Israeli and Palestinian volunteers create concrete alternatives for education and energy
The separation barrier and the proximity of settlements to Palestinian villages cause serious disruptions to the daily lives of Palestinians.
The situation is particularly acute for schoolchildren, who have to negotiate long circuitous routes to school as well as suffering settler violence. Many schoolchildren have stopped attending school because of these problems.
The Villages Group, a group of Jewish Israeli volunteers and Palestinian partners, decided to set up a school transportation system for children attending a new elementary school, Al-Massafer, belonging to the Palestinian community of Al-Fakhiet in the southern Hebron hills on the occupied West Bank.
The aim of the volunteers was to enable schoolchildren to reach school and return home safely, while also providing employment for a driver.
In January, after a fundraising campaign, the community secured the funds to purchase an improvised school ‘bus’ – only to have it promptly confiscated by Israeli army units in the area, who abandoned it in a neighboring valley where it was found two days later.
The community and volunteers didn’t give up: local activist Hamed Qawasmeh appealed worldwide for funds, and a ‘new’ vehicle was put to immediate use.
The Villages Group runs several other projects in the southern Hebron hills and in the area of Nablus. Their motto is ‘performing deeds of peace.’
Energy alternatives
In March, another joint grassroots project was completed in the southern Hebron hills. The Comet-ME team, a group of Israeli and Palestinian activists including a physicist, an environmentalist and a software developer, creates energy solutions for communities in the area.
After connecting Palestinian families in the village of Sussiya to electricity by installing solar and wind systems, the founding team, encouraged by their success, moved on to neighboring communities.
These semi-nomadic communities suffer from constant harassment by hardline Jewish settlers in the area, who vandalize their property, disrupt their seasonal agricultural activities, and attempt to drive them from their homes - simple cave-dwellings in the southern Hebron hills.
The team joined forces with a Palestinian volunteer from Hebron and fifteen local Palestinian electronic engineering students (including two from Sussiya) to install wind turbines and solar cells in four cave-dwelling communities - upper Sfai, lower Sfai, Mrier al-Abid and Tuba, as well as among the Bedouin families of Umm al-Kheir, adjacent to the Jewish settlement Carmel.
They were helped by residents of all the Palestinian communities in the area.
The British Shalom-Salaam Trust
One of the supporters of projects in the southern Hebron hills is a British-Jewish charity called the British Shalom-Salaam Trust (BSST).
A small grant-giving charity founded in 2004, BSST supports mainly community-based, informal projects that involve practical collaboration between communities in Israel and Palestine.
Other initiatives they support include Orthodox Media Watch, a project combating racism in Jewish-Orthodox media; Sindyanna, an Arab women’s fair-trade organization in the Galilee; an educational project on torture run by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI); and direct medical assistance to Gaza provided by Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-Israel) during and after the war of 2008-9.
Photos by Ehud Krinis, CPT Hebron and Edoardo Soteras.
Dr. Gillian Yudkin of BSST contributed to this article.
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