Sure enough the closure of Ramallah and surrounding area was officially announced and I was greeted before I left my house by Cathi from the Human Rights Action Project at Birzeit (pictured left), arriving to let me know there was no rush after fruitlessly trying to reach the out-of-reach university.
The newspapers and radio news quickly rushed to give details. A settler spacewaggon from Bet El, carrying Yoel and Etta Tzur and five of their nine children, aged 4 to 17 years of age, was ambushed in a drive-by shooting in the section of the bypass road between Beit El and the Surda crossing point of the Ramallah-Birzeit road. Etta and her 12-year-old son Ephraim died and the rest of the family were injured by over 30 bullets that hit the car.
The death of children is always difficult to deal with but how much more so when they ultimately were the victims of the political machinations of their parents. Settlers are an armed and hostile colonial force, and their situation is nothing like that of blacks being made to feel unwelcome in a white neighbourhood, a metaphor which is often used by them.
The Tzurs knew exactly what they were doing in settling Beit El. They are described in newspaper reports as "one of the veteran and leading families" of the Beit El settlement's B project, the second northward expansion of the original settlement. Yoel Tzur is one of the managers of Arutz Sheva radio and an administrative head of the yeshiva there, and a reserve major in the Israeli army.
In other words, Tzur is one of the field commanders of the Israeli right wing, on the frontline in the fight to create facts on the ground at the expense of the Palestinian population. His kind unashamedly hate Palestinians, call them "Arabs" to suggest their presence is an ethnic problem rather than an issue of legitimate national struggle, and try to shift responsibility for dealing with them by saying there are already "X" number of "Arab" countries in the Middle East, so why don't the Palestinians move there?
The Tzurs of the West Bank are virulently opposed to the peace process, although not adverse to using it for political propaganda. The mother of Beit El yeshiva student David Boim, killed in a November 1995 drive-by shooting, asked, "What kind of peace is this, if Arabs [sic] can feel free to murder our children and escape to their Oslo havens of refuge?"
Meanwhile, in 'Oslo haven of refuge' Ramallah, it's clear that we are not going anywhere as we set out onto the streets. Approaching the Manara, there are hundreds of people waiting to go to work in surrounding villages, and the faculty and students of Birzeit University are wearing those 'here-we-go-again' faces. Exams are on at the moment. Taxi drivers stand around drinking coffee.
Cathi recounts a story of some international students who came up to her on the way to my house, complaining about not being able to get to the university and how worried they were that the road might suddenly open and they might not know. Will Cathi tell their teachers if she gets there first that they were having difficulties getting there, they ask? "No," says Cathi, "I won't." I suspect this is because the lecturers might be able to notice all by themselves that the university campus is like a ghost town, that is is if they even got these and weren't turned back at checkpoints.
I don't blame her. She has more to worry about this morning. Left, right and center, the Palestinian Authority is arresting tens of people, including our students, and dragging them off to God-knows-where. Just when the numbers of students in Palestinian prisons was falling again. We are hoping they aren't taken to Jericho detention centers, notorious for their torture.
Rumours have it that the PFLP, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, carried out last night's attack, but we are suspending judgement until the facts become clearer. This theory stems from the fact that yesterday was the 29th anniversary of the PFLP's founding in 1967 but, then again:
The local journalists are out in force, hanging around in the busier than usual Manara. It raises an interesting comparison. Israeli neighbourhoods are not put under curfew or closed off when incidents happen inside the Green Line. I can only imagine the outrage that it would cause.
In the evening, a group of us congregated at Cathi's house to relax. The hourly question that kept coming round like clockwork was, When do you think they'll open the roads again? Whatever we talked about, it always came back to this topic.
Walking home later, Palestinian Police stopped us to question Kifah, a student friend from Birzeit village who has been staying with me since last night's closure. They weren't interested in my passport or the passport of the other international with us, just his haweeyyah ("identity [card]").
It just felt like harrassment. I will never feel comfortable with the racist nature of the obsessive identity checking in this country by both sides. I offered my passport to the officer, who repeatedly refused it, telling him, Khod! Izza wahad minna wisikh, koolna wisihkeen! ("Take it! If one of us is dirty, all of us are dirty!").