In Jerusalem, footballs go where people cannot
AFP
Date: 4/25/2010
ANATA, West Bank (AFP) – Palestinian Murad Obeidi used to crawl on his hands and knees through a dark tunnel under an Israeli wall on missions fraught with danger –– retrieving footballs.
The controversial barrier, which Israel says prevents deadly attacks, snakes through his north Jerusalem neighbourhood, swallowing balls kicked over the eight–metre–high (26–foot–high) cement wall.
The 21–year–old Obeidi and his friends used to tunnel under the wall to retrieve the balls until Israeli security forces sealed the route off.
He always worried he would get shot. "They would have said I was trying to carry out a terrorist attack," he said, after kicking the ball around the dirt pitch on a sunny spring day.
"(They) used to sometimes fire tear gas at us when we were inside the tunnel, but other times we would succeed in bringing the ball back. Now it's become impossible."
Like many residents of Anata, a middle–class Arab neighbourhood on the northern edge of Jerusalem, Obeidi holds a Jerusalem residency card but ended up on the West Bank side of the barrier, largely cut off from the city.
"I hold a Jerusalem ID, but I cannot go near the wall because the army will arrest me and interrogate me for approaching it, if they don't shoot at me," he said.
Israel has completed 413 kilometres (256 miles) of the planned 709–kilometre (435–mile) barrier since construction began in 2002 at the height of the last Palestinian uprising, when Israel was rocked by a wave of suicide bombings.
When it is completed, 85 percent of the barrier will have been built inside the West Bank, land occupied by Israel during the 1967 Six Day War and claimed by the Palestinians as the main part of their promised state.
Much of the barrier consists of barbed wire fences and closed military roads, but in Jerusalem the eight–metre high concrete wall rises between crowded apartment blocks, splitting some neighbourhoods in two.
In Anata, it runs through the football stadium, forcing Musa Khalil, the head of the neighbourhood club, to warn his players not to kick the ball too high.
"The wall that Israel built cuts the stadium into two parts, and we use the part that is left on our side," he told AFP.
In the last year and a half his club has lost more than 30 balls, and last month players accidentally kicked 15 over during a single tournament.
After the 1967 war, Israel annexed Anata along with the rest of Arab east Jerusalem in a move not recognised by any other government.
The Palestinians demand east Jerusalem as the capital of their future state and the city's status has been one of the most intractable issues in the Middle East peace process since its beginnings in the early 1990s.
Obeidi's neighbourhood illustrates the disfigurement of the city over the past two decades, as the peace process has repeatedly collapsed.
The area of Anata closest to the wall was called the Neighbourhood of Peace after the signing of the 1993 Oslo accords.
Now residents can hear earthmovers on the other side of the fence expanding the sprawling Pisgat Zeev settlement, a built–up residential area with neat rows of apartment blocks and shopping malls.
Israel has rebuffed Palestinian demands that it halt all settlement activity in east Jerusalem ahead of any new peace talks, despite months of US pressure to restart negotiations suspended when it launched a devastating offensive against the Gaza Strip in late 2008.
Around 12,000 people live in the Neighbourhood of Peace, most of them holding Jerusalem IDs which were given to the vast majority of the city's Arab residents when they declined Israeli citizenship after the 1967 annexation.
"We called it the Neighbourhood of Peace because we thought that peace was at hand," says Musa al–Qasrawi, 58, a local community organiser. "But instead of peace we got a wall."
Qasrawi carries a West Bank ID and so cannot enter Jerusalem without a special permit, but all the members of his family have Jerusalem IDs.
"They can go to Jerusalem, but I can't," he says. "Our house is divided in two."
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