Fenced in
By Eyal Ofer
Haaretz, January 2, 2004
They came and said - `You name the amount.' But I'm not selling. You don't sell a home," says Hani Amar, 46, from the village of Maskha as he looks at his house that, in recent weeks, has become a heavily fortified location. Like the rest of the village, this house, too, has seen better days. Every Saturday, Maskha used to be the embodiment of coexistence between Jews and Arabs: Thousands of Israelis filled its stores and created a traffic jam on their way to next-door Biddya to buy all kinds of items at rock-bottom prices - from porcelain sinks to bottles of olive oil, hummus and spare auto parts. Maskha, which is just a five-minute trip from Rosh Ha'ayin, became a giant shopping center.
The home of Hani and Munira Amar and their six children sat in an ideal location: It's the first house that Israeli shoppers driving on the old Trans-Samaria Highway would come to. At their stall by the side of the highway, they sold locally grown fruits and vegetables - dates, cucumbers and olives. Among the buyers were residents of the neighboring settlement of Elkana, whose last row of houses practically touches the village. A simple rusty fence separated the yards of Elkana from the Amars' home and there were good neighborly relations.
In the summer of 2003, new sounds were heard in the village - bulldozers and tractors wending a twisting route on the Samarian hills, marking the arbitrary outline of the separation fence. The idea was to have the fence surround the settlements of Sha'arei Tikva and Etz Ephraim and separate them from the nearby Palestinian villages. In Maskha, this route passes next to the residents' homes and separates them from their olive groves.
The fate of the Amar family was different than that of the other villagers. Their yard was appropriated to be used in the construction of the separation barrier. Bulldozers flattened part of the goat pen in the yard, made the area level by lowering the yard a meter and a half below the floor-level of the house - all to make way for the patrol road. These days, patrols pass right through the yard of the Amars' house. On the other side of the yard, directly opposite the house, a wall was built that separates their house from the other houses in the village. Thus, the Amar family's house has become an isolated Palestinian enclave next to the Elkana settlement and cut off by the fence from the rest of the village of Maskha.
In August, demonstrators from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), in conjunction with the Israeli group Anarchists Against Fences, tried to stop the excavation work in the yard and set up a protest tent there. On the morning of August 3, police arrested the protesters and the contractor continued building the fence, while the family looked on and watched the bulldozers digging its foundations in the yard of their house.
During the summer and fall, the family watched every day as the wall went up right outside their home. Most of the workers on the job were Palestinians from the nearby village of Saniriya who felt ashamed and apologized over and over again, saying that building the fence was the only work they could find.
The Amar family feared that they'd have to get to their home through the main gate to Maskha, which the soldiers at the checkpoint open only three times a day to permit passage into and out of the village. A solution was found to make things easier for the family - their own private gate in the separation fence. A small gate was built by the wall, which now serves as their only connection to their fellow villagers on the other side.
Every morning on their way to school, the children of the family pass through their own narrow gate in the separation fence. This gate (which, surprisingly, is still not locked) is not very many meters away from the main gate of the exit checkpoint from Maskha. Many dozens of Palestinians used to wait at this checkpoint every morning - Maskha residents who wanted to work their lands on the other side of the fence as well as Palestinians from nearby villages on their way to work in Israel.
In order to prevent infiltrations into Israel through the Amars' gate, another fence was built to surround the house. This horseshoe-shaped fence extends from the main fence across the patrol road, around the family home and then rejoins the main fence at the end of the Amar family's yard. To enable IDF patrols to pass on the patrol road, two more impressive gates surrounded by barbed wire were opened in the secondary fence.
This is how Munira, Hani and their six children are now living amid this elaborate network of fences, gates and a wall. Their little house, which doesn't contain much aside from a kitchen, two old armchairs and a number of mattresses for sleeping on, is now one of the most heavily protected houses in the Middle East.
For the past two weeks, the main gate has been kept closed for security reasons. Palestinians have not been permitted to pass through the checkpoint; only the Amar family's little gate has remained open 24 hours a day. The checkpoint at the exit from the village hasn't been manned and a patrol alongside the fence comes by a few times a day. The Palestinians who used to get through the fence at this place aren't coming here anymore. A new route - call it the "separation fence bypass" - which ends about 700 meters south of the Amar family's house, has become the main way from Samaria to Rosh Ha'ayin and Kafr Qasem.
