apartheid wall

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...

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. Nonetheless, hundreds of acres of Palestinian land were confiscated for that wall.

Here is a small microcosm of how this madness works: A Palestinian town has a wall built surrounding it from all sides, making it impossible for previously prosperous farmers to access their land, patients to reach their doctors and children to reach their schools. Naturally, the town is devastated. That's when Europeans send in their conscience-assuaging, smugness-propping aid "experts" to "save" the town, in the process relieving Israel from having to deal with the consequences of its crimes. They provide the farmers with food to replace the food they could have produced themselves, and proceed with projects to teach Palestinians "alternative industries," "new business models," "good local governance," "participatory development," "creative educational techniques" and countless other meaningless prattle that the Palestinians would gladly give up for having the wall removed, an independent state and some sense of normalcy bestowed on their lives.

In May 2003, whilst international attention was focused on the war in Iraq, the Israeli government approved plans to extend the Wall to the eastern and southern areas – taking the wall 15km inside the West Bank from the Jordanian border, stealing the Jordan valley and the most fertile Palestinian land, and completely corralling almost all of the Palestinian people in half of the West Bank.

Qalqilya, once a prosperous market town, with half the water resources in the West Bank, was an important agricultural resource which exported fruit and vegetables to Israel and the Gulf States. Now it is a ghetto almost totally surrounded by the wall. The only entrance and exit for the 42,000 residents is a bottle-neck. Gates, overlooked by a watchtower, control the flow in and out of the town — one person or vehicle at a time. The town can be transformed into a prison at the whim of any occupation soldier.

The Wall will cause many Palestinian villages to lose their only source of water ... Thirty wells are listed as lost in the Qalqilya and Tulkarm districts alone. The route of the wall bites deep into Palestinian land to ensure that Israel steals control of the aquifers in the West Bank. Movement restrictions have already led to an 80% increase in the cost of trucked water, an absolute necessity in summer. Israel already controls the entire water supply, rationing it to Palestinians and charging them for their own resources. Meanwhile illegal settler colonies use 80% of the West Bank’s renewable water supplies.

The “separation wall” is being built at a frantic pace. It does not separate Israel and the Palestinians. It separates the Palestinian villages and their lands. It cuts whole Palestinian villages off from the West Bank. It penetrates deep into the Palestinian territories, in order to attach dozens of settlements to Israel. It surrounds the West Bank on all sides, cuts it into pieces and cuts it off from the world.