Apartheid Wall
By
Gideon Levy
Ha'aretz
5 May, 2003
For the Israelis it is a
"separation fence," for the Palestinians - an "apartheid
wall." For the Israelis it is an ideal, for the Palestinians an
existential threat. For most Israelis it is a magic solution to the
dread of terrorism. For the Palestinians it is a profound fear. Once
again, they don't understand one another, two nations who don't grasp
the meaning of each other's anxieties.
A separation fence, a protective
wall, security, war against terror - but the Israelis have no idea of
the cost to the Palestinians. After the settlements, the outposts, the
bypass roads, the confiscations, the closure, the encirclement, the
unemployment and the curfew, now this problem has fallen upon the heads
of thousands of residents who live in the area of the fence, who once
again find themselves victims through no fault of their own. Farmers
whose fields have been expropriated, vintners whose vineyards have been
trampled, shepherds whose pastures have been lost, farmers whose plots
and wells have remained on the other side of the fence, unemployed men
whose last source of livelihood has also been destroyed now, and villages
that have been cut off from their sources of life.
A fence that is designed
to protect the lives of Israelis is located arbitrarily on their shrinking
lands - not, heaven forfend, on the lands of the Israelis. Why is this
so, actually? Why not on Israeli lands? Nobody asked them, nobody coordinated
anything with them, there's no point in even discussing the possibility
of asking them for permission. After all, who are they anyway?
The sound of the hammers
can be heard from a distance: Everywhere in the northern West Bank,
the noise of iron cutting into rock can be heard, a frightening banging
from the valleys and the hills. A fleet of trucks and bulldozers, uprooting
mountains, moving hither and yon. The sight is amazing: Between Tul
Karm, Jenin and Qalqilyah the ground is cracked and scarred, like a
broad wound slashing through the entire length of the northern West
Bank, as after a major operation. A patrol road and a security path
and a concrete infrastructure - a huge scar.
A light-green brochure issued
by the Palestinian environmental organizations, "The Apartheid
Wall Campaign," reveals the statistics: 2 percent of the lands
of the West Bank will be expropriated during the first stage, at least
30 villages will lose part of their lands, 15 villages will be caged
in between the fence and the Green Line, 160,000-180,000 dunams [40,000
to 45,000 acres] will be expropriated, 30 wells will be cut off from
their owners. And this only in the first stage, only in the northern
part of the West Bank.
Facing catastrophe
Another roadblock of dirt
and garbage rose this week along the entry road to Izbet Tabib, a small
village at the side of the main highway that ascends from Qalqilyah
to Nablus and is open to Jews only, to tighten the siege on the village
even more. Only an occupation apparatus could think of such a despicable
use for garbage and junk - to recycle them and to turn them into huge,
cruel and ugly roadblocks. On the dirt path that bypasses the roadblock,
the head of the village council waves from his car: Yesterday the army
came, dug, piled up dirt for roadblocks and incidentally damaged the
village water system. Now the residents have no water.
We drive through a pine forest,
bouncing about as we climb over the rocks, trying to reach the next
village. At the outskirts of Isla, one can already see the fence being
dug to the right of the road. In Azun huge trucks from Geneva are unloading
white sacks of flour, a gift of the International Red Cross. The unemployed
men of the town watch indifferently as the flour being unloaded. This
is not Baghdad or Kabul. At the edge of town the yellow taxis crowd
together. They have only one short route - until the next roadblock
- and they are also unemployed.
In the village of Jiyus,
in the renovated building of the village council, the map of the "apartheid
wall" is hanging on the wall of the office of Abdel Ataf Khaled,
of the Palestinian Hydrological Group. Large, broad patches of purple
stain the map, east of the Green Line.
"We are about to face
a catastrophe," says Khaled the hydrologist, the local activist
in the battle against the wall. Last July, he says, a one-day curfew
was imposed on the village. Then the army came, accompanied by bulldozers
that planted markers on the village land. The residents didn't understand
a thing, nobody had any idea what was going on. "Now we understand
that that was the planning period," says Khaled.
During the first week of
September, the farmers discovered papers scattered about in their fields:
They were the expropriation orders. A map was enclosed, too. Khaled
says that from the papers and the map that they received, it turns out
that the width of the fence will be 55-58 meters, and that 292 dunams
[about 75 acres], along 4,100 meters, will be expropriated from the
village. "Afterward we discovered that 600 dunams will be requisitioned
along 6,000 meters," said Khaled.
The next week, he and the
other village residents were told by the army, you will meet with Rami
from the Civil Administration, and will go out to tour the area. "The
residents were shocked by the tour," says their representative,
Khaled. "We're farmers, they said, and they asked: Will we be allowed
to work our lands on the other side of the wall? Rami said `yes.' Easily?
Easily, he promised. But they didn't believe him."
Last resorts
There are 3,200 residents
in Jiyus, belonging to 550 families. Khaled says that about 300 families
subsisted solely on cultivating the land, and about 200 families made
their living by doing work in Israel that no longer exists. Even these
families tried to go over to working the land, as a last resort. He
says that 8,600 dunams [2,150 acres] out of a total of 12,500 dunams
[approximately 3,120 acres] that constitute the area of the village,
including its houses, are situated beyond the wall.
"These are not barren
lands, these are cultivated lands," he emphasizes. There are 120
hothouses, each one producing 35 tons of tomatoes (or cucumbers) a year.
Seven wells, which the residents of the village share, have also remained
beyond the wall. Seven-hundred dunams [175 acres] of orchards and 500
dunams [125 acres] of fruits and vegetables and 3,000 dunams of olives
and the rest are grazing lands.
The hydrologist explains:
"There are 65,000 days of work for this community [Jiyus] to be
found beyond the wall." And what will happen in the summer, he
asked, to those whose water is in wells on the other side?
"If these fields aren't
irrigated, there will be an environmental catastrophe. In any case,
six of the seven paths to the village fields had already been blocked
by the Israel Defense Forces - even before the advent of the fence.
Even now it takes two hours in each direction to reach the plots, and
the whole day is wasted on how to reach the field and to return. The
cultivation of the land is a family project. What will happen if they
impose a tax on us for crossing over? Will a farmer spend NIS 50 in
order to reach his land with his family?
"I have a neighbor who
worked for three years in order to save a little money to buy a plot
of land," he says. "She bought eight olive trees, a tree for
each member of the family. She didn't believe that the wall would come
exactly up to her eight trees. She was shocked to see red signs on her
trees, which is a sign that the wall will pass exactly where they are.
Now they have already uprooted them. For her the eight trees were life.
The man who uprooted the eight trees doesn't know the story behind them.
There are people among us for whom the trees are like children.
"People here say that
we are turning into refugees. What will happen when the wall is completed
and the gate is locked? The situation in the village is already difficult.
This year we took 45 children out of the kindergarten because their
parents didn't manage to pay NIS 35 a month tuition. Sixty families
were cut off from the electricity grid because they can't afford to
pay their debt to the regional council. What will happen after the wall?"
What do they want now, when
the fence is being built in front of their eyes?
Khaled: "Three things:
that they leave us convenient and easy access to our fields, that they
allow us to retain ownership of the land and that we'll be able to live
in peace and as good neighbors with Kochav Yair and Tzur Yigal and the
rest of our Jewish neighbors."
Outside the village teenagers
gathered. They already want something else: "For you to return
to Europe."
The Civil Administration
in reply to our questions: "For lands that are physically taken
over due to construction of the fence, it will be possible to receive
money for use and compensation, in accordance with proof of ownership
by the owner of the land. For those lands that remain on the west side
of the fence, the owners of the land or their proxies will have access
for agricultural purposes, with passage based on gates that are to be
placed along the route of the fence. The security apparatus will find
a solution for the passage of the residents to their plots and their
lands.
"Only owners of lands
that are physically damaged will be compensated. For every takeover
of property, an appropriate order has been issued, which was translated
into Arabic as well. In addition, these notices were published on the
property that was expropriated, in the relevant headquarters of the
Offices of Coordination and Liaison of the Israeli Defense Ministry,
and a notice was sent to the Palestinian liaison office. Tours for the
land owners were conducted a few days after the distribution of the
order and, at the same time, an explanation was given about property
to be seized in the future."
Al-Quds, an independent Palestinian
newspaper, has already written that farmers whose fields have remained
beyond the fence will have to pay a passage tax of NIS 10 per person
each time they want to go out to their fields. The Civil Administration
denies this, but the farmers we met this week would actually be happy
if this were true: After all, already now, when the fence hasn't been
completed yet, they are not allowed to go to their fields.
Farmer Abed Khaled from Jiyus,
a father of eight who worked in Israel for 15 years, became unemployed
like everyone else and now is convinced that his land has been lost
too, and that he has been deprived of his last source of livelihood.
"There's no work and there's no land," he told us this week.
"Life is over."