Orwellian Israeli Laws against Palestinians (Amira Hass in Haaretz – Hebrew only)

Haaretz Wednesday November 28, 2007

Khaled rarely takes his children to the village of his birth in the western part of the West Bank, south of Qalqilya.  It's hard for him to sit on the roof of his parents' home and from there look out at the family land (about 500 meters away) without being able to reach it.  This land had always been a kind of insurance; security for a continuing income, where all the brothers and sisters worked and from which they all benefited.  It guaranteed respite from the urban crowd and was also a kind of savings and security for a time of need - sickness, heaven forbid; or higher education for the grandchildren.  It was always possible to sell a dunam or to build on it in order to realize a dream.

  Between the roof and the promise, between him and the 20 dunams that remained in the family's possession, was the separation fence, an ugly scar of high fencing, barbed wire, and wide strips of exposed earth where a row of trees had been uprooted and whose absence remains painful like the stump of a missing limb.

  The roof of his childhood home is Khaled's Mount Nevo.  He sees the promised land so close and cannot reach it.  Staff of the Civil Authority take care to create lengthy, complicated bureaucratic procedures for Palestinians to try to gain periodic entrance permits to reach the private lands beyond the fence.  By the time the processes are understood, they change, and the criteria become yet more restricted.

  The result: parents get entrance permits to their land, but they can't work the land alone.  Children and grandchildren can get permits but not as members of the family, only as hired workers.  Such permits are limited to a small number of days, and they are not suited to those who have regular jobs elsewhere.  Moreover, the very necessity of requesting a permit to reach the family property - all that only if you can prove you have a justifiable reason for wanting to be on your own land - is so infuriating that they give up without trying.

  In the West Bank there are about two million Khaleds.  In every village and city many families have land that Israel prevents them from reaching, like land in area C (60% of the West Bank), by means of the separation barrier, security roads of Jewish settlements, settlements built on part of the land that blocks access to the land that hasn't been confiscated, roads that are forbidden to Palestinian travel, closed military areas, army camps, or army road blocks.

  Every Palestinian has their own Mount Nevo, from which they see the land, which has as much emotional as material value, being taken away from them.  When a fire breaks out, as has happened more than once on the land of Kafin, it's impossible to reach it and put out the fire in time.  If one wants to grow vegetables, it's impossible to irrigate them because the well is in the part of the private land that has been confiscated for the use of the nearby settlement, as was the case with Abu Fahmi from Dir Istiya.  And when settlers occupy the land, it's impossible to get rid of them, as was the case with the land belonging to the Kadan family from El Bireh when youths from Bet El turned their private property into a place of worship.  The Civil Administration did remove the settlers from this intrusion, but in any case the army does not allow the Palestinians to come there.  The result is the same: the land cannot be used.

  The Israeli government is praised for its vision of two states for two peoples, apparently adopted by its leaders and brought by them to Annapolis. But Israel refuses to commit to a time table for implementing the vision.  Meanwhile, its faithful messengers in the army and in the Civil authority and the settlers as well hold ongoing one-sided negotiations on the fate and shape of the future Palestinian state.  They are doing everything to ensure that millions of dunams of land, the land reserve of the future Palestinian state, will not be returned to its lawful owners.  They cause more and more land to be seen as abandoned land or what is known in Israeli Orwellian as absentee property, that is, land that the state of the Jewish people has learned to pronounce as being state owned in practice.