at least as far back as the Great Wall of China and more recently to barriers such as the Berlin Wall (and its extension along the East-West German border), Belfast's 'Peace Walls', and the Cypriot 'Green Line', it seems to be gaining increased popularity as globalisation and labour migration raises nationalist anxieties about the integrity of borders and as the technologies of 'barrier construction' become increasingly sophisticated and aggressively marketed. Despite this proliferation there has not, to date, been a concerted comparative project to investigate the ways in which 'walling' impacts upon local communities on both sides of the walls, changing not only practices but, perhaps more saliently, imaginings of self and other. This project is a pilot study towards a more extensive comparative project; it investigates the Israeli 'security' barrier to assess the way in which its cutting of physical and social networks in the Bethlehem-Jerusalem region has affected local peoples, the way in which such sundered networks are replaced by new forms of social relations, and the way in which the social imaginaries of Israelis and Palestinians are reconfigured in the wake of the separation barrier. Research in the Bethlehem region has been carried out in two communities.

The Israeli 'Security Barrier' cutting the Jerusalem-Hebron road as it passes through Bethlehem city (copyright Glenn Bowman).

A restaurant adjoining the 'separation barrier' which used to serve local residents, travellers between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and tourists, but which now functions as a car park for West Bank residents forced to leave their cars behind while accessing Jerusalem (copyright Glenn Bowman).

	The first West Bank site, the mixed Christian-Muslim town of Beit Sahour, is located a little more than ten kilometres to the south of Jerusalem's Old City and a kilometre to the east of Bethlehem's Manger Square. Beit Sahour is a largely artisanal town famed for its production of olive wood products for the religious tourism trade but which in the past supplemented the income of its 13,000 population by finishing piece work (particularly textiles) for Israeli companies and providing skilled labourers for construction work in Jerusalem on both properties owned by Christian churches and by Israelis (both private individuals and business concerns). After Oslo and the Gulf War implemented increased 'security' along the until then relatively unmarked border between Israel and the West Bank, movement through (and more and more subvertly around) the checkpoints became increasingly difficult. In 2002 Jebel Abu Gheneim, the forested mountain which provided Beit Sahour's northern border, was confiscated from Sahouri and other owners and disappeared beneath the multi-storied residential and business buildings of the settlement of Har Homa. That settlement was divided from Beit Sahour by a security barrier -- a bulldozed strip twenty metres in width containing two three-metre barbed wire topped fences, a ditch, another fence with electronic movement sensors, two raked sand ‘trace strips’, and a paved patrol road -- sealing the town to the north and connecting up to the west with the more imposing 'wall' cutting Bethlehem and Beit Jala off from Jerusalem and to the east with a militarised bypass road allowing only 'authorised' traffic to access Jerusalem. Beit Sahour's economy began to wither, along with its ties of family, friendship, and religious devotion to people and places in the capital city of which it had, until less than a decade ago, been little more than a suburb. Furthermore, insofar as the 'barrier' pushed into Sahouri agricultural land right up to the borders of the households, much of the olive groves and other productive areas in the north of the town were rendered inaccessible. 

The 'Security Barrier' alienating cultivated land up to to the borders of Sahouri residential districts (copyright Glenn Bowman)
	
	The second site, Battir, is a Muslim village of 4,200 five kilometres to the west of Bethlehem in the fertile Wadi el-Jundi. Between 1892 and the 1948 war Battir developed as a major market garden for Jerusalem to which it was connected by the Jaffa-Jerusalem railway. After the war, when Battir fell on the Jordanian side of the Armistice Line, the railway station was closed, and Battir's agricultural outlet shifted to Bethlehem and Beit Jala to the East even though it continued, in accordance with the 1949 Rhodes Agreement, to work its lands on the Israeli side of the Green Line. After 1967 a number of Battir's men began to work on construction and other tasks in Jerusalem and Israel, as well as in neighbouring Israeli settlements. Since 2002 Battir has been effectively cut off from Bethlehem, Beit Jala and the rest of the West Bank by the 'Wall' running along Israeli Route 60 (crossed through a single checkpoint controlled tunnel linking Battir and Khadr) while at present another wall is in the process of being constructed 'along the Green Line' which will cut Battir off from its lands across the tracks, confiscate most of the fertile valley bottom and slopes, and seal off Battir and neighbouring villages (Husan, Nahalin and Wadi Fuqin) from both Israel and the West Bank between the two walls. Life in Battir is becoming increasingly unviable economically, and income comes largely from smuggling goods and workers across the as yet unwalled 'Green Line' and working to build the settlements that will soon engulf the village (Betar Illit, the haredim settlement of 32,000, built nearby, has the fastest growth rate of any Israeli settlement, clocking 22.35% per annum in the late nineties). 

Battir village viewed from the East (copyright Omar Hasan Hammad)

	The project, as yet incomplete because of a delayed start occasioned by my chief Palestinian informant's need to work for several months in America to provide money for his family (he's been largely unemployed for the past six years), has to date consisted of twenty four extended oral history interviews with a selection of residents of the two communities, including construction workers, former labour contractors, persons involved in the tourism trade, coach and taxi operators, businessmen with permissions able to import goods into the West Bank (produce and artifacts are not allowed to move from the Territories into Israel), Christian and Muslim religious functionaries, students, political activists, smugglers, etc.. Much of the material generated has dealt with questions of economic survival and the tactics pursued in order to ensure it, and it is clear that a radical restructuring of the local economy has come about with new entrepreneurs brought to eminence by various 'arrangements' with Israel, with the churches simultaneously able to provide jobs in Jerusalem to some people and driving wages down generally in the Bethlehem region because of their near total control of the job market, and with a near collapse of Palestinian production because of the sealing of the Israeli borders to Palestinian products and a consequent glut of agricultural produce which renders it nearly worthless inside. Questions concerning both memories of Jerusalem and imaginings of the future invoke generationally distinct responses, with middle aged and older persons able to recall Jerusalem clearly, setting out the particularities of its loss, and remembering good (and occasionally bad) relations with Israeli Jews, while younger people, most of whom have only seen Jerusalem -- if at all -- on rare and carefully regulated visits during religious festivals, have fantastic images of the place and antagonistic imaginings of Israelis. A clear retracting of horizons is evident, with its impact most salient on the youth whose sense of even nearby towns and villages (even those on the Palestinian side of the wall) is radically attenuated. Curiously one element impacting the landscape, particularly of Beit Sahour, is an increase of 'internal walling', largely carried out by the churches around properties (most of which were given to them in the past as waqf by local residents) which had effectively been 'common land' until recently.

The Greek Orthodox Monastery of 'Little Mar Saba' with recent walling -- Israeli 'security fence' in the background (copyright Glenn Bowman))

	In my project proposal I suggested that I would follow leads across the Wall so as to meet up with and interview Israelis who had been in previous contact with Palestinians, but this has proved difficult. I have been able to interview Israelis who have worked with Palestinians through, for instance, organisations such as the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement between Peoples (PCR) or the Alternative Information Center (AIC), even though cross-border contact has grown far more difficult because of restrictions on Israeli citizens travelling into Area A parts of the West Bank. Previous employers have been far more difficult to access, in large part because it appears that much of the Palestinian labour which had worked in Israel had done so by private arrangement and, in tax terms, illegally. I will, however, continue to pursue these contacts (as well as those with church and mosque officials) on my final visit to Israel and Palestine in September; I will also then continue to interview the South Asian labourers who now sit along Jerusalem streets waiting to be picked up for labour in the same places Palestinians used to perch. I will also continue to interview Jerusalem Palestinians about the breaking of of trade, friendship and familial networks with West Bank Palestinians and will finally convene a meeting of the collaborators on the project -- most notably Amira Hass, Nicola Perugina, Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti -- to prepare a presentation for the Alternative Information Center and plan further elaborations of the comparative project.
	The project is supplemented by a less extensive study of the early stages of the dismantling of the 'Green Line' dividing Northern and Southern Cyprus intended, via a case study, to provide insights into the aftermath of a long-standing physical separation which might help in assessing the potential long-term impact of the Israeli wall. In November 2009 I spent ten days in Lefkosa/Lefkosha working with the members of the Peace Research Institute Oslo - Cyprus, particularly Mete Hatay, Rebecca Bryant, and Yiannis Papadakis on the complex processes of 'opening' the Green Line after nearly forty years of closure. While North-South trade was clearly an impetus towards opening, salient in people's concerns was the differential development of North and South which made restitution and return extremely difficult, as well as the political machinations of both governments around issues of re-unification. Also important was 'remembering' and the ways in which very different narratives of the past are being brought into contact and negotiated -- both formally and informally -- in attempting reconciliation. I visited and talked with residents in two villages in Northern Cyprus -- Yesilirmak and Yialousa -- where, in the former instance, a strong cross border movement has been working with 'Greek' Kato Pyrgos towards the opening of a new crossing point and, in the latter, a community of strongly committed Turkish Cypriot nationalists was resettled in a 'Greek' village around which small groups of Greek Cypriots remain. I will, in September, return to Cyprus to interview in the South and to convene members of the PRIO group to discuss the Palestinian material and how to carry the comparative project further. 

Graffiti in Lefkosha, Northern Cyprus referring to 'economic tunnelling' through the Green Line (copyright Glenn Bowman)

Glenn Bowman
School of Anthropology and Conservation
University of Kent
Canterbury  CT2 7NR
30 April 2010