CPTnet
January 27, 2004
HEBRON: The cauliflower was too small

by Art Gish

The cauliflower was delicious, but much too small. Our hosts offered it to
us the raw and explained that Israeli soldiers told them that if they
wanted any of the produce in their fields, they would have to get it
immediately because they will no longer be allowed to go on to their land.
We were eating the last fruits of their fields.

A road had just been bulldozed right behind a cluster of Palestinian houses
near the Israeli settlement of Harsina, just east of Hebron, cutting off
those small farmers from their land on the other side of the new road. Their
land now is Israeli land, stolen by settlers in broad daylight as Israeli
soldiers stood guard.

A group of about ten Israelis, Palestinians, and Christian Peacemaker Team
members, had just had tea together in the home of one of the families whose
land a few days earlier had been confiscated. We had just walked on the new
freshly graveled road that now covered their land. We had watched as
workers set posts in concrete and installed ten-foot high steel mesh for the
fence. We had seen many uprooted olive trees with their roots facing the
sky.

As we stood on his demolished land, one farmer told us he had spent fifty
years planting those trees and building up his land. Now he had lost almost
everything. We watched helplessly as his land was being covered with rock.

I questioned a settler as to why they were stealing all this land. He
explained that this was only for security. I wonder if he believed that.
How does moving the border fence around the Harsina settlement three hundred
feet down the hill increase security for the Harsina settlers? Yet this is
the explanation for the building of the apartheid wall that is swallowing
huge tracts of Palestinian land throughout the West Bank. One Palestinian
told me, "This will only increase the hate which will continue for
generations."

Another 250 acres are being stolen around the Harsina settlement in this
latest spasm of land confiscations. Just a few months ago settlers
confiscated around 750 acres on the other side of Harsina.

This past year the Israeli military prohibited many farmers from harvesting
their crops. They were told they could not go on their land "because of
security for the settlers." The produce rotted in the fields, causing about
ten million dollars of loss around Hebron alone last year.

 At the same time that half of the Palestinian population is dependant on
international food aid, these and many other families are being cut off from
the land that has sustained this people over the centuries. A huge
catastrophe is building as the Israeli government seems to be attempting to
starve out the Palestinian population. One elderly farmer said, "How will I
be able to feed my family now?"

Cauliflower will never again taste the same to me.