Life Against the Wall

Mother Jones

As Israel's barrier encircles their once-vibrant town, the people of Qalqiliya are losing hope.

By Chris Hedges

July/August 2004 Issue

There is a 25-foot-high concrete wall in Nahayla Auynaf's front yard. The gray mass, punctuated by cylindrical guard towers with narrow window slits for Israeli soldiers, looks from her steps like the side of an ocean liner. It is massive, cold, and alien. The shrubs, bushes, and stunted fruit trees seem to bow before it in supplication. On this August day, I struggle to make sense of it, the way I struggle to make sense of the pit that was the World Trade Center.

We do not speak. Auynaf lives with the wall. She is as drawn to it as she is repelled by it. It absorbs something deep within her. In the morning she goes out on her second-floor balcony and looks at it. Her eyes seem to implore it for answers, as if it were a Sphinx that could answer the riddle of her existence. "My old life ended with the wall," she says in Arabic.

The wall, built by Israel in 2002, blocks her from the neighboring Israeli town of Kfar Saba, where she used to shop. It cuts her off from Israel. It makes it too hard to reach the rest of the West Bank. The lone Israeli checkpoint's guard towers, floodlights, concrete barriers, dust, stench, crowds, special pass cards, intrusive searches, and rude remarks by border police are more than she can bear. She tried to pass through once. "I could not stand the humiliation," she says. "I turned back. I went home. Now I never leave."

More: http://www.motherjones.com/news/dispatch/2004/07/07_401.html