Haaretz – by Gideon Levy and Alex Levac
Two days after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared, on Tuesday last week, his intention to annex the Jordan Valley after the election, forces of the Civil Administration carried out yet another brutal operation of destruction. The target this time was particularly remote: a rocky hillside adjacent to the village of Tamoun in the northern valley. The goal was singularly vicious: the uprooting of hundreds of olive trees that were about to yield their first fruit, and demolition of the cisterns holding the water that was used to irrigate them.
Four days later, on Monday, the groves’ owners stood next to their felled trees and their ruined cisterns, sadly rolling bits of olives from the felled trees between their fingers. The first crop of these seven-year-old trees was set to be harvested in another few days, but the Civil Administration’s terminators got here just before – as if to rub salt in the wound. The butchered trees are withering on the ground; their fruit is dying on the slashed branches. The Civil Administration also uprooted in full some large olive trees, about 50 years old, from this privately owned grove and buried them under the rubble of the reservoirs they had devastated, lest the farmers try to replant them, here or elsewhere.
Also on Monday, ministers of the symbolic Palestinian government left Ramallah and cruised east in their official vehicles, to hold a symbolic cabinet meeting in the village of Fasayil. They were protesting the meeting held a day earlier by Israeli ministers at the outpost of Mevo’ot Yericho, which they agreed to legalize on the spot. Few people took an interest in the Palestinian cabinet meeting.
The sign above the local council building in the small Palestinian village of Atouf says “State of Palestine,” but the reality on the ground tells a different story. There’s no state and no government – not even a security force to protect farmers from the violent dispossession of their land. The demolished cisterns on Mount Om Ekbesh and the whitewashing of the settlement of 175 residents north of Jericho are the real story of the Jordan Valley. They signify who is sovereign here, and the type of regime that exists under that sovereign.
But neither the possibility of annexation nor the Israeli election was of interest to any Palestinians in the Jordan Valley this week. All that remained amid the rubble was pent-up grief and a feeling of helplessness in the face of the crushing machine of occupation, whose engine no ruling party in Israel intends to shut down. Even Kahol Lavan’s Benny Gantz promised that under his government, too, Israel would remain here for all time. That’s a well-known fact among every last Palestinian farmer whose land has been plundered near the hill between the villages of Atouf and Tamoun, above the verdant, budding settlements of Ro’i and Beka’ot. Neither the results of the election nor the implementation of the outgoing government’s annexation decision will have the slightest effect on the lives of anyone here or make a difference vis-à-vis the flagrant apartheid here, as witnessed by the flourishing, illegal settlements of the Jews and the demolished water holes and fields of the Palestinians.
A steep dirt road ascends the mountain from the village of Atouf; it was cleared by the Palestinians over the course of several years and completed in 2018. Until then the farmers could gain access to their lands only on foot or with a tractor. The owners of these properties live in Tamoun, which can be seen from the summit. According to the documents they have, this is private land, officially registered as such since Ottoman times.
Last Thursday morning at about 7:30, local shepherds called Mursheid Bani Odah and Jihad Bani Odah, both residents of Tamoun, to say that large military forces were moving from the direction of Atouf toward the mountaintop. Arif Daraghmeh, a field researcher for the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem – who also serves, on a voluntary basis, as head of the Palestinian council of villages in the northern Jordan Valley – followed the Israeli troops in his car. He had no idea where they were headed, but it was clear from the equipment they carried that they were bent on destruction. As they approached Tamoun, he became increasingly concerned that they were going to raid the town. Daraghmeh counted four bulldozers, two power shovels and two excavators, escorted by three jeeps of the Israel Defense Forces and three more belonging to the Civil Administration.
The two landowners and the B’Tselem field researcher tried to drive up the mountain but were blocked by soldiers on the pretext that the site had been declared a closed military zone. Instead, the trio climbed seven kilometers by foot and approached their land, whereupon the former two discovered that their olive groves and cisterns were that day’s wrecking project.
Mursheid worked for 20 years in the fields of Beka’ot for a settler named Ilan Tzach, until he became fed up with the exploitative wages he received – a mere 100 shekels ($28) for a long workday that began at 6 A.M. His daily expenses were 20 shekels for travel, plus another 20 shekels for food and cigarettes, so he was left with very little. Now he does odd jobs and devotes part of his time to tending his family’s olive trees on the mountain. Jihad is a carpenter who specializes in doors. Their world collapsed last Thursday, when they reached their land and saw the contract workers of the Civil Administration uprooting trees and wreaking destruction.
Read the rest here: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-in-the-jordan-valley-the-cruel-wheels-of-the-israeli-occupation-keep-turning-1.7867122
Awful to see those felled trees, not just because of the trees themselves but because they are the evidence of a peoples’ toil, a peoples’ effort to survive. What cruel greed those images represent. The tree-fellers are turning their “promised land” into a cesspool where cruel death cannot be washed away.
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