FARMING WITH ONE’S BACK TO THE WALL

Tulkarem thrived on its rich agricultural land mostly given over to market gardening. Fatally close to the Green Line, it has been devoured by the separation barrier and its infrastructures My peasant roots twist, my farmer’s blood runs cold when I talk to people who, one fine day found that what has been their family’s for generations is no longer theirs.

In Palestine, that is the common lot as the occupier has moved in as it pleased without any regard for international humanitarian law..

For Fayez, it took the shape of the infamous Gishuri Chemical factory who produces mainly agricultural chemicals and moved to Tulkarem in 1984 after it failed to get a license in Telmond settlement, in Israel, due to its dangerous effects on the environment and health. (Wafa Apr 27, 2005). The neighbouring farmer on whose land it first spilled out got no compensation.

The wall that surrounds this unusual settlement hardly inspires confidence, any more than the black effluents Fayez repeatedly reported; but the crunch came with the four hundred almond trees he lost to a white dust which also blighted his Israeli neighbours’ cultivations. Redress was sought jointly by Israeli and Palestinian farmers, not without drawing some press attention. Legal loopholes afforded by the Israeli nature but Palestinian situation of the factory sheltered it from compensations. However, having noted that the wind normally blew West to East, that is away from Israel (and thus Fayez), it offered the Israeli farmers guarantees that on the rare days when this was not the case the factory would close. And this is how Fayez’s land is spared this hazard – though Tulkarem’s 60 000 inhabitants, on the Eastern side get the full benefit for the best part of the year.

Such favourable provisions did not fail to register with other chemical enterprises so that Fayez warily watched the industrial settlement developing on his doorstep.

The second Intifada places Fayez land in the crossfire: he keeps going, only to find himself at the business end of a bulldozer heading for his plantations that smartly scoops him up when he refuses to budge. Only the stone Muna, his wife threw at the driver, drawing blood would stop him. A short lived victory: the factory owners had the farm flattened. Fayez replanted, rebuilt, replaced the irrigation system. But he was to suffer two similar attacks in 2001-02 and 2007 – the latter not before losing 60% of his farm to the wall.

Fayez says he does not believe in violence and fights through demonstrations and press attention but neither these nor the case he brought to court would prevent the resulting loss of  14 jobs. In 2007, as  Fayez continues, unbowed, to rebuild his greenhouses and work his remaining 13 dunums (some 1.3 ha), the army opens the wall to allow a bulldozer to ravage once again this inconvenient obstacle between Israel and its industrial settlement. In vain: Fayez and Muna put everything they have into reinstating once more their unprepossessing patch now trapped between the invader’s walls. And the invader will do its utmost to deter them: their farm will become a “closed military zone” for 14 months, during which they will put up an impressive display of civil disobedience, finding ways to enter daily their blockaded farm and to restore its assiduously sabotaged irrigation system.

Their experience is an extreme version of the fate suffered by many farmers in Tulkarem’s outlying villages. Deir al Gushun and Attil,  for instance are cut away from a quarter of their land, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, UNOCHA’s estimations and in order to farm, they must run the gauntlet of “agricultural gates”, manned by soldiers, and open at specified times that vary with the season, the place etc.... All of them? Certainly not: they must obtain a permit from the military administration. The permit is only valid for a certain time and for one person, it can be revoked at any time, or not extended  upon expiration. Still according to OCHA, the people that can go and work in what is known as the “seam zone”  “is only a fraction of what it was before the Barrier was built”. No wonder: the arcane and varying rules presiding over the permit and access system combined with the humiliations at the gates (turning up at a stated time, complete with documents, being subjected to a metal detector and your ID ran through the military administration’s computers to access your own land) takes its toll. Farming is driven by the sun, the sky and the earth, not by geopolitics, not by 18-20 years old kids who, kitted out with a gun and surveillance equipment, can make your life a misery.

And still the farmers go, because farming is driven by the love of the land, by the tie to the soil, because they know that if they do not work their farm it will be taken over by the occupier, on the basis of such British Mandate laws as the Abandoned Areas Ordinance, 1949 to quote but one of an armory of dubious legal dispositions.

It is hard to measure the kind of courage Fayez and Muna and all the farmers need to resist to the grind of that type of oppression.