How can the settler steamroller be stopped?
I recently returned from co-leading an Eyewitness Palestine delegation that visited the West Bank and Yaffa and the Naqab (Negev) within ’48 Israel. Practically everywhere we went we saw Palestinian communities under tremendous pressure from a settler colonial movement which now holds the levers of power and is in a position to dictate Israeli policy undeterred by international criticism.
The landscape of Palestine is being rapidly transformed by looming settlements and a web of bypass roads knitting together ‘Eretz Israel’ and threatening the destruction of ancient Palestinian villages like Wadi Foquin, which is adjacent to the Green Line marking the West Bank from ’48 Israel.
On May 13th we drove there from East Jerusalem, past contingents of Israeli soldiers who were gathering outside St. Joseph’s hospital where the body of the murdered iconic Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was being held. We found out later that they were preparing to storm the hospital and beat mourners carrying her casket to the Catholic church for a funeral mass.
We heard about these shocking events during lunch in the flower-filled garden of the Manasra family in Wadi Foquin. A son who was in the funeral procession soon joined us. His arm was swollen and discolored from the impact of clubs wielded by the soldiers.
As we sat in the garden eating a magnificent meal prepared by the family, we heard that Wadi Foquin had once possessed 11 springs which made it the breadbasket for other villages and nearby Jerusalem which was now off limits to most villagers.
The village is now hemmed in by the Green Line on one side and the towering settlement of Betar Illit on the other. Built on stolen village land, the settlement of 60,000 people has dried up some of Wadi Foquin’s springs, and others have been polluted by settlement waste which is regularly dumped down the hill onto village land. Settlers, who descend the hill every Friday to take ritual baths in the remaining pools, frequently vandalize houses and write graffiti on walls.
Now other ordeals face Wadi Foquin: Israel is planning to build a major bridge and highway on the remaining village land, which could well be the death knell of a 3,000 year old community. It also recently told the village that it was seizing another 12 acres of its prime land.
The following day, May 14th, we saw the ugly face of ethnic cleansing up close – first in Hebron, where settlements that are metastasizing within the old part of the city have made it a brutal no-go zone for Palestinians who live near what used to be a thriving market center, and then in hills south of Hebron in the large area known as Masafer Yatta.
For years, the shepherds and farmers in Masafer Yatta have endured settler violence, and the destruction of their water infrastructure and trees in an effort to drive them off the land. A week ago a High Court judge – himself a settler – ruled in a case that has lasted for 22 years that Israel could expel more than a thousand residents of eight villages to make way for Firing Zone 918. Four more villages in the area could face a similar fate.
We heard from local activists in Youth of Sumud and the Good Shepherd Collective that there had been plans for a big demonstration to protest the destruction of homes which is now underway, but protesters had been blocked from entering the area.
They told us that Firing Zone 918 is part of Israel’s plan to clear the land for a wall of settlements that will sever the south of the West Bank from the north.
During this trip we saw with our own eyes what de facto annexation of land and water theft looks like on the borders of East Jerusalem, around the Bethlehem area and the villages surrounding Ramallah, and across the Jordan Valley and South Hebron Hills. It is the same story of the destruction of lives and livelihoods in the north of the West Bank which we did not have time to visit. Everywhere Israel’s settler colonization is on the march.
And everywhere we went we were told that only the US could stop it.
We left Palestine with a heightened sense of our responsibility as taxpayers in a country that now subsidizes Israel to the tune of $12 million every day and shields it from international pressure.
Polls show that a majority of Democratic Party voters want to tie military aid to Israel to its human rights record. We must demand that the Democratic Party leadership and policy makers heed this message and urge growing numbers of Americans to speak out for Palestinian rights.
It will take unrelenting activism to block a settler movement on steroids: that is our task.
Nancy Murray
The massive settlement of Betar Illit, which towers over Wadi Foquin, was built on village land.