Visit to Battir

A brief report for friends in Luton-Battir

Our Camden Abu Dis summer visit this year included a tour round the West Bank, and we were able to visit a number of places with twinning links. One of them was BATTIR! When Dave copied me into an email he wrote to people there and wrote something about "the most beautiful village in Palestine," I just thought how people flatter in order to be nice. But now I have to say, that if there is a list of the most beautiful villages, Battir really deserves to be on it.

I only have photos of parts of it, but you can see from the photos that Battir is on steep hills and has an amazing amount of water! It has an ancient system of stone piping for the water, which rushes down the hillside into a big stone tank which I think is also ancient, and every morning there is a division of the water into the irrigation systems of the different families. So there are so many trees and so much greenness - they are in that sense really lucky.

We walked down next to the old pipes and the water to see the agriculture, and then we learned what I hadn't realised - that Battir is just about on the green line. That was the ceasefire line of 1948 that internationally is treated as the border between Israel and Palestine - though Israel has never signed up to this. Everything is dominated by this. This is one of Jerusalem's villages that has had to reorient itself to the West Bank - I had thought it was a Bethlehem village but apparently the road to Bethlehem from Battir is actually since 1948. The side of Battir we were on looks down and out to the land that was taken by Israel - and there is no physical border at all. The village land stretches over the green line, a train line runs almost on it, the boys' school is the other side of it...

I wondered what it must have been like living there in the short period between 1948, when Israel appeared so close, and 1967, when it took over the lot.

We went to have lunch in a park that has been built high on a hill and has a restaurant. From there, the view is amazing - and again, it is west to the hills that are covered in cypress trees and now are called Israel. But a friend from Battir pointed to the tops of the hills and told me the names of the villages that had been there before 1948. He knew each one. The people had been driven out, lots of them to refugee camps just over the border, and the olive trees that are the life-blood of Palestinian villages - and flow out of Battir and just across the green line - have given way to cypresses...

We were shown one hill where the Hebrew University are doing an archeological dig... The Israeli military are involved in telling the farmers have been told to stop cultivating their land there because of it... And we learned about the difficulties getting work, problems of imprisonment, the threat of the wall being built very close up around the village and the other many pressures of occupation ... Battir is in this sense like other villages in Palestine: green or not, they are at this point in time not lucky at all in fact, because the occupation is a horror to them.

It was a very interesting visit for us. Some of the pictures show some of the group in a meeting in the town hall (baladiya) and you need to know that we were not only told about the village and its history and its present problems (the wall, the archeology, the green line) but we were also told that twinning itself is very important for them, and that the Luton-Battir link is very encouraging to them. I remember one statement that was a serious exaggeration - we were told that "Camden Abu Dis is a perfect example of twinning" - that replaced Dave's statement in my brain as an example of the way people flatter in order to be nice.

But the important thing is this - that the people of Battir really do value any support you can give them. This they told us includes communication and knowing they are not forgotten, material help (you helped I think with a summer school) and actual contact with the outside world. They would really like someone to be able to join the November conference in London - I don't know if that is remotely possible, but they are aware of the conference and would love to send someone over.

And lastly, thanks for giving us the contact. If any of you would like to join any of our visits to Palestine, we can maybe use that as an excuse to go back to that lovely village again! Or if you go in any other way, get in touch with us and we'll arrange a time for you in Abu Dis... It's very different but you might like it too!