A few weeks ago I attended an event commemorating Palestinian
Prisoner's Day at Al Far'a Refugee Camp in the Tubas area. To enter
the theatrical and cultural spectacle we had to pass through a
makeshift checkpoint with soldiers pointing their guns in our faces
and screaming in Hebrew for us to get back. Although I knew these were
Palestinian actors role-playing the harassment they experience daily,
it was very frightening to have men with guns yell at me in a foreign
language and stick killing machines in my face. I realized immediately
that although I witness harassment at checkpoints constantly, as a
white Jewish American woman of extreme privilege I can never really
know what it feels like to go through one as a Palestinian. I
suspected the actors had been instructed to especially focus on
Western attendees to illustrate some of the abusive behavior we remain
so shielded from. It was very effective.

Inside the spectacle, hundreds of locals and visitors were watching
performers depict typical scenes of interrogation, abuse, and torture
of Palestinians in Israeli prisons and detention centers. Some of the
actors wore blindfolds, handcuffs, and chains and gave moving
monologues about the injustice of abuse and imprisonment without trial
in an occupier's land. Others played Israeli soldiers and guards.
After the play as a finale, young Palestinian boys danced Debka to
signify cultural pride and continuity in spite of monstrous hardships
and injustices.

The event took place in a former prison/torture center and afterwards spectators toured the old holding rooms, haunted by past inmates and painted over with graffiti and prisoner shadows. There I met a mother holding a framed picture of her son, currently held in Israeli jail along with more than 9,000 other Palestinians, including many women and children. 
Near the old torture chambers was a holding center converted into an art studio, where I met Morshid Graib, an artist whose many stunning images depicted the suffering of the Palestinian people. His paintings and the performances reminded me once again of the extraordinary creativity of the Palestinians in their nonviolent resistance to the Occupation.

The next day I was going on a tour of the Northern Jordan Valley,
about 10 km (6 miles) from Tubas the way a crow flies. By road it's
more like 22 km (13 miles), via Tayseer checkpoint, which only Israeli
settlers and Palestinian residents of the Jordan Valley are permitted
to cross. Tayseer excludes most Palestinians and internationals, so I
was forced to reach my destination the long way around, via Ramallah
in the center of the West Bank. It's hard to comprehend the absurdity
of such a detour without looking at a map. Rather than a 10 minute
ride, I traveled 6 hours southeast through 3 checkpoints the first
day, and then 4 hours back up through 2 checkpoints the next to reach
the other side of Tubas' eastern mountains. 10 hours instead of 10
minutes.

I was cranky from the long ride when I got to Ramallah, but a kind
shop-owner noticed my malaise and took me into his store for tea and
fresh bread. His name was Ali, and he spoke perfect English. An East
Jerusalemite, Ali lived in the United States for 19 years. He studied
civil engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology and was one of
the top engineers behind a new Chicago Metro Terminal. For 19 years,
Ali flew back to Israel every 3 months to renew his Jerusalem ID,
which wasn't automatically renewed - although he and his family were
born and raised in the city - because he is not Jewish. After Ali
acquired US citizenship, he continued returning every three months
until one day Israel revoked all Jerusalem IDs of Palestinians with
another citizenship. This was the first Ali had heard of such a law,
but suddenly his ID was confiscated and he was barred from ever
returning to the city where his home and family remain (of course, all
the American Jews who "make aliyah" and become Israelis never suffer
penalties for dual citizenship). An extremely successful and
well-educated engineer, Ali now works at a souvenir shop selling
trinkets in Ramallah. He cannot get normal work because he doesn't
have a West Bank ID either.
 

Meeting Ali was a good prelude to my tour through the Jordan Valley
where, like East Jerusalem, most Palestinians are not even allowed to
enter, and those who live there are constantly threatened by house
demolitions, ID-confiscation, and other actions that encourage or
require them to relocate. According to our tour guide Fathi from the
area, before 1967 there were 350,000 Palestinians living in the Jordan
Valley. Now there are 52,000 - less than 15%.

Much of the Jordan Valley indigenous population's flight occurred
after violent expulsions in the first five years of the Occupation,
but the ethnic cleansing continues today as more and more Israeli Jews
move in and Palestinians move out. Israel no longer accepts
applications from Palestinians to move into the Jordan Valley, only
out of it. (A similar one-way transfer is occurring out of the West
Bank: "since the outbreak of the second intifada, Israel 'has not
approved a single change of address from Gaza to the West Bank'" but
Palestinians have been forcedly transferred in the other direction
[www.alhaq.org/pdfs/Deportations%20and%20Forcible%20Transfers.pdf].)
Jordan Valley Palestinians who spend too long outside of the region
also lose their residence permits, just like Ali did. And as in East
Jerusalem, Israel's annexation is so advanced that many Israelis don't
even know the area is occupied. Israelis come to the valley on
vacation to enjoy the bountiful fruit orchards, the desert mountains,
and the Dead Sea. The modern highways are lined with palm trees and
nicely-groomed settlements, no Palestinians in sight.

At one point our tour bus stopped at a juice stand and we could just
barely hear Fathi's voice over the zoom of settler and vacationer cars
speeding by: "I am 40 years old and from the Jordan Valley, but I have
only seen the Jordan River twice in my life, on my way to and from
Jordan. They say it's about resistance, but Israel controlled this
area strictly with checkpoints decades before suicide bombs or the
intifadas began. As a Palestinian, I'm not allowed to go to the river,
or even to the Dead Sea - that precious natural wonder which
scientists now say will be gone in 12 years due to overuse... The
valley is reserved for Jews and tourists. But it's owned by
Palestinians as far west as Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and beyond."

Traditionally, Palestinian families used to live in the Jordan Valley
during the wintertime because of the mild climate and fertile land.
But now, of the 2400 square kilometers - 30% of the West Bank - half
is controlled by Israeli settlements, and almost all the rest is split
between military closed areas, border closed areas, and environmental
"green" closed areas. The closed area strategy is familiar to anyone
who has studied urban development in East Jerusalem: Israel declares
large "closed" or "green areas," bulldozes all the Palestinian homes
and institutions within them, and after they've remained empty for a
few years the state begins to settle Jewish Israelis inside.

Some of these "closed areas" in the Jordan Valley are villages where
Palestinians have been living for generations. We visited Fasayel, a
Palestinian village that Israel has refused to recognize for forty
years since the Occupation began. Because Fasayel is unrecognized,
villagers aren't allowed to build or even repair their own homes. They
have no water infrastructure for the same reason. The village recently
got electricity but the electric poles are under demolition order
since they were built without a permit. In nearby Al Jiflik village,
Israel has refused permits to build a school, insisting that families
should either move or bus their children more than an hour each way to
Tubas town. In peaceful response, the teachers of Al Jiflik started
holding classes in a large village tent. Last year, Al Jiflik finally
constructed a real schoolhouse, which students will use until it is
demolished by Israel for being illegal.

About 4,500 Palestinians live in Fasayel and Al Jiflik combined. Just
1,800 more make up the total settler population in the Jordan Valley:
6,300 Israelis living in 36 settlements. The tiny population controls
the land of tens of thousands of Palestinians. Some settlements are
just a family or two, but have taken over huge expanses of Palestinian
farmland. Naama settlement replaced Ne'ama Palestinian refugee camp
and is home to 172 Israelis controlling more than 10,000 dunums. Of
the land-rich third of the West Bank, just 4% is left for the
remaining 52,000 Palestinian inhabitants. That includes the city of
Jericho and a few built-up Palestinian villages, but leaves next to 0%
for agricultural use. This has been devastating for the
agriculture-based society and explains the mass exodus of Palestinians
even after Israel's overtly violent expulsion tactics ceased. Having
lost their livelihoods, Jordan Valley farmers can either move west, or
stay and work as settlement laborers on their own land.

In Fasayel we met a young man named Zafar who works full-time packing
grapes into boxes at Beit Sayel settlement because his family has lost
all their land. Zafar said workers are paid between 30 and 50 NIS
(US$7.50 - $12.50) for an 8-hour workday, depending on their age: 50
for adults, 30 for child laborers, sometimes 10 years old or younger.
He said there's no contract, no insurance, no holiday or sick pay, but
they work like slaves because it's the only alternative to leaving. We
asked Zafar if he supported the boycott of Israeli products even
though that could indirectly affect his job and he answered
unhesitatingly: "Yes. I hope everyone will boycott. I only work for
the settlement because I have nowhere else to work - they took all our
land."

Along our tour we met a farmer named Abu Hashem who used to be one of
the richest landowners in Palestine. Of his 8,000 original dunums,
only 70 are left after Israel built what Fathi calls, "the Forgotten
Wall." East of the major settler highway is a barrier similar in shape
and effect to Israel's better-known Apartheid Wall, this one built
back in 1971 and reinforced in 1999. From his modest house, Abu Hashem
can see past the Wall across the thousands of his dunums that he can
never return to, spanning all the way to the Jordan River.

Abu Hashem's sons alternate years going to university and working on
the farm to support the family. Abu Hashem would hire Palestinian
laborers so his sons could study full-time, but Israel prohibits
Palestinians from bringing in outside workers. Another farmer we met
said he needs 50 farmers to cultivate his land, but he only has 10,
since so many locals have left. Settlements, on the other hand, are
free to bring in as much cheap labor from the rest of the West Bank as
they like, so long as the Palestinians head back west when they're
done so as not to throw off the Judaizing demographic trend.

Much of the produce harvested by cheap Palestinian laborers in Israeli
settlements is then exported by the company Carmel-Agrexco, which is
50% owned by the Israeli state and brought in three-quarters of a
billion dollars last year alone
(http://stopthewall.org/worldwideactivism/1386.shtml). Anyone who
claims that Israel is not profiting off of the Occupation need only
take a tour of the Jordan Valley to see truck after truck of local
goods being sent off to the European market. Carmel-Agrexco boasts
about getting produce from the Jordan Valley (which they often refer
to as "Israel) to the United Kingdom in 24 hours, when it takes
Palestinians three times as long just to get it through checkpoints.
Israel has consistently prevented Palestinians from exporting their
own produce, so it rots on its way from one village to another, while
Europeans enjoy fresh "Israeli" citrus and avocados and the Israeli
state's stocks rise.

As always, Palestinians have explored nonviolent resistance to the
monopolization of their land. We visited an agricultural cooperative
where local farmers have pooled their dwindling resources to try and
grow food to feed their communities so that they don't have to rely on
settlement products. Two representatives of the cooperative said that
Israel - which controls all water in the Jordan Valley, as in the rest
of the West Bank - only allows the farmers to use running water once a
week, not nearly enough to sustain their crops in the desert heat
(meanwhile, several settlements enjoy swimming pools to cool off from
the desert heat). In addition, when the farmers produce enough to sell
outside their communities, Carmel Agrexco and other Israeli companies
lower their prices until the Palestinians are run out of the market.
Then, secure in their monopoly, the companies raise their prices back
up.

Politicians and analysts have called Jordan Valley the second priority
after Jerusalem, but the most convincing reason is not border control.
Carmel Agrexco is just one of many companies making a killing off of
the Occupation, in the Jordan Valley and beyond. The electric, gas,
water, and other governmental and private monopolies have greatly
prospered since the Palestinian economy became a captive one in which
Palestinians either have to buy directly from Israel or pay taxes to
Israel for foreign goods. The latter isn't always an option anymore,
so millions go straight from Palestinians' pockets into Israel's.
Outside financial support for Palestinians eventually feeds into the
Israeli economy on top of the billions in aid Israel already receives
from the United States, enough to offset most of the Occupation's
costs. Coupled with tax collection, a captive cheap unprotected labor
source, and often unchecked industrial expansion using stolen land and
resources, the Israeli economy as a whole has been profiting off the
Occupation for many, many years.

Surprisingly - or perhaps not so surprisingly - it's difficult to find
this information all in one place, but a women's coalition in Israel
is working to do just that (Right now the best you can find are the
first few bulletins at
http://www.alternativenews.org/aic-publications/the-economy-of-the-occupation/).
Meanwhile, people continue to shrug off the near annexation of almost
a third of the West Bank to "security," never stopping to question who
the real winners and losers are. Is the United States in Iraq for
security? Or is it about big industries and private contractors? As in
America's war on Iraq, the driving force behind Israel's policies in
the Jordan Valley and all the Occupied Territories is not security;
it's power, control, and, money. The winners include the Israeli
state, private sectors, the economic settlers and the ideological
fundamentalists. The losers are too numerous to name: They are the
millions of Palestinians living under brutal military occupation, each
of whose stories is in some way as tragic as those of Ali and Zafar.
They are the Israelis who live in fear, and who mourn the victims of
Palestinian armed resistance. And they are us, the American people,
who continue to foot the bill for so much of the carnage, many of us
never knowing the difference.
 

Anna Baltzer
(Pictures by Anna Baltzer)