Dear Friends and Supporters,

About three weeks ago, four university students from France arrived at
the PFTA office as part of a year-long research project on olive oil
producing countries in the Mediterranean.  Coincidentally, Nasser
Abufarha, the director of PFTA was scheduled to attend and give a
presentation at a fair trade fair in France about two weeks after their
arrival.  To facilitate communication with fair attendees, Nasser asked
one of the students, Jean, to accompany him on the trip.  

After the fair, Jean attempted to return to Palestine the day before
Nasser and flew to Amman and arrived at the Jordanian border expecting
a routine baggage check and passport stamp.  He had been in both
Palestine and Israel before (just five days earlier) and had had no
problems entering, exiting, or living in the area.  All of Palestine’s
borders are controlled by Israel, which means that even if someone
enters and exits Palestine through the West Bank or Gaza, they receive
an Israeli passport stamp, and a taste of a ferocious Israeli border
security program.  So, Jean, who had no attention of ever returning to
Israel still had to pass through an “Israeli border” to go to Jericho
and catch a bus to Jenin (where he left the bulk of his belongings and
his three friends).  Israel wanted to know why a French citizen had
come to Israel, left for five days to Jordan, and wanted to return. 
Jean replied that he had gone home to France via Jordan to visit family
and was now “returning to Jenin in Palestine.”  Woops!  According to
Israel, there is no Palestine, it simply does not exist, and it is
incredibly irritating to border guards to hear tourists use the term
“Palestine” or “Palestinian” thus implying a claim to the land that is
not Zionist in nature.

The border guards wanted to know why Jean wanted to visit Jenin and
what he was doing there.  They also tried to make very clear to him
their morally reprehensible view that, “Jenin is in Israel, there is no
Palestine.”  In the end, Jean received a beautiful new red stamp in his
passport that read “ENTRY DENIED”, and walked back to Jordan.  

The next day, Jean tried again, this time with Nasser who had, in the
meantime, returned to Jordan from France.  Nasser went to both the
Israeli embassy in Jordan and the border crossing with Jean.  At the
border, he explained what was going on, what Jean was doing (which he
described as touring the Mediterranean), and that he was finished in
Jenin and was returning to Jerusalem to meet his friends.  Therefore,
there would be no reason to deny him entry, he had no nefarious
intentions, and by preventing him entry, Israel would be hurting only
its own image.  The border guard apologized to both of them, claimed
there had been a misunderstanding and informed them that Jean would be
admitted in very little time, after they received clearance.  Nasser
was told to leave the area and Jean was told to wait.  By the time
Nasser got into a taxi on the other side of the bridge, Jean was on the
phone telling him that the Israeli Ministry of Defense had deemed him,
“a threat to the State of Israel”, that he had received another
beautiful red stamp, and that he was returning to Jordan.  Jean will
not be allowed to enter Israel or Palestine for the next ten years. 
Ehud Barak (the Israeli Minister of Defense) seems like he should have
better things to do.

This story is interesting because it brings to light the quasi-official
policy of keeping Palestine closed to tourists, strengthening the
isolating hold Israel maintains on its population.  I’ve never had the
courage (or foolhardiness) to tell Israeli border guards my real plan
when entering the area.  I suppose that’s a good thing, because if I
had, I would have been denied the chance to write my thesis by Israel
and later would have been denied the chance to visit friends by
Israel.  The story also brings up the issue of who owns this land, and
Israel’s willingness to have its official representatives (ie border
guards) openly state that there is no such thing as Palestine.  It
feels like we’re back in the era of Golda Meir, who, during her time as
Prime Minister, declared that there was “no such thing as
Palestinians…they simply did not exist,” thus ridding Israel of
responsibility for the narrative of al-nakba, the event in 1948 when
800,000 Palestinians fled their homes in terror and, until this day,
despite UN resolutions to the contrary, have never been allowed to
return or receive compensation.

Sometimes, Israel really does make it seem like they own the land. 
They certainly do set up checkpoints all over the place, drive their
Jeeps and Hummers into villages, walk around the surrounding farm
fields in military formation and, in the past few days, have blocked
every single inter-city road in the West Bank, completely isolating
regions from each other.  But then you see who Palestine really belongs
to when you get in a shared taxi and the driver goes around a dirt
roadblock by driving through a field, when a father tells you of his
family’s 600 year history in a certain village, and when a farmer tells
the soldiers, “Even if you shoot me, I will still pick my olives.” 
Palestine is under occupation, but it is certainly still Palestine and
the determined people who live here are Palestinian.

Salaam,
Andrew Pappone

The House of Fair Trade Newsletter is a weekly email newsletter sent
from the offices of the Palestine Fair Trade Association in Jenin,
Palestine with stories and experiences from the ground in Palestine. 
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The views expressed in this newsletter are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Palestine Fair Trade Association.