Michael Shaik
In mid-April, Palestinian farmers in the hilltop village of Jayyous transported their newly harvested lemons to Nablus on a journey that used to take an hour but now takes between 9 and 10 hours, along a series of improvised dirt roads that they have been forced to use since the main road to Nablus was declared off limits to Palestinian traffic.
The lemons, which used to sell for 80 shekels a crate, now sell for five shekels, of which the driver gets two shekels and the vendor one, leaving the farmers with a profit margin of two shekels (66 cents) per crate.
For most of the farmers this year's lemon harvest will probably be their last. The "security barrier" that Israel is building through the West Bank has separated the village from 70% of its farmland and all of its water sources. This week the army notified Jayyous that it would confiscate all of this land for Jewish settlement and military use.
In January, Washington's favoured candidate, Mahmoud Abbas, was elected president of the Palestinian Authority on a platform of ending Palestinian armed resistance to Israel's occupation and renewing the peace process, a development hailed by US President George Bush as proof that the invasion of Iraq had initiated a new era of democracy in the Middle East.
For Israelis, life has improved markedly since the election. With the end of the suicide bombings, the stock market has surged, tourists have returned and Tel Aviv's nightlife is booming again.
For the Palestinians, the tragedy of Jayyous represents in microcosm another false start in the search for peace.
Ongoing dispossession and movement restrictions have reduced 70% of the population to an income of less than $2 a day. Last month, the Israeli government announced the construction of 3500 new housing units in the settlement bloc stretching between Jerusalem and Jericho that effectively cuts the West Bank in two.
Currently, East Jerusalem, the Palestinians' economic and cultural centre, is totally separated from the rest of the West Bank by Jewish settlements. On April 20, Israeli bulldozers resumed the demolition of Palestinian homes on the outskirts of Jerusalem, a practice illegal under the Geneva Conventions but that Israel considers necessary to limit the city's Palestinian population.
Even in the Gaza Strip, from which Israeli settlers are to be withdrawn this July, the situation looks set to worsen. So much water is being diverted from the 40-kilometre long strip of land that is home to 1.4 million people that the water table in the south of the strip is now below sea level and in eight years will become too saline for human consumption.
The Israeli government maintains that these are minor issues, and that it remains committed to a Palestinian state. The World Bank and donor nations can provide the funds required for the Palestinians to build a desalination plant in Gaza and a network of tunnels that will link together the Palestinian areas of the West Bank that are separated by Jewish settlements. Dispossessed farmers will be able to work in the "industrial estates" that Israel is building west of the "Security Barrier", where Palestinian workers are paid a third of Israel's minimum wage.
Militant Palestinian parties such as Hamas claim that these developments prove that Israel is using the peace process to wage war by other means against the Palestinian people; and that Israeli politicians only understand the language of force. In support of this claim, they point out that Israel used the Oslo Peace Process of the 1990s to double the number of Jewish settlers in the Occupied Territories, while its decision to abandon its settlements in Gaza was due to consistent attacks on the settlements by Palestinian guerrillas.
In mid-April the peace process began to fray as Palestinian guerrillas fired a salvo of improvised rockets on the Gaza Strip settlement of Gush Katif after Israeli snipers shot dead three boys playing soccer in the Palestinian town of Rafah (the Israeli military claimed that the boys, aged 14 to 15, were creeping towards the border and ignored warning shots).
Ariel Sharon has warned Bush that they should prepare for the post-Abbas era, citing the rocket attack as proof that the new president cannot control the Palestinian militants.
He may well be right. Recent developments have put Abbas in an unenviable position. Should he continue to call upon his people to exercise restraint, he risks losing their support to the militants. Should he speak out against the peace process, he risks suffering the fate of Arafat and being sidelined by the Bush Administration as an "obstacle to peace".
[Michael Shaik is a coordinator of the International Solidarity Movement and a member of Australians for Justice and Peace in Palestine.]
From Green Left Weekly, May 4, 2005.
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