Ben Granby

There will be no celebrations in Burqa. This small northern West Bank town of 4,000 should have every reason to revel in the demographic shift imposed by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s “Disengagement Plan”: the neighboring Israeli settlement of Homesh was cleared of its residents on August 23. But the reality for Burqa, as well as other Palestinian villages in the areas of the West Bank recently evacuated by Israel, is that little will change. There is no plan to return the land. According to its municipality, Burqa once boasted a population of over 30,000, but numerous pressures induced people to emigrate to Nablus, which lies about 10 km to the south.

“It was an all too familiar scene in Afula on 19 May 2003. Screams, sirens and blood stained ground. When Hiba Daraghmeh detonated the explosives strapped around her just outside a shopping mall, she took the lives of three innocent people in a most brutal fashion. The American media was quick to report that the recent bombings would hurt the peace process, but they gave little note to the numerous obstructions that Ariel Sharon’s government has placed, or the Israeli army’s continued unprovoked attacks on Palestinian cities.” Ben Granby reports.

The makeshift tank barricade on my street is gone. The twin piles of sand were probably never meant to do much more than provide area residents like myself with some sense of security.

The Israelis didn’t see it coming. Clearly, after the failure to get people inside on April 28, they must have assumed that the International Solidarity Movement did not pose a threat to their siege of the Church of Nativity.

It’s a difficult thing to comprehend a willing descent into a place of mass suffering. Usually, such things are random and so temporary that one cannot plan for it.

Last night I brought Jenin to Israel. I tried to at least. I walked from East Jerusalem to West, seeking a drink after spending a night in the devastated northern West Bank town. Jenin was still on my boots.

On the evening of April 3, 2002, US Federal Embassy Security Agents rescued me from Bethlehem. The entire episode felt comical. And it pretty well summed up my impressions of the US’s involvement in the Israel/Palestine conflict.

I penned this just after hearing about eight bodies pulled from the rubble of just one home in Nablus yesterday.

The nicest thing about the morning of April 3 was the discovery that electricity existed again. This meant working television. Television meant news. News meant information from outside the confines of the Bethlehem Star Hotel.

Two children dragged the broken metal frame of a cart across the road. They arranged it next to a pile of plastic milk crates and some other small pieces of garbage and stone debris.