Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

Angry Arab reveals that the overly uncritical coverage of the farce in Annapolis by the Guardian correspondent Ian Black may have to do with the fact that his son serves in the Israeli Occupation army.

And now for some truth: IMEU has two Palestinians reporting on the realities the Guardian and others will not report.

The right to our land must be restored
Fareed Taamallah, IMEU, Nov 27, 2007

This week in Annapolis, Maryland the United States government will host a conference between Palestinian and Israeli leaders to launch peace talks on a permanent agreement. A vital component of the peace proposals to be discussed involves exchanges of territory that would allow Israel to keep its West Bank “settlement blocs” while compensating Palestinians with land inside Israel.

But my community of Qira, like many others, cannot survive in a Palestinian state divided by Israel’s settlement blocs. The settlement blocs are built on Palestinian agricultural land and water resources, and carve the West Bank into disconnected Palestinian bantustans.

Every morning I see through my window the settlement of Ariel, lying atop the hill adjacent to my village. I’ve never visited Ariel’s beautiful homes and green gardens, so different from our poor, parched community, because as a Palestinian I am forbidden to enter Ariel, even though it sits on Palestinian land in the West Bank.

In 1978, when construction of Ariel began, I was a child. Yet I recall my frustration and sorrow for the many Palestinian farmers who lost their lands to the Israeli colony. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Ariel is one of the four fastest growing Israeli settlements. It expanded from 179 acres and 5,300 residents in 1985 to 1732 acres and 16,414 inhabitants in 2005.1 In contrast, my village, which is hundreds of years old, has not grown because the Israeli government restricts the area and growth of Palestinian communities.

Ariel is located in the center of the Salfit District in the northern West Bank, 13 miles east from the Green Line, Israel’s pre-1967 border. Ariel is part of the larger “Ariel settlement bloc” which consists of 26 other West Bank settlements with nearly 40,000 settlers.2

Cutting deep into the heart of the West Bank, the Ariel settlement bloc separates the northern West Bank from the rest of the West Bank. U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher warned against the construction of Israel’s wall around Ariel in June 2004, saying that it would make Palestinian life more difficult and confiscate Palestinian property.3 Nonetheless, hundreds of acres of Palestinian land were confiscated for that wall.

If the Ariel settlement bloc becomes part of Israel through the territorial exchanges proposed by Israel and supported by the US, it would be disastrous for the Salfit district’s 70,000 residents. Ariel forms a physical barrier. We must travel around the entire settlement and through Israeli checkpoints to reach the town of Salfit, our district’s “urban center.” It typically took me 90 minutes to drive from my village to Salfit when I worked there, even though it is only four miles away.

Ariel’s settlers prevent Palestinians from harvesting their olive groves near the colony. They attack Palestinians, sometimes under the Israeli army’s protection. They have even entered mosques and desecrated the Quran inside.

Although the Salfit district is located in the West Bank’s most water-rich region, our water supplies have been redirected to Israel and Ariel. According to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, Israeli settlers consume five times more water than local Palestinians.4 The nearby villages of Kifr al-Dik and Bruqin are constantly without enough water for these reasons.

Sewage from the hilltop settlements and wastewater from Ariel’s industrial zone pollute our region. According to the Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem, 80 factories from Ariel’s Barkan industrial zone discharge 0.81 million cubic meters of wastewater per year into nearby valleys.5 All this wastewater and the sewage have formed a river through the agricultural lands of the villages of Kifr al-Dik and Bruqin. These poisonous streams have led to the death and ruin of trees and crops located in their immediate vicinity.

Restrictions on our movement, settler attacks, the diversion of our water and the pollution of our land, all caused by the Ariel settlement bloc, are destroying Salfit’s economy, and dramatically restricting our rights. Ariel is like a bone in our throat that is choking us.

Palestinians hope to reach a peace agreement with Israel, and we are cautiously optimistic about the upcoming Annapolis, Maryland conference. But Palestinians are most concerned with getting back their stolen lands. Incorporating settlement blocs like Ariel into Israel is not a viable solution. Ordinary Palestinians will not be able to cope unless their rights are restored.

Fareed Taamallah is a peace activist and journalist who lives in the West Bank village of Qira in the Salfit district.
[1] http://www.ochaopt.org/documents/TheHumanitarianImpactOfIsraeliInfrast
ructureTheWestBank_ch1.pdf
[2] http://www.poica.org/editor/case_studies/view.php?recordID=664
[3] http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/news/2004/06/mil-040615-31
9dee83.htm
[4] http://www.btselem.org/english/Water/Consumption_Gap.asp
[5] http://www.arij.org/pdf/chapter9.pdf

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Separate but unequal in Palestine: The road to apartheid

Mohammed Khatib, IMEU, Nov 27, 2007

On the eve of the meeting intended to restart negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians at Annapolis, Maryland, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced that Israel will build no new West Bank settlements, but will not “strangle” existing Israel settlements. This means that construction in the 149 existing Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank that are strangling Palestinians, including the settlements on our village’s land, will continue unchecked. Olmert’s cynical announcement underlines our fear that Israel, with US support, will insist on retaining most West Bank settlements in the upcoming negotiations, locking Palestinians into a “separate but unequal” position.

When United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s visited the Middle East a few weeks ago, people from our small village of Bil’in joined neighboring villages to send her a message. We protested peacefully against a West Bank highway near us that is reserved for Jewish Israeli settlers, and off-limits to Palestinians, though it was built on Palestinian land. Our banner read: “Condi, What would Rosa Parks do?”

We know that Dr. Rice experienced the bitter taste of discrimination growing up in the South during the US civil rights struggle. In Bil’in, we’ve drawn inspiration from the US civil rights movement as we’ve carried out a three year nonviolent resistance campaign against the discriminatory policies of Israel’s military occupation.

We share Dr. Rice’s admiration for the courage of Rosa Parks who was arrested in Alabama, Rice’s home state, for refusing to give her bus seat to a white man. As Palestinians we aren’t even allowed in buses on many roads in our own country, because 200 miles of the best West Bank roads are reserved for Israeli Jewish settlers.1

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), there are 561 physical obstacles and checkpoints inside the West Bank restricting Palestinian movement within the West Bank2, in comparison with only eight checkpoints which separate the West Bank from Israel proper. Nearly all the obstacles and checkpoints are located along the West Bank roads reserved for Israelis. This makes getting to the hospital, school and work or visiting relatives painstakingly difficult or impossible for us. This fragmentation of the West Bank has devastated our economy.

For Palestinians, accepting a state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip on just 22% of our historic homeland was already a dramatic compromise. But President Bush promised Israel in 2004 that in any negotiated agreement with the Palestinians Israel would retain its “already existing major population centers” in the West Bank.

However, all Israeli settlements are illegal under international law. By annexing to Israel strategically located clusters of settlements, or “settlement blocs”, and their highways which carve Palestinian areas into isolated enclaves, Israel will gain permanent control of our movement, borders, water, and cut us off from Jerusalem.

The Israeli organization Peace Now reported a few weeks ago that the population growth rate in the settlements is three times the growth rate within Israel.3 We’re experiencing such rapid settlement construction around Bil’in and throughout the West Bank that I can’t even find an accurate map of the West Bank for my son.

In 2001, Israeli developers began building settlement homes on land seized from Bil’in, calling them a neighborhood of the Modi’in Illit settlement bloc. Four years later, Israel’s segregation wall separated Bil’in from 50% of our agricultural land under the pretext of protecting this new settlement. In response, we held over 200 nonviolent protests together with Israeli and international supporters. Hundreds of us were injured and arrested. After our protests, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that the wall’s route in Bil’in must be changed to return around half of our seized land. Though we celebrated this success, Israel continues to build on our land that wasn’t returned and plans to annex it as part of the Modi’in Illit settlement bloc.4

Israel has already de facto annexed the 10.2% of the West Bank that lies between the Green Line and the segregation wall, including the major settlement blocs and 80% of Israel’s 450,000 settlers. The segregation wall, settlements and settlement roads carve Palestinian areas into isolated enclaves.

We pray that our children will not spend their lives under Israeli military occupation. We hope that the Annapolis meeting will bring our dreams of freedom closer to fulfillment. But we are concerned that if Israel is allowed to keep most of its settlements and the roads that connect them, then the existing system of “separate but unequal” will be cemented in place in a Palestinian state.

Mohammed Khatib is a leading member of Bilin’s Popular Committee Against the Wall and the secretary of its village council.

[1] Forbidden roads: The discriminatory West Bank road regime, B’Tselem.
[2] OCHA Closure Update: October 2007, The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
[3] West Bank settlements ‘expanding’ BBC, 7 November 2007.
[4] One Palestinian Village Struggles Against Israel’s Ever-Expanding “Settlements”, Alternet, 26 September 2007. The color of Palestinian license plates is different from the licenses of Israelis. Palestinian plates are not allowed on most of the highways crisscrossing the West Bank, many of which were built with US government funding. Palestinians have been banned for five years now from Highway 443 where we protested.