IN STEREO

It was a nice life in the past, but now it's very difficult. After the occupation, a lot of people from Beit Jala emigrated to Latin America – to Chile, Honduras... So the population there that are originally from Beit Jala is more than 150,000. And the population of the whole city of Beit Jala [now] is about 18,000. I have a lot of memories in Al-Makhrour. The whole family used to gather – especially on Sundays – and we'd go there. We had a watchtower; it's an agricultural ‘castle’. So we always had a barbecue there. And also, my father and mother and I slept there in that castle, especially in summertime, the school holidays. I’ve heard it said that before I was born, from June [or] July until September the people from Beit Jala were on their lands. They slept there, worked there. Because of that, each land has a watchtower or ‘castle’. And in the night, all the neighbours were together. Not just for Beit Jala people.

Even from [another] village. They are neighbours in Makhrour. They have a lot of stories to tell, and they have their own songs. The [Israeli separation] wall crossed another [piece] of our land and destroyed all of it, and uprooted 29 olive trees. Roman olive trees, very old. To estimate their age, I think it would have been more than 1000 years. And they simply uprooted them. I have a lot of memories in that area, because we always collected the olives there, from when I was a baby. The trees there, they have names. We called each tree by a ame: ‘the bride’, ‘the bridegroom’... But now it's vanished; all of them are uprooted. Just one olive tree left on the whole land, and it's behind the wall. The gate is on our land. So what's left for us? Just the memories. But [the tree] is a witness, about what happened there in that area. – Issa A.