[Peace-discuss] Walls & Water: Ripple Effects of Occupation (full text)

[David Green]

The link that Mort supplied to this article didn't go directly there--here is the full text:
 
Walls & Water: Ripple Effects of Occupation
 
The West Bank town of Bethlehem begins to cool at dusk, and the streets surge with people enjoying the mild evening air. Down the hill from Manger Street, the city’s main drag, a small crowd lingers in the fading sunlight outside the Bethlehem Hotel — a popular spot for Western tourists. Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh, a biologist and professor at Bethlehem University, leaves the hotel after giving a lecture about the Israeli occupation.
 
Qumsiyeh drives through the hillsides of Bethlehem into the neighboring village of Beit Sahour. As American ‘80s music plays on the car radio, he points to different areas and explains them: a new Israeli settlement, an Arab village without any sign indicating its location, a road used only by Palestinians, another meant only for Israelis.
 
He stops at a Palestinian playground, where children squeal with delight, dangling from monkey bars and running on a patch of healthy grass. It’s a sight typical of a suburban summer anywhere, but what lies beneath the surface makes this ground something of a war zone.
 
Qumsiyeh points to a truck with a huge tank on it parked nearby. The tank is filled with water from a freshwater spring that runs below the playground. He says this is why Israelis have told people here that the playground is illegal (even though it was built with US aid money) and that it must be removed — because they want control of the water below.
 
Qumsiyeh is Palestinian, and he lives daily under the occupation. He drives through checkpoints any time he leaves the West Bank, and he must show his identification to the Israeli soldiers who guard them. He is not a criminal. But collectively, the Palestinians are treated with a level of security that implies criminality. Walking through the checkpoint to leave Bethlehem is much like going through airport security — bags and IDs are scrutinized, fingerprints are scanned, and Palestinians must present permits allowing them to leave the West Bank.
 
Because his knowledge is both scientific and personal, Qumsiyeh is in a unique position to explain how the Israeli occupation has changed the land, and what the consequences of those changes are for the people who worked and lived off the land for generations.
 
As Qumsiyeh puts it, “Establishing 240 or 250 settlements in the West Bank, with a separate infrastructure for them, devastated the ecology.”
 
But some Israelis, if they look over the walls and beyond the checkpoints, can see what is happening to their neighbors. Ethan Heitner, an Israeli-born Jew who now lives in New York, remembers how much his perspective changed when he saw Palestine for himself. Though he grew up in Israel and traveled there many times prior to the Second Intifada in 2000, it wasn’t until he returned in 2003 that he saw the other side of the occupation, when he ventured into the West Bank.
 
“It was really a shock going there and seeing checkpoints for the first time; what refugee camps look like,” he said “It was really a shock seeing what the occupation is doing, in a concrete way.”
The Israeli occupation is an emotionally electric issue for both Israelis and Palestinians. But one thing is certain: The occupation has taken a physical and psychological toll on Palestine.
 
The Water
 
The spring beneath the playground provides a valuable resource for a region scorched by drought. Israeli authorities have told local Palestinians that the playground must be razed. Qumsiyeh and local residents say that Jewish settlers regularly come to the area, and that Israelis have threatened to demolish the playground. He and residents believe water is the reason behind their insistence.
 
According to statistics gathered from international organizations, about 85 percent of the water in the West Bank is controlled by Israel. Water is a constant concern for Palestinians, especially in the summer months. Among houses lining the valleys and hillsides of the West Bank, Palestinian homes are distinguished by water tanks on their roofs, used to collect rain. This helps supplement their limited water supply, which is controlled by the Israeli authority. Israeli homes have a separate water system and no need for these rainwater tanks.
 
B’Tselem, an Israeli information center that focuses on human rights in the Occupied Territories, says that per capita water consumption in Palestine is only 2/3 of the minimum amount recommended by the World Health Organization. And B’Tselem’s 2008 statistics indicate that 20 percent of all Palestinians living in the West Bank aren’t connected to a water network at all.
 
Take Al-Wallaja village, for example. It falls between the Green Line and the separation wall, both of which separate Israel from the Occupied Territories. Palestinians there have access to one spring, which they share with settlers. Though settlers are installing a pump and pipes to bring the water into their homes, Palestinians are not allowed to use mechanized devices or build a road to access the spring. The only way they can access the water they need is on foot or using pack animals such as donkeys.
 
Since many Palestinians lack a regular water supply, they also buy water on the private market, at prices three to six times higher than Israeli households pay, according to officials from the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.
 
Qumsiyeh says that Al-Wallaja is one of many examples of how Israel is securing the richest agricultural land and natural resources for itself. “The areas the wall adds to Israel include the majority of the western water aquifer in the West Bank,” he said, adding that such acquisitions by an occupying power are illegal under international law (defined by the Hague Regulations of 1907 and the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949).
 
The Wall
The wall isn’t just a symbol of the occupation, but also of the conflict’s complex language. Alternately known as the separation wall, the security wall, the separation barrier, and the apartheid wall, its name changes depending on who’s speaking. The wall was begun in 2003 as a response to the Second Intifada. It isn’t a monolithic structure, but rather a collection of barriers and walls lining the West Bank. It includes stretches of electronic fence with barbed-wire fences and trenches on both sides, or thick concrete walls up to 26 feet high. Much of it is covered in political graffiti, left behind by Palestinians and visitors from all over the world. Sometimes vitriolic, other times hopeful, the graffiti is one of the few public ways Palestinians are able to express their frustration.
 
It remains an amorphous work in progress, winding through and around the West Bank, and will be about 472 miles long once it’s completed. With checkpoints, the wall restricts entry and exit between Israel and the West Bank, divides neighborhoods and, in some cases, separates landowners from their property.
Since construction on the barrier began, Palestinians have filed dozens of petitions against its route. Heitner doesn’t believe for a second that the barrier is just about security, as Israelis often claim. And he says these court cases bear that out.
 
“If it was for security, they would’ve built it on the Green Line, within the borders of Israel,” he says, talking about the case of Baleen — a village near Ramallah that’s the site of ongoing protests. The villagers’ lawyers took their complaint about the barrier to the High Court of Israel, claiming that Israelis illegally separated them from their land. The area has no settlements on it, and Heitner contends the barrier was placed there so the land could be occupied for future settlements. “This clearly had nothing to do with security,” he said. “It had everything to do with land grab.”
 
The court ruled in favor of the villagers, saying that the wall must be moved. The ruling has yet to be enforced.
 
As for effects on the land itself, Qumsiyeh’s research indicates that more than 1.5 million olive trees have been destroyed so far to make way for the wall. Israeli authorities removed many of the trees to create what they call a “security zone” of about 656 feet around settlements, in which they don’t allow any plant or animal life. The reasoning behind this is that it prevents hiding places for those who may be a threat to the settlers, but the result is large swaths of barren land that stifle agriculture.
 
Prior to the Six Day War in 1967, about 70 percent of Palestinians worked in agriculture. But as they lose more land to settlements and Israeli infrastructure, unemployment has soared. It now hovers around 40 percent in the West Bank and continues to rise. The situation in Gaza, where foreign sanctions are keenly felt, is more severe.
 
“If the situation continues, we can foresee people literally starving,” Qumsiyeh said. “Seventy percent of Palestinians live below the poverty line, which is here defined as $2 a day or less.”
 
The US Response
To Heitner, the wall is a tangible symbol of the desire to choke Palestinians out of their land: “If you talk to extreme settlers, most of them will say, ‘We’re trying to make life unbearable for the Palestinians so they’ll get the hell out of here.’”

In New York City, Heitner works with Jews Against the Occupation, a network of volunteers that works in coalition with Adalah-NY. Heitner acts primarily as a media spokesman for the group. He joined in 2003, after meeting JATO activists in Palestine. He has worked with them steadily since, trying to bridge the gap of information that stifles dialogue on the conflict.
 
“No one in Israel can deny there’s an occupation,” he said, adding that the same isn’t true for people in the US and elsewhere, who don’t actually see the damage being done.
 
His work with JATO includes passing out pamphlets that explain the situation in Israel. And he says the response can be startling. “We get all sorts of vitriol and hatred from people on the streets. They say we’re helping build another Auschwitz,” he said.
 
And as far as he’s concerned, the new administration hasn’t made much headway. “I had hopes for Obama up until the moment that Israel killed 500 civilians in a single day on December 27 in 2008, after Obama had been elected,” he said. “[Obama] was silent then, and silent throughout the bombing last winter. Since then, I think it’s been pretty obvious that he, at best, hopes to go back to the era of the Clinton diplomatic initiatives, which were highly problematic and didn’t lead to anything.”
 
For Heitner, the issue isn’t about some state solution, but about human rights. “Whether that comes to one state or two states or 50 states is irrelevant,” he said. “Palestinians have no equal rights; they’re not actually legal citizens of any place. There’s no legal structure if something bad happens to them. They’re under military occupation. Jewish security and Jewish human rights can only be guaranteed if you guarantee the rights of everybody.”
 
Ripple Effect
 
Loss of agriculture and restrictions on movement are closely connected to Palestine’s failing economy. Without land to cultivate and water to grow crops, many face a crisis of survival. Qumsiyeh compares the Israeli occupation, wall and environmental impacts to South Africa’s apartheid — a forced racial segregation. Many Palestinians and others familiar with the situation call the wall the Apartheid Wall (apartheid means “separateness” in Afrikaans).
 
Qumsiyeh understands that both sides must reconcile for peace to exist. He suggests a peace resolution along the lines of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, in which victims and perpetrators of the apartheid were given a public forum to discuss their experiences. For Qumsiyeh, such a process in Palestine must include an acknowledgment of wrongs committed on both sides, and recognition of human rights and land rights for Palestinians.
 
“But it has to be based on truth — that’s why they call it truth and reconciliation,” he said. “The truth is that this is not a tribal conflict, but like in South Africa, it has to do with racism and the idea of ‘chosenness.’ Seven million of 10 million Palestinians are now refugees or displaced people. To live together, we must face this reality head on and truly develop equality.”
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Additional Resources
	* To find out more about Mazin Qumsiyeh and his book, “Sharing the Land of Canaan,” visit his website: www.qumsiyeh.org
	* For more information and statistics about the occupation, check out B’Tselem at www.btselem.org.


      
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