Saturday 17 July

Went to Batiir, a village south west of Bethlehem, with Holy land trust. Nimer, a tour guide from the village accompanied us for the day.

Batiir is on the green line and was only saved from Israel in 1948, by the villagers' cunning. The British mandate kindly gave one gun to the village leader to protect the whole village from the Israeli army.

He decided the only chance was to get all the village men to collect big sticks and pretend they were guns, they set up in the village school and march in one door and out of another hidden door for half an hour to give the Israeli soldiers, who were watching from the hills above, the impression the Palestinians had a huge army.

The two sides struck an agreement and Batiir has remained to this day Palestinian. ‘I wanted to show you what a typical Palestinian village is like’ Nimer explained by the spring that gave fresh drinking water to the women and children filling buckets and pop bottle to take back to their homes, the rest of the water fills a pool and irrigates the terraced land below the village.

‘We are scared now because when the Israelis build the wall round our village, we don’t know what will happen to us’

We travelled around the countryside and saw clearly how the settlements, outposts (land confiscated by settlers and fenced off waiting to be built on) and military installations, perched on each hill, have formed circles around all the Palestinian villages.

‘These Israeli installations continue right across the West Bank, from Israel to the Dead Sea. The land is sliced like a pizza. If the Palestinians build on or farm their own land beneath the settlements, the Israeli’s bulldoze it down.

For more information about the Palestinian Summer Encounter with the Holy Land Trust including Ayda Camp mural pictures go to www.holylandtrust.org.

Paul Gent