URIF, West Bank — I guess it was inevitable that at some point Jewish settlements in the West Bank would endanger even the trees.
This was the thought I had as I drove through the northern part of the West Bank recently on a field trip organized by Oxfam [pdf]. Since 2006 the British charity has been working with Palestinian nongovernmental organizations and the European Union to help local farmers’ cooperatives improve their agricultural practices and open local and international markets to their products.
When Jewish settlements were first established soon after Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, they were situated mainly on uncultivated land. But more was soon needed. Since about half of the cultivated land in the occupied territories is used for olive farming, olive trees [pdf] became a major casualty of this expansion. About 80,000 Palestinian families who rely on income from olive farming have been directly affected.
Tens of thousands of olive trees have been uprooted to make way for the construction of the Israeli separation barrier, 85 percent of which lies in the West Bank. By the time the barrier is finished, in a few more years, one million trees [pdf] will be caught in the no-go area between it and the 1967 Armistice Line.
More than 40 percent of the West Bank is now effectively off limits to Palestinians or very difficult for them to access because of settlements and other outposts, military bases, bypass roads and areas that Israel has declared as nature reserves. According to a report by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, there are 73 barriers in the West Bank preventing Palestinian farmers from reaching their olive groves; 52 of those are closed year-round except for limited hours during harvest season. What’s more, in 2011 the Israeli authorities rejected 42 percent of applications by Palestinians seeking to pick olives.
The settlers also have unofficial methods to encroach on Palestinians’ land. During my tour of the farming village of Urif, I was briefed by the head of the local olive farmers cooperative, Abdel Fatah el-Safadi, who is in his 50s. He told me that about 250 acres of village land had been made inaccessible because of the separation fence. He also said that local farmers were often attacked when they tried to pick olives or care for their trees, and that settlers nearby had burned down or otherwise vandalized their trees.
According to the U.N., since the beginning of the year settlers have destroyed 7,500 trees throughout the West Bank.
The Israeli government displays considerable tolerance toward this kind of harassment. According to the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din, of 162 investigations conducted since 2005 by the Israeli police concerning acts of vandalism against Palestinian-owned trees in the West Bank, only one produced an indictment [pdf].
We also visited the village of Marda, just south of Urif, which is separated from the huge Jewish settlement of Ariel by the Israeli barrier. Marda is surrounded by a wire fence. It has two entrances, but those are sometimes closed by the Israeli Army. A new women’s cooperative is doing its best running a small factory to produce, package and sell olive paste. But it, too, is up against the settlers who live nearby — and who dispose of their sewage in the village’s olive groves.