What Is Life Like For Palestinians Under Occupation?

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0:44William:Hello and welcome to a very special bonus edition of Empire with my old friend, Raja Shahada. Raja, welcome to Empire. Thank you. I'm very glad to be here. You're speaking, I believe, from Ramallah under a rain of Iranian missiles and debris heading overhead. Yeah, four already this morning. Landing in Ramallah or just passing overhead? No, landing close to Ramallah, but we can hear the bombs and the reverberations. And this on top of the most violent period of settler activity that I've certainly read about in my lifetime. That's true, that's true. Almost daily settler attacks that are very violent in the Namaala villages.

1:27William:But you are in the middle of the town. So at the moment, shielded in a sense from the worst of the, it's more the outlying villages and so on than farmsteads that are getting the worst violence at the moment. I keep thinking so far, so far we are shielded. Yes. Raja, perhaps before we go any further, I should first of all say it's just me today, as Anita has another project today. So I'm afraid you'll start with me, Raja, and listeners. And we should perhaps explain for those who don't know who Raja Shahadeh is. Roger is certainly one of my favorite Palestinian authors, a man who's written an extraordinary array of books.

2:05William:I've found three just sitting in my shelf next to my desk. There are more scattered around the house. And a man who's led, I think it's fair to say, a double life initially as a human rights lawyer, setting up the extraordinary human rights group Al-Haq, whose reports I used a lot as a young journalist reporting the Intifada and earlier phases of violence in the West Bank. And more recently, since Al-Haq has been closed down, has it, by Trump? It was declared a sanctioned organization. You've been sanctioned, like many other people who work for human rights. Like criminals. Like criminals. Like criminals.

2:49William:Yes, well, we'll come to Al-Haq and we'll come to the current state of Al-Haq in a second. But, Rajah, just introduce yourself and explain for those who haven't read your work and don't know it, a little bit of your background. Maybe talk about your father, Aziz Shahadeh, who figures in many of your books and was clearly a remarkable man, too. My father was living in Jaffa until April 1948, and he was working in Jaffa. He had his office. And he had just married and had a child. And in April 1948, the goon had violent attacks on Jaffa, and it was getting very scary. And he decided he would go earlier to his summer house in Ramallah and wait for the facilities to end.

3:35And he thought that the worst that could happen is the partition scheme where Jaffa was in the Arab side. And so he would always be able to return to Jaffa. So he moved with his family to Ramallah in April 1948 and was never able to return. And I grew up after the Nakba, I was born after the Nakba and grew up in Ramallah and never left Ramallah until today.

4:00William:Do you know what happened to your family house in Jaffa, Raja? It was taken over by Israeli immigrants and we visited and it was very sad to see my mother and father saying this is where this was, this was the room that we were in and so on. And it hasn't been demolished, it's still there, but it's not in our hands. Were you able to go inside the house or meet the people who live there now? We were able to go inside the house, but it was very strange because we didn't have a common language. I think they were Hungarian Jews or something like that. And we didn't understand what was happening really.

4:37And we went in and my mother started pointing out to things that were familiar. And then we left and it was very strange. And I could see my father was very disturbed and he couldn't wait to leave. He showed us the land that he had bought where he wanted to buy the house and it was also gone. And they had the hotel, which was also gone. And so it was very sad. And I grew up, I was always thinking, always being told about Jaffa and how good it was. And so I had a sense of yearning for Jaffa.

5:07William:Roger, you mentioned your father. He was a strong supporter of a two-state settlement. Tell me what you remember of him and what his example meant to you. He struggled for many years with the implementation of the right of return 194. 194 being the UN resolution. UN Resolution 194. And he was sure that it would be implemented eventually, and he did everything he could, including taking cases and using the law as a weapon of resistance. And then in 1967, we were, of course, occupied by Israel, and he became very distressed. At first, he wanted to commit suicide, really. And then he realized that we have to figure out a way of living together, the Israeli nation and the Palestinian nation.

5:57And the Palestinian nation has to have self-determination in Palestine, in a part of Palestine. And he proposed, along with other leaders of the West Bank, a petition sent to the Israeli government proposing that they agree to negotiations for the creation of the Palestinian state side by side with Israel. He believed in coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians all his life, and he thought that would be the best way for everybody. And he knew and had foresight that if we didn't do this now, in 1967, the Israelis would become very, very extreme, and it would become very difficult later on.

6:38And he was right, of course. This is exactly what happened. It became much more extreme. Also, he used the threat of the presence of over a million Palestinians in what became Israel, in the occupied territories. And he said Israel would not be able to control this number of Palestinians. And so they would have an incentive to make peace with them. And it should be now. But it didn't work out. And I think I followed my father's plan. And I always believed that the only way is to make peace with the Israelis and live side by side. in Palestine, Israel.

7:14William:We'll get to your work on coexistence in a minute, Raja, but this is part of a history series where we've been talking to Eugene Rogan about the history of the 1967 war and the beginning of the occupation. But you lived through it as a human being caught in the middle of these great political cogs whirring away on a sort of continental scale. How did the occupation, the beginning of the occupation in 1967, change the life of your family? And how have things continued to change in the decades since? It was total change immediately after 1967. June 6, 1967, June 5, when the Israelis came, they took control over everything and they passed military orders that affected every aspect of our life in the occupied territories.

8:06We needed a permit for work, a permit for travel, a permit for using the land and the water. And the division of the area from Gaza became impossible to visit. Jerusalem eventually became impossible to visit. And so it was a complete change from the Jordanian time to the Israeli time. And as time went on, the restrictions became even greater. and then, of course, the settlements took over and the settlements have affected our life entirely and making us almost feel like strangers in our own land.

8:43William:I'm going to ask you in a minute to describe that process, Roger. But your career, you went off and became a lawyer in London. Isn't that right? And you could have presumably stayed. Why did you decide to come back to the West Bank and continue the fight as a lawyer here? I studied in London law and then realized that I don't want to be in exile and was very curious about the situation in the West Bank. And I needed to come back and figure things out and be part of the resistance to the occupation. And so I came and realized that the image of the occupation as a benevolent occupation was far from the truth as it existed on the ground.

9:26And there was a lot of work to be done to correct the record and to show the real face of the occupation. and the use of law as an instrument of colonization, which was not an easy matter because Israel is very adept at law and very careful at how they use it. And so it wasn't an easy matter to do that. But I dedicated myself to it and of course helped establish the HAK, which was the human rights organization that did a lot of this work together with me and so on.

9:55William:So, Raja, tell me about Al Haqq, which you co-founded in 1979. It means the right or the truth. And it was, I think, the first human rights organization in the entire Arab world. Yes, it was. And it was very difficult to establish and keep it going under Israeli occupation, which was, of course, very severe. And we were threatened to be closed all the time. And so it was not an easy matter to keep it going. We had to do a lot of work to explain the legal mechanisms of the occupation. And in the course of its existence from 1979 to this day, it has covered almost all aspects of the occupation from the legal point of view and from the human rights point of view.

10:39And we have a huge documentation of the human rights violations.

10:45William:Or again, people listening who have not been to the West Bank and perhaps are confused, could you just in very basic terms explain to someone who's never been to the West Bank how your life would be different from, say, a Jewish author living a few miles away in Jerusalem? Well, a Jewish person living next door to Ramallah, because Ramallah is surrounded by settlements, and the settlements live under Israeli law and have all the rights under Israeli law. They can move from the West Bank to Israel. With a very good road, lovely new roads straight through without any airs and brand new roads. If you have Israeli citizenship and also have a car with yellow plates that you get kind of waved through all the roadblocks.

11:33Yeah, so visible in the West Bank because the roads are segregated. Views of natural resources is segregated and discriminatory. And so the West Banker lives in a closed area, which is now very much surrounded by settlements and roadblocks and sometimes gates. Israel is very adamant at making the Palestinians in the West Bank feel that they are in Israel. So if you travel from Ramallah to Nablus, along the road, you will find millions, thousands of Israeli flags all along the road. And billboards advertising things in the settlements and restaurants and dry clean and so on, in Hebrew, of course.

12:16And all of this makes you feel that you are in Israel when you cannot move around freely and you have to be careful about when to leave because then the point will be closed, and when is it open, when is it closed, when is the gate closed, and when is the gate opened. It's a very restricted life, and you have no control over your affairs, over travel, over use of natural resources, over the taxes. Colonization at best, in a very strong sense.

12:46William:I just remember my visits to Ramallah Roger. And just to go through the gates into Ramallah as a non-Israeli, you have to show your passport. You can sometimes queue for an hour or two hours, even if the gates are open. Bored teenagers ask you questions, security questions of the sort you might expect to get at an airport, but not just on a 20-minute trip to Jerusalem. Describe again the daily restrictions that you labour under. Well, now the travel is not only restricted by roadblocks, it's also dangerous because the settlements which have filled up the land come to the road and then they often throw stones at Palestinian cars which are distinguished by blue number plates.

13:37And so you are always under threat of the settlers. Sometimes they saw stones at the car and you get injured and then there's nobody to resort to to get them to pay any price for what they've done. And some people have died on the road like this and nobody was taken to court. It's a very painful life because you see that the land is being taken more and more and you are being restricted and there's no way out it seems.

14:09William:In your wonderful book, Diary of a Normal Life, it's written around the time that the Oslo Accords, was it 1991, 1993 that Oslo came in? There were hopes at the time that this would make things easier for the Palestinians, but it had the opposite effect. Could you describe that? Oslo was a big deception because Oslo promised to have a resolution for the conflict and instead it divided the area into three parts, A, B and C, and A was supposed to be under full Palestinian control and jurisdiction, but it was constituted only 18 % of the land. B was under both jurisdictions and C, under Israeli control.

14:54But then, according to the Oslo, it was supposed to be that the transfer of all these areas would be back to the Palestinians in five years. And the five years passed and no transfer happened. And so Israel made it clear to the Israelis that settlement in the area C, which is about 60 % of the whole of the territory, would be under Israeli jurisdiction eventually. And so the people who were hesitant to settle, Israelis who were hesitant to settle in the occupied territories, were encouraged. The settlement increased fourfold since the Oslo. And at this point, the AESC is almost entirely Jewish-Israelis, and the Palestinians, the few Palestinians living there are under great restrictions, and life is very difficult for them.

15:47And yet it didn't stop at AESC. now the settlements are increasing in area B and even area A. And all this is in violation of the Oslo agreements. But then Israel has always violated the agreements that it has made with the Palestinians.

16:02William:Raja, some of the books I love most of yours are ones that talk about your walking. I mean, very much in the tradition of English travel writers like Paddy Lee Furmore or Robert McFarlane. But the difference is that you're walking through occupied territory, which which is being transformed by another people as you watch. And your book, Palestinian Walks, in 2007, actually won the Orwell Prize, which is a book for political writing. I think it's the only travel book or walking book that's ever won that prize. Talk to me about those walks and this phrase you coined, Saha, the Palestinian freedom to roam this land.

16:45William:Could you go for a walk today? Do you still put your backpack on and wander around? Or is it now an invitation to just be shot and killed? It's a great limitation now because the hills have been militarized and have settlers there with rebrandishing weapons, roaming them and attacking anybody, any person, even if going on a hike. But then I've always been interested in hiking and started in 1979 walking in the land and never realized that I could do a book which combined my both interest in walking and writing. And so when I did that, I was very happy because I enjoyed writing and enjoyed walking.

17:25William:And we should perhaps say, again, for people that don't know the West Bank and only see it on news clips, often with burning cars or burning buildings or soldiers, the West Bank is slightly like Tuscany. I mean, it's one of the most beautiful hilly areas of the Mediterranean you can imagine, isn't it? I feel as I'm walking through a kind of Pier della Francesca canvas at times when you find some of the more remote areas that haven't been landed with enormous concrete settlements on the hilltops. I mean, there are very, very beautiful places out there. Absolutely. And one of my purposes, objectives in the Palestinian walks was to evoke the beauty of the land and to show the leader that the land is so beautiful and so attractive and so convenient for walking that it's a pity that it's been destroyed by these settlements, which were built very quickly with roads that are totally unsuitable to the hills and not going along the contours, but cutting through and wide roads that are not convenient for the purposes.

18:25of the delicate land of the West Bank.

18:28William:It's a very, very striking visual metaphor to go and see, walk through this ancient landscape where there are olive groves and strip farms and flocks of sheep and shepherds, and immediately looks like a Tuscan fresco in the back of some beautiful Renaissance painting. But also, you know, for anyone who's brought up in the Christian world, you know, the word that comes immediately to the world, of course, is biblical because there are shepherds and people in keffiers and so on. And then you turn a corner and you come across one of these settlements, which is built in concrete, often white, and they're cut into the landscape.

19:06William:So, the landscape is cut away to create these ranks of houses. And through the landscape are driven these straight settler roads, which are magnificent roads and great works of engineering, but they rip through the hills. They're not built with the landscape. Describe that to me a bit, Roger. They rip through, you're right, they rip through the hills. And the idea is that the Israeli government wanted to convince the settlers to move into the settlements from which they can go back to their work in Tel Aviv and central Israel in the shortest possible period of time. And so they made them very straight and very unsuitable to the land, but suitable for the purposes of the settlements.

19:49William:I mean, I, as a foreigner, can use both sets of roads and have done. And it's a completely different experience because wandering around in a Palestinian service taxi, it is, again, you know, like in rural Greece or rural Italy, olive groves, winding roads going around these lovely contours. And then if you're going, I mean, as I've done reportage from settlements and talked to settlers and talked to settler leaders in the settlements. And you're given a bus from Jerusalem. And in sort of 15 minutes, you're suddenly in a completely different world, in this high security behind barbed wire with incredible immunity.

20:27William:Suddenly, everyone's got swimming pools and children have got crèches and there are state-of-the-art industrial parks and sort of high-tech industries springing up in the middle of this very medieval landscape. Palestinian settlements, the Palestinian areas of living are in villages and cities, and they have been confined to small areas, and they are not allowed to increase beyond these areas. You find that the Palestinian villages are cramped and without space in between them and without gardens, and the settlements are open land and wide areas of possibilities for expansion and development. And this has been planned from 1980, when they made a huge plan for the West Bank, whereby the majority of the land was reserved for the settlements, and the Palestinians were confined into small areas of the villages.

21:22and now the consequence of this is visible. If you travel through the West Bank, you immediately recognize the Palestinian villages because they're cramped and don't have space around them. And now, of course, the settlements are building high-rises also in order to make it more difficult for them to be relocated. And some places have become like cities with more than 100 ,000 people. And this is in the midst of a land that is so fragile and so unsuitable for such a wide area, built so quickly, without any proper planning and so on.

22:06William:In Palestinian walks, you describe walking to a particular spring in Kenya and returning later to find that a settlement road had been built across it and the spring itself had been appropriated and its waters diverted. Can you walk us through what that felt like? In Palestinian walks, the last walk was called Imagine Sarha because I was walking in Nika and Kenya and found the settler. This was in 1981. I found the settler sitting by the spring smoking a hubble bubble, Ardeele, and having his gun resting on the rock wall. And I passed by and was worried that he would stop me and shoot me maybe or something and continued with my walk.

22:48Later on, I thought, what if I had stopped and spoken to the settlement, looked at his view of the land and in contrast to mine? And so the last walk in the Palestinian walks is called Imagine Sarha, and it is a discussion between him and me on our conflicting views of the history of the land.

23:07William:What strikes me, I mean, I live in India, and there is a similar-ish conflict between India and Pakistan, but there are huge differences. If an Indian and Pakistani meet each other outside one of the two countries, quite often they'll fall into each other's arms. They have the same food. They enjoy the same games like cricket. They listen to the same sort of music. Pakistanis love Indian film stars and Indians love Pakistani musicians. And there is things to talk about. Have you succeeded in making meaningful friendships across the divide? In your book, Where the Line is Drawn, you describe a tortured friendship with an Israeli-American called Henry.

23:48William:Talk us through that. Well, you know, the common feeling is that the Palestinians and Israelis are always in enmity and never can be friends at all. And I wanted to show that this is not true because there is a long history of Jews and Arabs living together. with historically a fair degree of shared sacred spaces and common festivals until the Belvoir Declaration. Not a bad record of interfaith harmony. Yeah, and it enriched life to have the three religions, each with its own ceremonies and festivities and so on. But then in the book that you described, I wanted to show that relations between Israelis and Palestinians have not been static.

24:38I described the relations throughout 40 years of occupation and showed how it changed and drive my relationship to Henry and the friendship. And I had other friends to whom I'm very close. But then as time went on with the wall and with the divisions and with the checkpoints and the inability to cross borders, the two groups of people grew further apart and became hostile, and they didn't know each other. So a young Palestinian would have never met an Israeli except as a settler or a soldier.

25:16William:Looking at his passport or his past papers at a checkpoint or something. It's a different situation now than it used to be before, and it's getting worse and worse, and there is more enmity now than ever before. Roger, I mean, there are so many wonderful Israeli writers, often of the left, people like David Schulman, who writes wonderful pieces from the West Bank for the New York Review of Books. There's a whole range of them. Meron Benvenisti, who again has written a book not too similar to yours about the changing of the landscape and the renaming of the landscape. Do you manage to maintain relations with sort of fellow, with neighboring writers at all?