Haaretz
Kislev 4, 5765
Back home, the kids believe Father sleeps in a
rented apartment with other relatives, all of them from the same northern
West Bank village, all of them working in faraway Israel, all of them
coming home once every two weeks. "They welcome us when we come back as if
we'd arrived from a different planet." The first thing they do is take a
shower; they barely have a chance to see the family, only taking out a
little gift or something tasty for the children. They sleep as if they
were dead, drink coffee with the grandfather and uncle, and head right
back to work the next day.
Except that this father, H., so gaunt
that he looks older than his 45 years, with only his eyes smiling like a
boy's - lives in a garbage dump, along with 25 or 30 other residents of
Palestinian villages. The dump is in the heart of a Jewish city in central
Israel, on a plot of land tucked behind factories and warehouses that has
gradually become a local garbage dump. The men have built their home in
the underground. The walls are piles of garbage, an upside-down,
rusted-out car chassis and piles of wood panels; their roof is the sky. At
best, they have a canvas sheet stretched overhead.
They "live" in
three or four similar garbage-walled clusters. When they visit one
another, they exit through an entryway that only those in the know can
find, or they climb over the walls of piled-up garbage. A circle of steel
beds is arranged in a clearing surrounded by garbage. The beds have
mattresses that have been collected over time, and thin blankets. Other
furnishings include a few cracked chairs, some donated kitchen cabinets
and a small desk on which they cut the salad every evening and in whose
drawer they store the water bottle that the neighborhood butcher, a Jew of
Iraqi descent, freezes for them in his refrigerator.
They buy some
fresh meat from him every day. It was he, they say with affection, who
taught them the definition of a rich man: anyone who has eyes, teeth,
hands and feet. "They know us in all of the shops in the neighborhood.
They know we're Palestinians, and they also know that not a single car has
been stolen here." People know they are living in the area, but don't know
exactly how or where, even though it is only five minutes away on
foot.
"We're embarrassed to tell our families how we live," they
admitted last week, in a conversation that took place at their "home."
"But what choice do we have? No one will rent us - Palestinian workers
without permits - an apartment." The youngest man in the group is 31, the
oldest 65. All of them worked in Israel for years, and look back with
longing for the days when they would get into a taxi at 5 A.M. every
morning and within an hour at most, and for NIS 5 or NIS 8, would get all
the way to work. Now the winding route, which circumvents roadblocks and
the separation fence and its gates and Border Guard policemen takes at
least five hours, including a few different taxis, and costs NIS 200 a
person, if not more.
Well known to police
This group
of laborers works in construction. Some of them know the contractors from
years ago. Some contractors pay decent wages, of NIS 300 a day, while
others exploit the situation and pay less than NIS 100 a day. It's all
exempt from taxes, health insurance, paid vacation days, etc. The
contractors come early every morning to the nearby city street, and
collect them in their cars. The more decent contractors drive their
workers back to their "neighborhood" each evening. Otherwise, the workers
have to find their own way back without drawing the attention of the odd
policeman or alert citizen. There are always a few Jewish taxi drivers who
can be relied upon to drive them wherever they need.
Every so
often, the denizens of the garbage dump are included in the weekly
statistics of the Israel Police, which refer to the number of illegal
aliens who have been apprehended. Last week, this number stood at 2,400.
H. has been detained eight times in the past year, whereupon he was
transported in a police car to the area of Kafr Qasem, where he was thrown
over to the other side of the barrier. A day or two later, he was back.
The same holds true for his friends: They are apprehended, sometimes going
back the same day, sometimes waiting a few days, particularly when there
have been terrorist attacks. All of which means that many of these
apprehended illegal aliens appear multiple times in the weekly
statistics.
Workers without permits still work and live in
Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and the central region, and in the villages of the
triangle and the Galilee. They come from every area of the West Bank -
from Hebron in the south to Jenin in the north. It is difficult to assess
the numbers: In August 2004, when the border was not hermetically sealed
(which has not been the case since Rosh Hashanah) approximately 15,000
workers from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were permitted to work in
Israel. Estimates regarding the permit-less aliens, all of them from the
West Bank, range from 15,000 to 30,000.
In the second year of the
intifada, especially during Operation Defensive Shield, they did not dare
come to Israel. Some found work in the settlements. Over the past two
years they have returned, mainly to employers for whom they had worked in
the past. But since then they have discovered that most of their
applications for the magnetic card - the prerequisite for working in
Israel - have been rejected. The hotels that used to hire them don't dare
renew the relationship. Small hotels and hostels no longer rent them rooms
after policemen served warning to their owners.
The residences of
the workers are not unknown to the police: on the beach, beneath bridges,
on construction sites, in apartments in a few Arab neighborhoods. The
breaches in the fence and at Green Line roadblocks through which they
sneak into Israel are fairly well known to the police. If the police are
checking every car at the exit of the Shuafat refugee camp, the illegal
aliens trek through the hills. If there are police in the hills, too, they
head south for a while, or find a route in the Qalandiyah area, or wait a
few hours until the police grow tired.
`We are the
best'
Every so often, police raid their garbage dump. Some are
apprehended, others manage to escape and, as they put it, "to hide with
the cats." When they are caught, they sign a statement that they were in
Israel illegally, that nothing was taken from them and that they were not
beaten. If they are caught a second time, their name appears on the
computer screens of the Civil Administration, and when they apply for a
magnetic card once every few months, the negative answer is based on the
fact that "the police have something against you."
So you
constantly live in fear of being caught?
"It isn't a bodily fear,"
answers Abu Khaled, 42, who says he doesn't know how to read or write.
"They don't eat people. If we're caught, nobody cuts off our heads, they
only cut off the source of our subsistence, our possibility of feeding our
children." Every other sentence out of Abu Khaled's mouth is a joke. It's
hard to know if he is joking or simply always seeing the comic angle to
his reality. He has worked in Israel for 20 years or so. "We've worked in
all the restaurants and all the streets," he says. He once worked in
Kochavi Shemesh's (a founder of the 1970s-era Black Panther movement in
Israel) restaurant in Tel Aviv. "I knew his partner, Yehezkeli, who was a
wrestler and the Israeli champion in 1962, the same year I was born."
Sometimes, he says, the police tell the apprehended illegal aliens: "`Go
work for Arafat.' And we answer them: `If there were work there, do you
think we'd come here?' Is the West Bank a state? It isn't a state. They
broke the state [Israel] when they brought workers here who sent money to
Romania and China, while we are the best for them."
They offer two
explanations as to why they can go back after having been caught. Says H.:
"The contractors need us and the good, cheap manpower we provide, and the
Shin Bet knows we pose no risk. Once I heard someone from the Shin Bet
telling a Border Guard policeman not to waste time on us."
In the
twilight hours, they return to their "apartment." "I'd be willing to give
up the 40 dunam they confiscated from us in our village," says Abu Khaled,
"if only they would let me build an apartment here with two rooms, a
shower and bathroom." Considering the lack of sanitary conditions, the men
are surprisingly well groomed. They find a tap or a rubber hose at their
workplace, and shower at the end of each workday. They buy their food
items for that evening and cook something in the "kitchen": a plywood
board leaning against a pile of garbage. In the resulting triangular space
underneath the board, they light a small bonfire.
All of you cook
together, or is one of you the cook?
"No," says Abu Khaled. "We
have a woman from Sri Lanka, but today she's on vacation" (he says the
word vacation in Hebrew - "hofesh"). Someone calls the drawer in the small
desk "the refrigerator." This is where they store the leftovers for a few
hours, in case someone wants to eat it before it goes bad. The youngest
man in the group waves a water bottle that he filled at work and says,
`"Write that our worst problem is that we don't have water." To which
someone resting on his bed in the depths of the "room" answers: "You want
them to hook us up to water and electricity here?"
They work in the
hot and dry months and save up about NIS 4,000, which is supposed to be
enough for the family to make it through the winter months, when they
remain in the village. Wouldn't it be worth their while to go home for the
olive harvest? "What olive harvest, what olives? I only have two trees,"
says the younger man in the group. Abu Khaled says that the price of a
liter of oil has gone down to NIS 7 (due to trouble exporting the oil or
selling it in the Gaza Strip), another says that he has no trees, and the
65-year-old reports that he had 200 trees but that all of them are now
part of the nearby settlement.
Throughout the entire conversation -
which took place before the terrorist bombing in the Carmel market in Tel
Aviv two weeks ago and before the death of Yasser Arafat - Abu Khaled's
cell phone keeps ringing. Contractors are calling to ask him to set them
up with a worker for the following day. "There are workers," he answers a
caller in Hebrew, "but I don't know if they need work tomorrow." When the
work on the separation fence is completed, the last of the breaches
through which they come to the garbage dump - and work - will be sealed.
Then what will they do? "We'll fly," suggests Abu Khaled. "Actually, I
know of a helicopter in Ramallah that's available [Arafat's - A.H.]. We
can take that one."
Fear of degradation
M., a 25
year-old bachelor, doesn't want to think of what will happen then. "I live
the moment," he says in a conversation that takes place in a Jerusalem
cafe. Right now, he is waiting tables in a Jerusalem restaurant. As
opposed to the monthly NIS 1,700 that he received in a Ramallah
restaurant, here he gets NIS 3,000 plus some tips. Each month, he sends
NIS 1,000 to 1,500 to his aging parents and three of his brothers and
sisters, who do not work. He lives off the rest. He had hoped to save a
little, and with the help of some friends travel to Europe, continue to
work and enroll in an acting school that does not require a matriculation
certificate. He didn't get the visa. For a week straight, M. got drunk
every day to drown his sorrows. Now, during Ramadan, he is fasting as a
means of forcing himself not to drink alcohol and get drunk. "I could have
been living abroad, ensuring my personal future, studying. Here I only
subsist." Several waiters from the West Bank sleep in the restaurants in
which they work; a handful, like M., live in rented apartments. In the
past year he has been caught twice and taken to a roadblock. Once, he was
back at work the same day.
M. insists on living this way, at
constant risk of being caught, because "I consider myself an ordinary
person, going to work, going back home. I can't bear the thought that I am
different, seemingly inferior, that I don't have the same right to freedom
of movement and livelihood as a young Israeli."
He fears being
beaten by policemen: not from the physical pain, but from the pain of
degradation, which is seared into the mind forever. In the course of the
conversation, held in a cafe, tears well up in his eyes once: He points at
one of the waitresses. They had gone out a few times. When she heard that
he was from the West Bank and not a resident of Jerusalem, she left him.
Today, there is no chance for such "mixed" couples to overcome the
distance created by the bureaucracy of the separation fence