Guess what! Fayyad's village has electricity 24 hours a day now! His family gave me a birthday party a year and a half ago in darkness. While the lack of electric lighting creates a romantic atmosphere for candle-blowing, and kerosene lamps may seem like a creative throwback, it gets old very quickly. Try washing dishes by kerosene lantern. Try studying. Try washing the clothes of your whole family by hand- it makes your fingers bleed. Using the bathroom in the pitch-blackness, I accidentally once discovered that my longjohns made light when you rub two parts together!! "Lack of electricity makes everyone a discoverer," said my host.
If you look out from the upper story windows, or go for a walk, you get a distinct and revealing view of the differential between the villages and the settlements, the West Bank and Israel. The settlement lights are ordered in rows, are bright yellow and light up the night, and have clear perimeters. The village lights, if they have lights, are dim, whiter, and scattered. The Apartheid Wall actually is visible in the darkness: there is bright light on one side from the bordering villages (also Palestinian Arab), and darkness on the other. You can actually see it follow a line.
Even when they had electricity for a few hours a day in the village, they paid several times more for it than I do to enjoy 24 hours of service inside Israel. Now, the solution that has brought back the convenience we take for granted, and the absorbing lure of the TV as well as the global gateway of internet, is an agreement with Israel to bring the Israeli lines to the village. In this arrangement, the electricity-controlling station, for lack of the correct word, is a little hut near the wall where the Israelis hold the key to one half of the hut, which is divided by a wall down the middle, and the Palestinians hold the key to the other half. Talk about a tiny analogy.
Apart from the romantically dim candle-blowing ceremony, on that visit I had the pleasure of witnessing Oslo-era maintenance of public order. One afternoon, it was announced from the mosque that something had happened in the next village over involving an argument between residents, and the accidental shooting of a woman. From the roof, we watched private car after private car carrying anyone who had anything to do with anything in the next village over there, in case there was anything they could do to help. Fifteen minutes after that, unmarked Palestinian police cars went by, on their way to do their duty. Then a full half hour AFTER that, and perhaps nearly an hour after everyone with any relation whatsoever had certainly made it to the scene of the event, the marked Palestinian police cars went by.
The police need to take permission from the Israelis before they can go to another village, traveling through Areas B and C (shared and Israeli control). Note that in this case, the police were going from Palestinian area to Palestinian area, through Palestinian areas. But they still needed to wait for radioed permission to move in their official capacity.
I can only imagine the scene when they actually got there. What do you do as a citizen in a situation like that? Wait for the police? They may never come and tensions may rise out of any control before that. So you can see that, in the absence of an effective police response outside of the major cities, justice has resorted to traditional ways of resolving conflicts like this- meaning exile of the perpetrator until the family of the victim agrees to blood money or retribution. This isn't something people should have to do! These aren't people in a midieval village we're talking about, this is 2008 in a place surrounded by people living in modernity (or post-modernity perhaps, except that it has many aspects of colonialism still- whats correct oh humanities gradschoolers?). They're just cut off by the Wall and in addition, and purposefully, from all of the aspects of life that the rest of the world takes for granted.
There seems to be a trend going on. 470 additional police were recently deployed in Jenin, approved first by Israel of course. A similar gaining of control over Nablus by police is ongoing from last year. You can see the police out in force in Ramallah regularly, usually stopping cars and checking the registration, searching for ones reported stolen from Israelis.
And yet, in the villages in all the areas surrounding the major cities, the Israeli army polices. In the village of Azzoun near Qalqilya, the army surrounded a high school after a few attendees were accused of stonethrowing. (Can you imagine? Try for just a second to imagine yourself sitting in ninth grade English, while a foreign ARMY surrounds the perimeter of your school. Imagine being a parent of those kids.)
What is the point of having a police force, if they aren't allowed to police? The Israeli army maintains all control over the West Bank, except for that little bit of Jenin, the little bit of Nablus that you can only enter from two places that the Israelis control anyway, that little bit of Ramallah... And then they seem to be used mainly as traffic directors, finders of stolen vehicles, and Abbas henchmen/arresters of Hamsawis. (also crushers of general public demonstrations) The Israeli army enters these towns and tears them up with their tanks regularly. With the Palestinian police deployments, the Israeli army seems able to simply save themselves the cost of regular day-to-day policing.
Unfortunately I am unable to find an uploaded version of the story I saw on Al Jazeera about the policemen in Gaza making themselves useful to the citizenry, using their cars to transport people around, as they're the only ones with any fuel. However I did find this:
And here's another consequence of blockade and no fuel: burning chicks...
