The New Dark Age

7 August, 2009 — Jewbonics

It is a long-standing Israeli practice to destroy Palestinian agriculture. In 2005, 25 dunums of Palestinian land in Qaffin were confiscated by Israeli settlers under the aegis of the Israeli Defense Forces. Since 2005, Jewish settlers have set thousands of acres of orange, almond, and olive trees aflame. Olive trees bear fruit in the Mediterranean littoral for hundreds of years. Palestinian farmers can trace the lineage of their trees to the planter and the year planted. Apart from the commercial losses entailed in this destruction, the destruction of the olive trees is like the erasure of communal memory.

5500 dunums of Qaffin’s land is either behind the apartheid wall or buried underneath it. 1100 dunums of Akkaba’s land is separated from its population or devastated by the wall. This amounts to 25 percent of the villages’ land, the same percentage of the West Bank’s total agricultural land that the Wall appropriates. Qaffin and Akkaba are microcosms of Palestinian agriculture. Farmers in the West Bank are everywhere separated from their land by a sinuous barrier of concrete, motion-sensors, razor-wire, guard-posts, and guns. 12.4 percent of the Palestinian population is separated from the arable land it ostensibly owns and attempts to farm.

Palestinians are permitted to apply for permits to get access to their land. Some 20 percent have received the permits. The rest haven’t. Often, the occupation authorities issue permits to the wrong family member—to the old, the infirm, to those who can’t really work the land. The IDF opens the portals through which Palestinians must pass to get to their land capriciously: daily, weekly. Farmers used to working according to biological and ecological rhythms must work based on the rhythms of an occupation. It’s difficult to plan a harvest based on a rhythm syncopated by security concerns and the whims of an occupying army. In 2003, farmers in the northern West Bank weren’t allowed through the gates to harvest their olives. The crop rotted on the boughs.

Since construction began on the Wall, hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, trees have been felled. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, have been stolen, their root systems uprooted and bagged, then transported to Israeli settler-farms. Palestinians see this as the theft of their communal memory. Such theft and ravaging of Palestinian agriculture amounts to the destruction of the Palestinian economy, which has long been based on peasant farming. Fifteen percent of Palestinian GDP comes from agriculture. Sixty percent of the Palestinians live in rural areas. Seventeen percent of Palestinian employment is farm employment. Similar percentages rely on subsistence agriculture for day-to-day survival.

A recent B’Tselem report adds that Israel has added a new tool to its satchel of eco/econocidal practices: biological warfare. West Bank waste-water is substantially under-treated. This is not a problem for Israeli settlers, who are largely linked to the Israeli water-infrastructure. But Palestinian farmers often rely on untreated springs, wells, and aquifers for their day-to-day needs. Such water is heavily polluted: nitrates are well-above ‘safe’ levels (themselves a rather fancifully constructed measuring tool), while ‘A study conducted by Bethlehem University in 1999 found that more than 99 percent of 400 samples of spring water contained high concentrations of coliform bacteria.’ The Palestinian Ministry of Health reported bacteria counts exceeding WHO-standards in a 2001 study.

More recently, the Elon Moreh waste-water plant broke down; waste-water cascaded downward to nearby Palestinian towns. ‘The flow of the settlement’s waste-water destroyed crops and desiccated olive trees, some of them very old, at a distance of up to 30 meters from the sides of its channel.’ This is very much de rigueur, and in fact an integral and predictable effect of the occupation. What’s less predictable and what was less predicted was the Israeli blindness in thinking that political control can be asserted over eco-systems. This simply isn’t the case–eco-systems are intrinsically inter-connected, and biological flows over-flow political or even physical barriers designed to stop them (something military and policy planners writing of the ‘Fortress Scenario’ response to global warming desperately need to understand). As Eyal Weizmann writes,

The sanitary conditions of West Bank Palestinians were aggravated by Israel’s segregation politics that isolated Palestinian towns and villages behind barriers of all kinds. This policy generated more than 300 pirate dumping sites where truckloads of waste were poured into the valleys beside towns and villages. Paradoxically, the restrictions on the flow of people [in the West Bank and between the West Bank and Israel ‘proper’] accelerated the trans-boundary flow of their refuse. Furthermore, Israeli companies have themselves used sites in the West Bank for their own waste disposal. […] In the wild frontier of the West Bank, Israel’s planning chaos means Jewish neighborhoods and settlements are often [hastily] constructed without permits, and populated before and regardless of sewerage systems being installed and connected. This sewage runs from the hills to the valleys, simply following the force of gravity and topography, through and across any of the boundaries that may be put in front of it. […] Mixing with Palestinian sewage, traveling along the same open valleys, [Israeli sewage] will eventually end up in Israeli territory. Instead of fresh water flowing [from underground aquifers] in the specially conceived water pipes installed under the Wall, Israel absorbs large quantities of raw sewage from all across the West Bank. The enclosures and barriers of the recent [counter-measures against the] Intifada thus created the very condition against which they sought to fortify.

Perhaps workable as an interim step, Palestinian/Israeli national separation in in the picayune Palestine mandate was never feasible; a form of confederation is inevitable.* So while Israel commits an ecocide on Palestinian towns and agriculture, it damages itself with every seeping leak. And in destroying Palestinian agriculture by stealing it, a practice Sara Roy has condemned as ‘de-development,’ it simply makes future Palestinian economic development that much harder.

* There are of course mad-men advocating full-bore ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.