Don't tell me it's a "separation" fence, which is what too many Israelis and their Israel-right-or-wrong supporters are calling the "annexation" wall/fence. Don't tell me that, unless you mean that as of today huge portions of the West Bank have been unilaterally "separated" from Palestine. That, of course, is hardly what the so-called "peace process" has been purportedly about. What actually is underway right now is a "piece process" (enabled by the United States government) in which piece by piece Palestine is relentlessly being absorbed into a newly emerging "greater" Israel.
However, from what I have been able to determine, even those of us here in the West Bank, back home, and elsewhere who are opposing the "annexation" wall/fence may not be completely grasping the full impact of the success of this monumental unilateral land grab. That's because most of the attention "annexation" wall/fence has been getting has been focused mostly on what is happening in the northern and central portions of the West Bank.
But that is only half the story.
Even though there are not miles and miles of long sections of serpentine "annexation" wall/fence to be seen that are dramatically laying bare the massive expropriation of Palestinian territory that is inexorably taking place in the south, the same old same old relentless "annexation" process is underway there too. For instance around Hebron, where there is no "annexation" wall/fence like the one in the north to be seen, the decades long campaign of annexation "walling" and "fencing" continues. And this annexation process has been and continues to be just as dramatically successful as the "annexation" wall/fence has been and is in the north.
The main difference is that the insidious annexation "walling" "fencing" process in the south gets virtually no attention in the conventional overseas press, not to mention from many governments: for instance U. S. State Department officials. Essentially the response we get from low-level functionaries, who are the only ones to whom we normally have access, is essentially, "Your story has touched our hearts, but…"
And when we contact stellar American news organizations to suggest that they come down and view what we have been seeing, the answer in effect is, "Ho hum." The other day when I offered to show the bureau chief of a major U. S. newsmagazine what is happening in and around Hebron, he said that the last time he was down our way was to do a story about a suicide bomber from the area and he didn't expect to be back until there was another story like that.
So, hardly noticed and virtually unreported--all over the southern half of the West Bank to the south, west, and east of Bethlehem and Hebron--most settlements large and small, protected by the Israeli Army, are engaged in a never ending process of digging new pathways on Palestinian soil on which new annexation fencing will be and is being installed. When in place the annexation fencing will then extend hundreds of yards deeper into neighboring Palestinian farmlands.
For instance just after the first of the year the pace of land grabs in the Ba'qaa Valley and wadis bordering the settlements of Harsina and Kiryat Arba quickened. The settlements, which are connected by a settlers-only road, sit on top of adjacent hills about a mile apart just east of Hebron. In less than a month new paths for new annexation fences located far down the hills from both Kiryat Arba and Harsina were quickly cleared by settler earthmoving equipment that was watchfully protected by Israeli soldiers.
Just as quickly new fencing laid out hundreds of yards further down hill from previously embedded less sophisticated fence systems, which until then had marked the limits of earlier confiscations, were installed. In one instance the fences were put in place by student volunteers from a high school in Israel who had been given time off to journey to the West Bank in order to help the settlement get the work done as quickly as possible. Another day we encountered Asian laborers doing the same thing.
Now for the first time a broad corridor of confiscated fields runs along either side of the settlers-only connector road. So even while territorial discontiguity remains a grave issue everywhere for Palestinians, the settlers of Kiryat and Harsina have quietly reached out towards each other and achieved a triumph of contiguity at the expense of Palestinian farmers living in this sadly oppressed and deprived corner of the West Bank.
Clearly annexation fencing is just as serious for farmers living in the grasping shadow of Kiryat Arba and Harsina as it is for farmers in the north who continue to suffer the same fate. For instance up until late February, CPTers and Palestinians who live and farm between the two settlements could walk east to west or the other way round through wadis lying between the two settlements.
Now they can't.
Recently when I tried to cross the expanding corridor near Kiryat Arba with a group of international fact finders--something that had done many times before--we were quickly stopped by armed settler security guards in pick-ups and Israeli soldiers in three Jeeps. When I told them what I was trying to do, we were told solemnly that we couldn't.
"Why?" I asked.
"It is dangerous for you," was the answer.
"It never has been " I said. Naturally I thought they were going to try to convince me that terrorists might attack us, which is the usual line. But instead one of the soldiers said, while pointing to an army outpost a hundred or so yards away and which I had walked by uneventfully several times in the past, "You see that barracks over there?"
"Yes."
"If you walk by there, the soldiers will shoot you."
"I am not worried about that," I said. "They never have stopped us before."
But then when he said firmly that we had to immediately vacate the area by walking north via the corridor, which he, as well as I, knew was going to take us a few miles out of our way, I understood that he had been issuing an oblique warning. The rules of the game, he was saying, have changed. It's time to leave the way we tell you to, not the way you want.
Meanwhile, as thousands of acres of Palestinian land continue to be swallowed up that way, the harassment of Palestinians living in the path of these encroachments is also continuing nonstop.
For instance, recently several CPTers were called to the home of a friend living several hundred yards down the hill from Harsina. He asked us to try to help him prune his grape vines. He needed our help because, a few days before, settlers had quickly overrun the last of his eight acres of orchards and grape arbors that hadn't been picked off before.
After this latest extension of the annexation fence was completed earlier, soldier guards--never settlers--promised our friend and his neighbors that they would have access to their land so that they could still work it. However, that is an old promise the military makes but which it rarely keeps.
After several days of trying to call a phone number he had been given to obtain permission from the relevant military authority to go through an opening in the annexation fence to tend to his remaining grape vines, he called CPT to ask if we would--permission or not--accompany him through the opening in a nonviolent "action," the aim of which would be to get his grapes pruned. Which we did.
Shortly after filing through the fence and starting in on his vines, first one settler security pick-up drove up, then another, and then in quick succession three Israeli Army jeeps. Soldiers jumped out and ordered everyone back through the fence. Our friend tried to argue that he had had been trying to get permission to prune his grapes by calling the phone number he had been given, but it never answered.
Never!
"Never mind," the soldiers' commander told him and us. "You cannot go there unless you call the number and get permission. There is no other way."
When our friend continued to protest, the soldier threatened to have his house searched. A Palestinian friend who lives in the Old City of Hebron and who had accompanied us to the action tried arguing on our friend's behalf. The commander, much annoyed, took her ID and held it for two hours. He also said that he was going to see that her home was searched too.
Not able to leave the area without her ID, two CPTers rushed back to the Old City to her home to be there with her mother just in case a detachment of soldiers did show up to search it. About thirty minutes after getting there, five Israeli soldiers came tramping into the apartment and conducted a room-by-room scrutiny that this time was carried out without incident except for the outrageous intrusion itself.
Naturally our friend still is not able to get through the fence to tend his grapes. The reason, of course, is because that phone number he was given to call to get the required permission still doesn't answer.