'We will never leave'
Michael Jansen visits Qalqilya which will soon be incarcerated behind Israel's concrete wall
The West Bank city of Qalqilya has not only been closed by the Israeli army, it has been totally imprisoned. At present its 42,000 citizens are encircled by Israeli trenches, earth barricades and a long section of grey cement wall eight-metres high.
In a few months time the wall will nearly encircle the entire city. The only break in the edifice will be a long neck of land blocked by a gate, a one-metre-wide strip for pedestrians and a 10- metre strip for vehicles. The entrance to the city will be guarded by a tower manned by armed Israeli troops.
I visited Qalqilya, an hour's drive north of occupied Jerusalem, with Anne and Tareq from the Palestinian negotiating team. We drove to the makeshift lot at the entrance to the town where the gate will soon stand, parked our car and approached the checkpoint on foot, requesting admission. "We have an appointment with the mayor," Anne told the Israeli soldier as he leafed through our passports. He promptly handed them back and waved us through.
"We're lucky," Anne remarked, "It can take an hour and a half, sometimes more," she said. A driver emerged from the scrum on the Qalqilya side of the barrier, greeting Anne like an old friend. We engaged him and began the tour with a look at the site where Israel's bulldozers were levelling the ground for the wall. The ramshackle taxi plunged down a narrow road between orchards fenced with battered corrugated iron and halted at a vast expanse of exposed hillside. A Palestinian couple were loading their pickup with firewood from a massive pile of olive branches. Last week there had been rows of lovingly tended century-old olive trees here. Now the trees are gone and there is not even any sign of shorn trunks and roots -- all of them were carted away by their owners or stolen by Israeli settlers. On the hillock above us sat a tank, its heavy machine-gun pointing in our direction; on the slope below, a bulldozer scraped the bed of a military road. "This has been done since we came here last week," Anne remarked.
The once prosperous market town is dying, its streets are empty, its shops shuttered.
On the city's eastern flank, the smooth grey concrete wall looms over a handsome new school and a row of two-storey houses. The wall stretches as far as the eye can see to the right and left, a watch-tower every 200 metres, and in front of the wall is a wide swathe of bulldozed land. On either side there will be a four-metre- wide trench, a barbed wire fence and a military road patrolled by Israeli soldiers. All Palestinian property located within 35 metres of the wall has been or will be flattened. "It's like a prison wall," I remarked to Anne.
When completed, the first phase of the wall will be 115-kilometres-long -- three times the length and twice the height of the Berlin wall. The edifice costs $1 million per kilometre.
Since it is set to loop deep into Palestinian territory to take in clusters of settlements, the wall is likely to be two or three times the West Bank's length of 350 kilometers. The cost of the wall complex could run in the billions to build, not to mention annual costs for maintaining and manning it, all of which are sure to exceed the $220 million budgeted. Finance for the wall is one reason Israel is applying to Washington for $10 billion in loan guarantees and for increased military insistence.
Granting Israel's demands will signify endorsement of the wall project by the Bush administration.
As sections of the wall go up in the north, army engineers are preparing the route of the wall in and around Jerusalem, in Bethlehem and in the Hebron area. Sharon has decided to use the wall to annex to Jerusalem Rachel's Tomb which is located in Bethlehem. This involves encircling and isolating a number of Palestinian homes and excluding Muslims from a religious site they also revere. Israel is also preparing a plan for a "sleeve", a narrow-walled passage from the Kiryat Arba settlement to the Jewish enclave at the heart of Hebron.
Instead of separating Palestinians and Israelis along the old Green Line, the wall is designed to stitch the occupied West Bank to Israel proper by incorporating settlements and land.
The wall will make prisons of Palestinian population centres, fragment the West Bank and prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state. Once it has been completed and Israel's eastern and western "security zones" are formally defined, there will be three Palestinian cantons in the West Bank, as there are in Gaza. Palestinians living in them will have little contact with each other. Palestinians who stay on will serve as menial labourers in Israeli-run enterprises in manufacturing zones adjacent to the wall. There will be no other jobs for Palestinians to do. Most farmers will lose their land to the settlements; inter-canton trade will be in the hands of the Israelis.
Ultimately, Israelis expect the wall will make life for the Palestinians so difficult that they will eventually cross the Jordan River into exile in Jordan and transform the kingdom into the "Palestinian state". Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon recently refused to give Jordan assurances that he is not pursuing a policy of "transfer".
Mayor Maa'rouf Zahran was waiting for us in his office. He told us that the municipality has been fighting the wall since work began in the area. "Our lawyer went to the Israeli high court in mid-August to get a ruling that would stop the work," he stated. "The court called a three-week halt until the case could be considered. But the contractors ignored it."
According to the mayor, the contractors said, "'We receive our orders from the Ministry of Defence.'" He continued, "The Israelis do not recognise the municipality since it is part of the Palestine Authority, so they inform the owners of the land they are expropriating by hanging documents in Hebrew and maps on trees and fences. But the contractors do not follow the maps, they take much more land than [designated] on the plan. More than 6,000 dunums have been taken -- 33 per cent of the land of Qalqilya city." Nineteen wells and 50 reservoirs and nine villages with 18,000 residents in the Qalqilya area will be isolated on the western Israeli side of the wall.
Mayor Zahran observed, "Qalqilya was a wealthy town. We have 70 wells, 365 million cubic metres of water -- half the water of the West Bank. We exported fruit and vegetables to the area, Israel and the Gulf. The monthly income of a family was $1,000, now it is $60. People survive on charity. We had a job creation scheme. There were 500 jobs paying 30 shekels [about $7] a day."
While touring the city we met Hajj Hassan, a grey-bearded patriarch, who lost 26 dunums of olive and citrus trees to the wall. His brother also. "The land was in our family for many generations," he stated. They each have six dunums left.
Hajj Hassan's large carpentry workshop does only 10 per cent of its former volume of business. His family lost land in 1948 when Israel was created and was forced to evacuate the town in 1967 when Israel occupied the West Bank. In spite of the wall, the danger posed by Israel's ever present forces and the economic pressure to go, the hajj asserted, "We will never leave."
