Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 2004, pages 15-16

Special Report

 

As Peace Initiatives Come and Go, Palestinians Face “Transfer by Strangulation”

	Palestinians gather Jan. 21 at an area where the Israeli army tore down 28 small businesses in the West Bank village of Nazlat Issa, on the way to Tulkarm, amid protests by Palestinians and foreign human rights activists. An army spokeswoman told AFP the buildings were razed because their owners had no building permits, but Mayor Ziad Salem said it was linked to the construction of Israel’s security fence, 1.5 miles away (photo credit AFP Photo/Yariv Katz).

 

By Peter Lippman

NEGOTIATORS FROM the Israeli opposition sign an unofficial peace accord with members of the Palestinian Authority in Geneva, accompanied by great fanfare in the international community. Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announces “disengagement” plans in Herzliya, threatening unilaterally to establish a separation between Israelis and Palestinians in the absence of a negotiated agreement. How do such declarations and initiatives affect Palestinians living in the occupied territories?

The Jaber family, farmers in Baqa’a valley near Hebron, could tell you the answer. Atta Jaber’s house was demolished twice in the late 1990s. Across the highway, the Israeli army demolished his brother Jawdi’s house in December 2002. I visited the Jaber family in September, during a two-month research visit to the region. Jawdi now lives with his parents, several brothers and sisters, and several children, in an ancient and rotting house in the middle of the family vineyards. Jawdi was depressed. “I feel nervous in my heart,” he said to me. “I want to fight [but] there is nothing I can do. One hundred soldiers came to demolish my house. I can’t fight them; I have nothing.”

Not only did soldiers destroy Jawdi’s house, but Israeli settlers from nearby Har Sina “confiscated” 25 dunums of his land to add to their illegal settlement. Jawdi showed me pictures of his vineyards now under control of the settlers. He used to cultivate radishes, cabbage and turnips, and earned 5,000 shekels in a year. When the land was confiscated, he said, the settlers cut down 1,000 trees. They stole Jawdi’s fig and almond trees and planted them in their settlement. He showed me a photograph of settlers loading trees on a truck.

If you ask a Palestinian farmer, professor or activist about the meaning of the Geneva Accord, the response most likely will be vague and quizzical. For, rather than concerning themselves with speeches and complicated plans, Palestinians are preoccupied with what is happening in front of their eyes: the inexorable and seemingly final confiscation of more than half of the West Bank. Sealing their fate is the notorious Separation Wall, already snaking through the northern part of the territories, and expanding as Americans sleep.

In the not too distant future, the wall will transform the denser Palestinian communities into ghettos from which freedom of movement will be cut off, and over which Israeli authorities will be able to exert strict and arbitrary control with minimum effort or risk to themselves. When Sharon speaks of “disengagement,” this is what he means.

When completed, the wall will run almost 500 miles through the West Bank, leaving over 40 Palestinian towns and more than 340,000 Palestinians in a no-man’s-land under Israeli control. Around a quarter of the Wall is already built, in a section running from Jenin to Jerusalem. In that region at least 13,000 Palestinians already are stranded on the Israeli side, and thousands more on the other side are cut off from their land. Each gate through which a farmer might pass provides another opportunity for young Israeli soldiers to browbeat and humiliate Palestinians who are trying to go about their business.

In October I observed the soldiers’ behavior at a gate near the village of Qaffin, north of Tulkarm. A column of Palestinian cars waited to pass through the gate, but there was no movement. The soldiers were detaining two young Palestinian men at the gate. They were forced to sit in the dust under the hot sun, with plastic handcuffs binding their wrists. I asked a soldier why they were being detained. He told me, “One of them attacked us.” As I stood there trying to understand how an unarmed young man would attack a half-dozen soldiers with automatic rifles, a middle-aged woman came up and requested passage through the gate. The soldier yelled at her, “Go home!”—not caring that her home was in fact on the other side of the gate.

It is not unusual, in fact, to encounter soldiers who are ashamed of their behavior. But the capricious and abusive behavior I witnessed was the manifestation of a policy determined at a higher level, calculated to intimidate Palestinians and discourage them from asserting their rights. One might describe it as “institutionalized sadism.”

Further north, I visited the town of Nazlat Issa, right on the old border between Israel and the West Bank. Here, in two assaults, the Israeli army had demolished a couple hundred Palestinian shops and a handful of homes. Cinderblocks, beams, broken glass, garbage, and corrugated metal roofing lie in chest-high piles of wreckage over an area of several acres. Since the beginning of the occupation in 1967, Nazlat Issa had grown together with a village to the east of the border. Now the Israelis have decided to build the Separation Wall through this area, and in doing so they have destroyed a thriving market area serving nearby villages and towns on both sides of the border.

Some of the Palestinian-owned houses in Nazlat Issa are under further threat of demolition—they allegedly will be “too close to the new wall,” which includes a 500-foot “security zone” on both sides. A family in one of the endangered houses welcomed me in and served tea. One family member told me, “This is population transfer by strangling, instead of with trucks as they did in ‘48 and ‘67. They strangle us without land, water, work, and dignity. Then if we leave, they will say, ‘We never touched them.’“

The deadly precursor to the Separation Wall’s construction is the demolition of houses in its path. The legal pretext for house demolition varies; Palestinian-owned houses that were constructed without building permits are subject to “administrative demolitions.” Since the Israelis never give Palestinians housing permits, it is easy to resort to this excuse. “Punitive demolitions” are carried out against houses belonging to families of resistance fighters and suicide bombers—regardless of the fact that such collective punishments violate international human rights law.

Houses are demolished and the wall marches forward. Currently, work on the “Jerusalem Envelope” is in full swing, with sections of the wall snaking through neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, dividing communities in half, cutting off students from their schools and farmers from their fields. Due east of Jerusalem a makeshift sectional concrete barrier about six feet tall runs up a hill through the middle of the Abu Dis neighborhood. Israeli soldiers stand by idly as Palestinian men and women of all ages climb awkwardly over the wall, helping each other with their packages and groceries.

Students look both ways and heft their books as they climb over to attend classes at Al Quds University, a few yards beyond the wall. If the whim strikes them, soldiers halt the crossings, throw a few concussion bombs or tear gas canisters, and later the movement goes back to normal. But soon a higher, permanent wall will be in place, and thousands of Palestinians on the wrong side will no longer be even second-class citizens of Israel.

North of Jerusalem stand the neighborhoods of Beit Hanina and Al-Ram, the last communities before the checkpoint between Greater Jerusalem and the district of Ramallah. The main road between Jerusalem and Ramallah cuts through these communities, and the Israeli government is preparing to plant a wall along this route. Home demolitions have taken place in the area sporadically over the last year; now their pace is picking up.

There are around 2,000 demolition orders on Palestinian houses in the Jerusalem area alone. I spoke with Israeli anti-demolition activist Victoria Buch, who explained the situation to me: “Around Jerusalem, every place has demolition orders. This is in court, this was demolished last month, this two months ago. Here there is a pile of rubble, there, there are two piles of rubble...The objective is to outlaw every aspect of Palestinian life, not just construction: education, movement, identification.”

Back in Hebron district, Jawdi Jaber’s depression is about to get worse, as the settlers have just started bulldozing a road through vineyards and orchards in his valley in order to connect Har Sina with the nearby settlement of Kiryat Arba. The new road portends more Palestinian land fenced off by the army, which promises to build gates allowing access to the farmers. Sometimes these gates are built and sometimes they are not. When they are built, however, chances are they will not be opened. Thus another portion of Palestinian land is requisitioned for the use of Israeli settlers.

The Jabers and other Baqa’a farmers are experiencing the same slow assault on their livelihood that is taking place throughout the occupied territories: Jews-only roads cut through, fences go up, access to land is blocked off. In this way vast parts of the West Bank are coming under a de facto annexation to Israel. Most of this land is in the failed Oslo Accord’s Area C—land which is less densely populated by Palestinians, and which has remained under complete control of the Israeli army.

As Greater Jerusalem nears complete separation from the West Bank, residents of Hebron are contemplating the route of demolitions and confiscations, divining the location of the Separation Wall in their district. With the wall’s progress, chances for a peaceful resolution to the conflict diminish, and Sharon’s long-term plan takes shape.

Peter Lippman, a native of Seattle, Washington, is a field project coordinator for the Advocacy Project (www.advocacynet.org), a human rights organization that supports grass roots advocates in countries in crisis or transition.

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