On the Road to Nowhere, [Palestinians] Pay the Toll

Israeli soldiers, border police and police officers arrest foreign activists, members of the International Solidarity Movement, protesting against the construction of Israel's separation fence in the northern West Bank village of Masha, near the town of Qalqilya, Tuesday Aug. 5, 2003. Israeli forces detained 47 Palestinians and foreign activists and the army said the protesters were arrested after refusing to leave a closed military zone. (AP Photo/Muhammed Azba). Since the 1970s Israel has confiscated at least 7,000,000 square metres -- eighty percent -- of the land of Mas'ha, to build the illegal Jewish settlement of Elkana.

Scott Wilson, Washington Post Foreign Service, 21.10.07. Route 505 has been blocked at the western edge of this village by the $2.5 billion barrier Israel is building to separate Jews from the Palestinians of the West Bank, splitting a largely shared economy whose shops, factory floors and restaurant terraces once provided a rare meeting place for two peoples. Now they are living increasingly estranged lives in the land they are unable to share.

Hani Amer walking near the wall which runs next to his home in Mas'ha. In the background lies the illegal Jewish settlement of Elkana. (Amer Madi). When Hani Amer refused to leave his land 'voluntarily', a new strategy was introduced. An Israeli officer came to Hani Amer and threatened that he could not stay. According to Hani Amer, he said, 'We will break you, if you don't accept our good offers. We could send someone to shoot at the settlement and we will have already prepared the charge against you. Then your house will be bulldozered because you are known as a terrorist.'

The Israeli government says the steps it has taken help ensure Israel's security in the absence of a peace deal. But Palestinian officials argue that the impoverishing effects of the economic separation spawn unrest in the territories and increase the potential for attacks inside Israel. Israel's economy is nearly 40 times larger than that of the territories, even though its population is less than twice the Palestinian one in the territories. The lopsided effects of Israel's economic withdrawal have left much of the territories economically lifeless. "We knew them," said Ruven Hirak, 51, an Israeli economics professor at Bar-Ilan University, who lives in the wealthy Jewish settlement of Elqana along Route 505 just beyond the separation fence from the village of Mas-Ha. Grocery shopping in Elqana's busy central mall one recent afternoon, Hirak said of his Palestinian neighbors, "I sat with them in restaurants, bought from them, and some of them worked here.

"Now," he said, "there is no relationship at all."

אלקנה

Elkana

	דונם Dunam	מקרא Legend	אחוז %Percent	אקרים Acres
שטח כולל	1,444		100	361	Total Area
קרקע פרטית פלסטינית	746.5		51.7	186.6	Private Palestinian Land
אדמת סקר	0		0	0	Survey Land
אדמה שנרכשה ע"י יהודים	0		0	0	Land bought by Jews

Graphic by Peace Now

According to the World Bank, the Palestinian gross domestic product per capita has shrunk 30 percent -- to $1,129 -- since the uprising began. Unemployment and poverty rates have spiked across the territories, especially during the 16-month international embargo that followed Hamas's election victory. By contrast, the International Monetary Fund estimates that Israel's per-capita GDP is $31,767, nearly double what it was on the eve of the Palestinian uprising. The more than 550 military checkpoints, roadblocks and other obstacles within the West Bank, along with restrictions presented by the 456-mile separation barrier, have made it impossible for many Palestinian merchants to attract customers outside their small local markets. On the eve of the uprising, 136,000 Palestinians, or nearly a quarter of the labor force, worked inside Israel or in Israeli-owned enterprises in the territories. With a financial stake in Israel's security, said Persky, the Israeli army officer, only a "very few" were even tangentially involved in suicide attacks. Today, 47,400 Palestinians from the West Bank, or less than 9 percent of the workforce, have such permits. The United States and Europe are increasingly the largest markets for Israel's more than $40 billion in annual exports -- including cut diamonds, high-tech hardware and software, arms and agricultural products. Less than 5 percent of Israel's exports are sold in the Palestinian territories. By contrast, roughly 90 percent of Palestinian exports are sold inside Israel.

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related links
Israeli Troops Arrests 47 Barrier Activists
"They will not break me"

Over the Line

Photograph by Jerome Delay/Associated Press
A settler walks by an Israeli Army patrol in Hebron, 1996.

Adam LeBor, The New York Times, 14.10.07. The West Bank, captured in 1967, is a lawless place, where the Jewish settler, rifle in one hand and prayer book in the other, is undisputed king. The settlers have their own roads, guarded by the Israeli Army, water, electricity, supplies and — occasional if well-publicized crackdowns aside — substantial impunity from the law. Much of the land on which their settlements stand, was, as Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar detail in this important book, simply stolen. The settlements are illegal, in contravention of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which forbids an occupying power from transferring its civilian population to occupied territories. But for those who claim a divine mandate, the Geneva Conventions count for nothing. According to the United Nations, more than a third of the West Bank is now off limits to Palestinians. A web of Israeli Army checkpoints and obstacles further atomizes what is left of Palestinian society.

“Lords of the Land” is the first complete history of the settlement project. It provides a detailed narrative of injustice, and is profoundly depressing for anyone still hoping for a fair resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or even hoping that Jews and Arabs will be seen as equal in the eyes of Israeli law. In a chapter entitled “Everything Is Legal in the Land of Israel” Zertal and Eldar chronicle the paltry punishments given to settlers who kill Arabs, like the settlement leader Pinchas Wallerstein, who in 1988 shot two young Arabs in the back after he saw them burning a tire on the road. One died. Wallerstein was sentenced to four months community service.

If Palestinian lives are cheap, much Palestinian land is even cheaper — that is, free, at least to the settlers and Israeli authorities. The security fence that snakes through the West Bank is, according to Zertal and Eldar, an unparalleled land grab. They write that it was “constructed with no reckoning and no logic other than the purpose of enclosing as many settlements as possible on the western, Israeli, side and dividing up and seizing Palestinian lands.”

This may be an angry, embittered book, but the two authors are well-informed experts. Zertal is a noted Israeli historian, who now teaches at the University of Basel, and Eldar is an influential columnist for the left-wing daily, Ha’aretz. They are especially good on Gush Emunim, the Bloc of the Faithful, the religious Zionists driving the settlement project and the compromises with them made by a weak secular Israeli establishment.