The Archers – Palestine Style

Abu Azzam smiles benignly as he welcomes us to Jayyous – he is decidedly more cheerful than the Archer men of the legendary soap but when you’ve heard his story, you wonder why.

The problems are a bit different in Palestine. Instead of bovine TB, the pros and cons of a digester or the vicar marrying a Hindu, the farmers around here have to cope with a tough permit system to access their ever-decreasing land, much of which is behind a fence with electronic sensors and an ever-changing route.

Abu Azzam’s 42-year-old marriage got off to a difficult start when hostilities between Israel and three Arab countries broke out in 1967 while he was on honeymoon in Jordan. He and his bride Siham worked their way back to the village on foot.

Life was good for some decades, however, in spite of the fact they were – and are – living under Israeli military occupation, and they now have a spacious, well-appointed house on the edge of the village.

“I promised my wife a new house,” said Abu Azzam.

“She is my banker and after 16 or 17 years she said we have enough money to build the house but I said ‘Azzam will graduate from school. Either you build the house or you send your son to university’.”

Once all the sons and daughters were through university the house was built.

But things deteriorated sharply when the second Palestinian Intifada (uprising) broke out in 2000. Israel decided to build a Separation Barrier to stop suicide bombers crossing the Green Line – the border between Israel and the West Bank.

Jayyous in the north of the country was separated from 8,600 dunums (1 dunum =1,000 sq metres) by the first fence. Like many people around here, Abu Azzam feels the barrier is there to take the land and the water – the main reason being that the fence comes 6.5 kilometres inside the Green Line and happens to take in the village’s water sources.

Jayyous villagers were the first to protest – Abu Azzam founded the Land Defence Committee and made 18 journeys to give papers in Europe and India, including trips to Cambridge and Geneva. He was forced to send a paper to a conference in Madrid in 2007 when the Israeli security committee scheduled a meeting with him the day after the paper was due and he could not attend in perso

Israeli security figures large in his life – he has often been imprisoned himself. And whilst we are having dinner with him, Donatella from Amnesty International UK rings up. She is asking about Ghassan Khalid, Abu Azzam and Siham’s second son.

A law professor at An Najah University in Nablus, Ghassan is in an Israeli jail* under administrative detention. This is an Israeli form of imprisonment where prisoners are held without trial or charge for six months. In practice they are very often re-arrested immediately on release and can be kept indefinitely.

Ghassan was first detained in January 2008 following the publication of an article in a magazine. The family has appealed the latest decision to renew his detention and hopes to hear the result soon.

Meanwhile a second fence has been put up which gives Jayyous back some of its isolated land – but it has resulted in more destruction of olive trees. Abu Azzam shows us maps of a third proposed fence with various routes being considered, all of which would lead to the loss of yet more trees. He thinks the fence should be on the Green Line “if a fence is really necessary”.

UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs field officer Stephanie Julmy said: “It’s very obvious that the space left to the Palestinians is shrinking all the time. The shrinking space is a serious issue.”

Would hardcore Archer fans recognise this, too, as an everyday story of country folk?

*It is a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention for an occupying power to transfer prisoners to its own country. There are approximately 10, 250 such prisoners in Israeli gaols as of April 2009, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross