Scorched earth … a Palestinian farmer, Maher Amleh, beside a damaged water storage tank. Israel says the farmers were building illegally on state land. Photo: Gali Tibbon


February 23, 2008

The farmers of Beit Ula spent two years preparing their new groves of fruit and nut and olive trees, clearing rocks, building stone terraces and digging deep cisterns to catch the scarce rainwater.

It took the Israeli Army less than a day to destroy it.

"We heard they were here at 6.30 in the morning, when it was still dark," said Sami al-Adam, one of eight farmers whose terraces were bulldozed on January 15.

"There must have been dozens of soldiers with jeeps and bulldozers and they brought a lot of Filipino workers, or maybe they were Thai, who pulled up the trees and cut them and buried them so we wouldn't be able to plant them again," he said.

When the soldiers and police withdrew from the site, in the low hills on the West Bank's border with Israel, 6.4 hectares of trees and terraces had been uprooted and bulldozed. The concrete cisterns were broken open and choked with rubble. Two years of labour and a cash investment of more than €100,000 ($160,000) had all gone to waste.

The Israeli military department that controls the occupied West Bank - called the Civil Administration - subsequently said it demolished the terraces because they were built illegally on land belonging to the state of Israel.

This came as a surprise to the West Bank farmers, who brandished documents with Palestinian, Israeli and even Turkish stamps which, they say, prove their title to the land. And it came as an even bigger surprise to the European Union, which had paid for the lion's share of the project, €64,000, as part of a campaign to improve "food security" for the Palestinian population.

"We were pretty distressed, obviously," said a European Commission spokeswoman, Alex de Mauny. "It's a huge concern, not only in terms of the livelihood of the people we were trying to help out - obviously it's a disaster in human terms. These are not rich people, they are living very much on the margins - but there's the broader issue of why it happened, and how we can stop it from happening again."

The hows and whys of the episode are, as usual in this part of the world, subject to widely divergent claims.

A statement from the Civil Administration maintained, contrary to the EU's statement, that the Europeans had not funded the project. An administration spokesman said that the West Bank land in question was state land belonging to Israel, but at the time of writing it had yet to respond to questions about how and when the land had been seized by the army.

The administration also says that the Palestinian farmers were officially informed that they were building illegally on state land in 2006 and given the statutory 45 days to appeal before the demolition notice became final.

One of the eight farmers, Mahmoud al-Adam, shows visitors a military form which he found under a stone on his plot in June 2006, telling him he would be evicted from 2.5 hectares of state land which he was illegally building on, and that he would be charged with the cost of the demolition.

Such forms are indeed the Israeli Army's standard method of notifying its Palestinian subjects of house demolitions or land seizures. But there was apparently no warning to the other seven farmers. And on the day of the operation, 6.4 hectares of terrace and trees were destroyed, not 2.5 hectares.

"It's a routine action. It's nothing special. We do these activities every day in Judea and Samaria," said a spokesman for the Civil Administration, using the biblical terms for the West Bank. "We are very strict about these things. If you let one person do it unauthorised all the others will come after him."

This strictness seems to apply to some people more than others, however. This week the Israeli group Peace Now reported on demolitions carried out in "Area C" - the 60 per cent of the West Bank that officially remains under full Israeli rule.

Figures supplied by the Civil Administration say that in the seven years to September 2007 nearly 5000 demolition orders were issued against unauthorised Palestinian houses, buildings or infrastructure in Area C. Of these, 1663 were executed, or roughly a third.

Yet in the same period 2900 demolition orders were issued against illegal building by Jewish settlers in the same area, but only 199, or 7 per cent, were actually carried out.

And while the Civil Administration issued permits for 18,472 housing units for Jews in those seven years, the indigenous Palestinians were granted 91 building permits.

Peace Now's figures are that 94 per cent of the Palestinian applications were rejected. These included requests to build or extend houses, repair roads, water pipes, wells and other vital infrastructure.

"The numbers speak for themselves," said Hagit Ofran, a settlement monitor with Peace Now. "Settler lands are being supported by government funds and planners and so on, but often the settlers also build without permits, and on state land, and when they do nothing happens to them. There is no enforcement of the law against settlers … but law enforcement against the Palestinians is very efficient."

The Civil Administration accuses Peace Now of distorting the truth. The administration says the reason why so few permits are granted to the 70,000 Palestinians living in Area C, and why so many demolitions are carried out against them, is that most do not apply for permits until their homes or infrastructure have already been condemned by military inspectors and their applications must therefore be refused.

Coincidentally, this week also brought news of the establishment of two new Jewish settlements in the West Bank - one in the Jordan Valley and another purporting to be a new neighbourhood of Eli, an older Jewish settlement near Nablus.

While all Jewish settlements in the West Bank are regarded by the International Court of Justice as in breach of Geneva Conventions banning colonialism, these new ones - like dozens of other so-called settlement outposts - are illegal even under Israeli law.

They also conflict with Israel's promise to freeze settlement activity under the terms of the 2003 "road map for peace" and last year's Annapolis process.

Yet the new illegal Jewish settlements are guarded by the Israeli Defence Force and have already been hooked up to state water, power and road networks. This week the Civil Administration told journalists that any future attempt to evict the settlers or demolish their structures would depend on the political leadership and on Israel's High Court of Justice.

"I don't want to predict how this will end," a spokesman told The Jerusalem Post.