Ma’ale Adumim: Annexation and the Architecture of Apartheid
by MICHAEL RATNER on JANUARY 3, 2010
Today we came away stunned, shocked and almost numb from our trip to
East Jerusalem with Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House
Demolitions. And when I say we, I mean my family—my wife and two
children, 19 and 21. We have spent the last 10 days trying to get into
Gaza from Egypt; demonstrating against the Gaza siege and joining
demonstrations in Israel at the Erez crossing and protesting the
evictions in the Sheikh-Jarrah area of East Jerusalem. But nothing and
I mean nothing prepared me for today and our trip through East
Jerusalem and to Ma’ale Adumim, a city a few kilometers away. It
was not the Palestinians we met, although each had heart breaking
stories. Rather it was our seeing first hand the deliberateness of the
Israeli annexation project and its seeming inevitability. If you want
to be made almost speechless stand at the edge of East Jerusalem and
look out at a vast construction project on someone else’s land.
Look out at the commission of a monstrous crime, open and notorious. As
one of my children asked, “Why have the countries of the world
done nothing to stop this?” I said, “It’s worse, the
U.S. and others have aided and abetted this crime.”
Today we traveled with Jeff through East Jerusalem and to what some, at
least in the media in the U.S,. refer to as the settlement of
Ma’ale Adumin. It is not a settlement, but a new city of 50,000
Israeli Jews, soon to be expanded to 70,000. Ma’ale Adumim, built
on a hilltop, will ultimately be, or is already, part of the expansion
of East Jerusalem into a wider municipality that is called by some the
“Jerusalem envelope.” Before we drove through the valley to
get to Ma’ale Adumim, Jeff showed us a bit of East Jerusalem. He
pointed out the Israeli Ministry of Interior, the police headquarters
and the courts, all now in East Jerusalem; all a means of asserting
Israeli control over the area and its Palestinian inhabitants. Then we
went close to the 25 foot high concrete separation wall which will
ultimately lock out Palestinians from Israel, Jerusalem and many
cities, towns and settlements in the occupied territories. On a knoll
above that particular piece of wall we saw a prison and an
interrogation center for Shabak, the Israeli internal security agency.
Jeff then drove us to a viewing site at the edge of East Jerusalem
where we overlooked what is called by Israel area E1. It was a valley
with roads criss-crossing it, a few houses and trees and on the distant
other side, there it was, Ma’ale Adumim. While I had heard of
area E1, I never understood what was meant. I think I understand it
now. It is, at least the valley area I was looking at, the road system
and land that will link Ma’ale Adumim to East Jerusalem and other
settlements. Area E1 will also cut off Palestinians traveling north and
south; they will be forced to make circuitous routes from one
Palestinian area to another. And remember all of this land is in
occupied territory including all of East Jerusalem. Israel’s
actions are in flagrant violation of the Geneva Conventions.
As we drove toward Ma’ale Adumim Jeff took us to what are known
as Areas A, B and C. Area A is where there is full Palestinian control;
B is where there is joint Palestinian and Israeli control; and C is
where there is full Israeli control. It is in the C area of East
Jerusalem where many of the house demolitions are
occurring—another story for later. We also went to the Shuafat
refugee camp in East Jerusalem where some 35,000 Palestinians live in
poverty with no municipal services. We drove past small sheet metal
shacks of Jumalat Bedouins who, like many Palestinians, are facing
eviction. We saw field after field of olive tree stumps, 100 year old
trees that once belonged to the Bedouins that had been cut down by the
Israelis—insuring that Bedouins could not stay in or near East
Jerusalem. We passed an almost completed road with a high metal wall
separating two concrete strips; one side was for Palestinians and the
other Israelis. Finally, we began our drive up to the city on the hill,
Ma’ale Adumim.
What first strikes one is the color. The city is green and lush. There
is grass everywhere and palm trees lining cleanly paved concrete roads.
This is all in an area where water is almost non-existent and many
Palestinians have no water.
In the center of each of the roundabouts on the way up is an olive
tree, but not just an ordinary olive tree, but a wide squat one that is
perhaps 400 or even 500 years old, likely an olive tree likely taken
from Palestinian land. At the entrance to the city is one of the more
incongruous and Orwellian monuments to erect in this stolen city: a
huge white metal sculpture of two doves with wings unfolded sheltering
a globe and inscribed on its base with the word—and it seems like
a nasty joke—“Peace.” Peace, apparently defined, as
the dismembering of the Palestinian people. As we continued our ride up
we pass a suburban shopping mall with some big box stores, stores that
are part of international chains that hopefully will become targets of
the BDS movement.
We finally stop at the end of a street that could come out of any
middle class suburb in America: neat houses and apartments with small
yards. Ma’ale Adumim is called a dormitory community or as we
would say, a bedroom community. Its residents work in Jerusalem. They
live here rather than in Jerusalem because of price (half that of
Jerusalem) and lower taxes, not because of religious ideology. It is a
secular community that can shop at the mall and will be able to drive
to work in a few minutes on segregated roads. We went to a lookout over
the E1 area and toward Jerusalem. As we looked down the hill we saw a
construction site for a huge swimming pool—a swimming pool in
this parched land where only the select have water. Across the valley
we saw the building of the architecture of apartheid: the segregated
roads and separation walls. I could have been standing in a white only
town in South Africa, but I was standing in an Israeli Jewish only town
in the occupied territories.
Michael Ratner is a human rights attorney and the President of the Center for Constitutional Rights.