wfn.org | [PCUSANEWS] Palestinians losing orchards they have tended for

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Note #8753 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

05288
May 31, 2005

Family trees

Palestinians losing orchards they have tended for centuries

by Alexa Smith

LOUISVILLE - Ahuva Shilo says the 10 trailers perched on a hillside in the
West Bank are legal. And that's that.

	"I don't think there is any problem," she says. "The trailers you are
talking about are in an area that officially belongs to Ma'le Shomron. ...

	"There isn't any problem. We've got the permits."

	Shilo is a spokesperson for the Shomron Regional Council (SRC), a
municipal government that covers 33 widely dispersed settlements, including
this new, tiny one, El Matan, which is guarded by a contingent of Israeli
soldiers.

	It was founded four years ago when settlers hauled three trailers to
a hilltop across the valley from Ma'le Shomron, a sprawling Israeli
settlement about 15 miles east of Tel Aviv.

	Despite Shilo's denials, Hameed deb Odeh, an aging Palestinian
farmer, does see a problem. So do his neighbors.

	Odeh believes he owns the property, because he's farmed it all his
life, tending a grove of olive trees in these ancient foothills. His trees,
and those of his neighbors, form the periphery of Kufr Tulth, a dwindling
Palestinian village of 5,000 people that has lost much of its agricultural
land to nearby settlements.

	Odeh says settlers at El Matan have beaten him. Worse, they keep
chopping down his trees, laying claim to ever more ground. 

	Shilo insists that Odeh couldn't be more wrong.

	"We have a lot of land to develop with new houses, and that's what
we're going to do," she says. "With every house built, they are going to
complain. We're used to it. So, OK ... but everything is legal. The Arabs can
tell you whatever they want."

	Shilo argues that the property in question falls within the municipal
boundaries of Ma'le Shomron, and says she has the papers to prove it.

	Welcome to the Holy Land.

	In this place, you are either in western Samaria or Qalqilyia,
depending on your ethnicity. The nearest holy site - the tomb of the
Patriarch Joseph - is just up the road, in either Nablus or Shechem,
depending on your religion. El Matan's existence is either suburban sprawl or
state-sanctioned thievery, depending on your nationality. The whole region is
either your inheritance, deeded to you by God, or part of the spoils of the
Six Day War.

	Settlers claim the land is being legitimately divvied up by the
Israeli government to restore a centuries-old Jewish presence here.

	But to Palestinians, and many Israelis, the entire settlement
enterprise is illegal and jeopardizes peace. They say it breaches
international humanitarian law and violates the Geneva Conventions, which
prohibit an occupying power from transferring its civilians onto occupied
land.

	To Shilo and Odeh, it is about staying put on land they both claim.

	ISRAELI DROR ESTES doesn't hide his disdain. A settlement analyst for
the secular Israeli organization called Peace Now, he practically sputters
into the telephone that El Matan's supposed legality is bogus.

	"It's a lie. ... It is an illegal site. There is no construction
permit," says Estes, who monitors dozens of tiny outposts (or fledgling
settlements) like this one. To date there are 99 on the West Bank - 50 of
them established since March 1, 2001.

	"They can say, 'It's within the municipal boundaries of the
settlement,' but that's a theoretical line. It's state land - land that
Israel has nasty ways of taking from its owners, and not acknowledge their
ownership."

	The Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem (ARIJ) says the area
around Kufr Tulth has lost more than 400 acres to settlers since 1976.
According to a report on ARIJ's Web site, www.ARIJ.org, El Matan has been the
site of fistfights between settlers and locals.

	According to these analysts, the legal system is skewed to give
settlers an edge.

	B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, says most Israeli
settlements are built on seized land and managed by the Israeli Civil
Administration, which has links to the army. (Civil Administration officials
failed to answer questions about the permit-process to create or expand a
settlement, despite repeated requests by the Presbyterian News Service.)

	Historically, Israel has seized land in four ways:

	* Israel declares that a settlement meets an urgent military need.
(This strategy was rejected by the Israeli High Court in 1979 and is no
longer used).

	* The state declares that any property whose owner left the West Bank
before, during or after the 1967 war is officially "abandoned."

	* Israel takes land for a public purpose. (This method has been used
to build an extensive network of roads connecting settlements and
circumventing Palestinian towns.)

	* The government applies the "Ottoman Land Law," which, according to
B'Tselem, allows more than 40 percent of the West Bank to be declared state
land.

U	nder the Ottoman provisions, the state can seize agricultural land
that has not been farmed for three years or is within a 30-minute walk from a
village. The "legal test": Can the loudest noise made by a person in the
nearest house in the village be heard in the orchard?

	"It has been a very stacked deck," says Sarit Michaeli, a press
officer for B'Tselem. "It's a crazy situation."

	She said the settlements are clearly illegal, according to the Hague
Regulations and the Geneva Conventions.

	The Fourth Geneva Convention forbids the forcible expulsion of
locals. Israel says it does not apply in this case because the settlers are
not being forced to move, but are returning voluntarily to areas from which
they or their ancestors were ousted.

	Under the Hague provisions, a military occupier is responsible for
the welfare of the people under occupation and may not make permanent changes
in the demographic makeup of the area. Israel argues that it is in compliance
because the demographic changes wrought by the settlements are not permanent,
an argument that the Supreme Court has upheld.

	However, B'Tselem says Israel's settlement enterprise is not intended
to restore a Jewish presence in the region, but to establish local Jewish
settlements in areas not populated by Jews before 1948.

	Michaeli says that violence by settlers against Palestinian civilians
is a problem, too. Israeli soldiers are not allowed to arrest settlers and
frequently understand their role to be protecting Jews. "Which is why," she
says, "they get away with land grabs."

	CHARACTERIZING THE SETTLEMENTS AS "LAND GRABS" offends Shilo and the
people she represents. What is happening is exactly what ought to be, they
insist.

	"They're putting olive trees on land that doesn't belong to them,"
Shilo says of the Palestinian farmers. "It is land that, officially, belongs
to Ma'le Shomron. Down in the valley, there are Palestinians and Beduoin
living without permission. Nobody gave them the land. ... But they are not
bothering us and we are not bothering them."

	Captain Yael Hartman of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) says only
dozens of trees were chopped down at Kufr Tulth, not hundreds - and the army
replaced them.

	She says that, while it is true that the army is charged with
protecting Palestinians, there are incidents that the army does not witness.
The IDF, she says, has the difficult job of protecting Palestinians while not
fighting Israelis.

	In volatile Hebron, she says, that meant building a wall around a
Palestinian home that settlers repeatedly targeted for harassment, and
posting guards outside.

	In more placid Karnei Shomron, Sandra Barnes, a lawyer and director
of the Christian Friends of Israel Committee, says she's never even heard of
Kufr Tulth.

	"All I can say is that no Jewish community of any sort is built on
land that belongs to somebody. We've always built on public land ... As in
every country of the world, we have the right to build a road to create
access. That's a standard principle, and I can't imagine getting excited
about that. No one is being moved out of their homes."

	Barnes said the Shomron communities intend to expand, because many
Israelis are eager to get out of congested Tel Aviv and live in the
countryside. Others like the adventure of Zionism, of building a new town,
she added.

	The Biblical tie is also an attraction.

	"This is the cradle of Jewish civilization," Shilo said.

	 Abraham built an altar in Shechem after God promised land to his
descendants. Joshua assembled the Hebrew people there after the conquest of
Canaan and urged them to follow the Mosaic law. Nearby are the well of Jacob
and the grave of Joseph.

	"Ma'le Shomron was built on land that belongs to us, not private,"
she says. "You know, Israeli came to the Shomron 3,000 years ago, not 30 -
just to remind you. It's in the Bible." 

	Somewhere in the Book of Joshua, she says.

	She can't say exactly where.

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