NU’MAN: Al Quds came to the unsuspecting people of Nu’man in 1967 as an imaginary line across their hamlet’s parched, rock- studded hills far beyond the city.

In the wake of Israel’s drubbing of the Arab armies in the Six Day war and occupation of the West Bank, the conquerors drew a wide arc deep into Palestinian territory and declared it the new boundary of the Jewish state’s “eternal and indivisible capital”. It hardly mattered to the bemused villagers even when Israeli bureaucrats, out of incompetence or malice, declared Nu’man’s houses inside this new greater Al Quds, but (at the same time) said its people were residents of the West Bank.

As the years passed, the 200 or so people living in Nu’man did wonder about the Jewish settlements creeping ever closer but the hamlet’s ties were with the West Bank and that was just a short walk to the larger village of Al-Khas where most people shopped, worshipped or worked. Al Quds’ boundary was for the Israelis to worry about.

Until now.

As work on Ariel Sharon’s controversial “security fence” through the West Bank stalled while the Israelis and Washington wrangled over how deep it can cut into Palestinian territory, the government stepped up the pace of construction. Altogether, almost 80km of fence and wall will carve through the city’s Arab neighbourhoods and the occupied territories declared to be part of Al Quds. It will force children from about 30 schools to find new ones, divide families that used to live just a couple of minutes’ walk apart and separate tens of thousands of people from their work.

“This is the greatest change to Jerusalem, and the way it will function, since Israel occupied the east of the city in 1967,” said Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer fighting a legal action against the Al Quds section of the barrier.

To the north of the city, about 24,000 Palestinians will be ghettoised as the fence surrounds a neighbourhood that will be on the Al Quds side of the barrier but whose residents do not have permission to enter the city. To the south, the barrier already divides Al Quds from Bethlehem, and part of Bethlehem from itself.

“The official policy is to maintain a ‘demographic balance’ of 70 per cent Jews to 30 per cent Palestinians in Jerusalem,” said Jessica Montell, head of the respected Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem. “It sounds very innocuous for what is a policy to drive people from their homes. There has been an explicit policy to use residency rights and building permits to make life difficult for Palestinians so they leave the city. To that we can now add the security fence.” “People who go two metres down the road to take their kids to school were crossing an arbitrary line in the sand that is now becoming a massive structure.” So far, almost 17km of the fence has been completed with one section grinding to a halt just a few hundred metres from Nu’man. The Israelis say the villagers are living there illegally because they only moved to the area during the 1980s.

The claim infuriates Yusuf Dirawi. He says his family has lived there for generations, first in caves with their sheep and then in tents before the first solid houses were built around 50 years ago. He gestures to stone housing with construction dates in the 1950s carved above the door. Aerial pictures of the area show that the village was well established by 1967.

“How can they say we haven’t lived here all these years?” Mr Dirawi asked. “They only have to look around. It’s obvious. But they don’t want to see.” The first problems came before the fence. In 1995, the Israeli authorities barred the children of Nu’man from attending their nearest school, in a neighbouring Arab village, saying that it was reserved for Al Quds residents.

“Then they destroyed the road connecting us to Jerusalem,” said Mr Dirawi. “We received water from a village in the West Bank. They say because we are in Jerusalem we are not allowed to get our water from the West Bank.” The harassment escalated in July as construction of the fence approached. Police came at night and arrested all the men they could find, Mr Dirawi among them.

When the fence around Al Quds is finally put into operation in the coming months, the people of Nu’man will be trapped. Already barred from travelling into the heart of Al Quds they will also find themselves cut off from the West Bank. Once they leave their village they will not be allowed to return. There will be nowhere for them to work or shop, or for the children to go to school.

“An official came here and told us this would be a ‘sterile area’ (free of Palestinians) or used for settlement expansion,” Mr Dirawi said. “At first we didn’t see how they could do it. Now we know.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service