Holy Land or Living Hell? Ecocide in Palestine
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From the Jordan River valley and Dead Sea basin, through the central highlands comprising the West Bank's populated core, to the fertile western hills bordering Israel, recent reports from occupied Palestine reveal a worsening environmental crisis.
Holy Land or Living Hell?
Pollution, Apartheid and Protest in Occupied Palestine
By Ethan Ganor / Published in Earth First! Journal, September/October 2005
the Jordan River valley and Dead Sea basin, through the central highlands
comprising the West Bank's populated core, to the fertile western hills
bordering Israel, recent reports from
occupied Palestine
reveal a worseningenvironmental crisis. A labyrinth of settlements, industrial zones,
dumps, military camps, fortified roads, electrified fences and a massive
concrete wall—all of it installed by Israel in the West Bank since
1967
and intensified since 2000—is draining the life from this ancient land.
Destructive
actions by settlers and soldiers, waste from factories and settlements,
land confiscations to expand settlements and roads, the
plunder of water,
the mass uprooting or
burning of trees, and the snaking,
sunset-eclipsing
structure known to Palestinians as the "Apartheid Wall" are the major impacts of colonialism causing
the West Bank's once-lush ecology to deteriorate. The cumulative impact
on the land's hydrology,
topsoil,
biodiversity, food security and
natural
beauty is severe. No longer recognizable as a "Holy Land" bountifully
"flowing with milk and honey," as inscribed in religious texts and
memories,
Palestine's environment has become a weapon of war,
deliberately designed
to turn its inhabitants' lives into a living hell.
Israel's much-touted "disengagement"
from the Gaza Strip, while proof that decolonization --
incomplete as it is -- is not impossible, is also a
smokescreen, distracting attention from its
escalation of
violence against people and nature in the West Bank. Fully chronicling the current devastation in
Palestine could fill several volumes; what follows are only snapshots. (Click on the hyperlinks for more information.)
Poisoning
the Land
In
late March, shepherds from Tuwani and
Mufakara, Palestinian villages
near Hebron in the southern West Bank, discovered strange,
blue pellets
littering their grazing fields. Suspecting these seeds as a possible
cause of the mysterious deaths of goats and sheep during the
previous week, villagers had them analyzed. The tests confirmed their
hunch: The pellets were barley laced with fluoroacetamide, a rodenticide
produced only in Israel and illegal in many other countries due to its
acute toxicity.
Not
just livestock, but also wild gazelles, migratory birds, snakes and
other animals were poisoned. Palestinian
farmers were forced to quarantine their flocks and stop selling or using
their milk, cheese and meat. On April 8, a new poison—pink pellets tainted
by brodifacoum, another highly toxic, anti-coagulant rodenticide—
was found at a
hillside
grazing area near Tuwani. Later that month, Amnesty International issued
a press release condemning Israeli authorities for failing to clean
up the toxic chemicals from affected areas and bring the perpetrators
to justice.
Local
Palestinians blame Israeli settlers from nearby Maon and
Havat Maon,
two small outposts south of Hebron, whose male members are notorious
for assaulting Tuwani children who are walking past the settlements
to school. On April 1, solidarity activists videotaped one Maon security official
admitting that he knew that Havat Maon settlers had planted the poisons.
Despite
this, no arrests were made, and the crime has spread. In mid-April in
Yasouf, a Palestinian village south of Nablus in the northern West Bank,
large amounts of identical pink pellets—wheat seeds boiled in brodifacoum—
were
found.
Industrial
Pollution and Dumps
While
such poisonings may seem to be isolated attacks by rogue settlers, other
forms of pollution in the West Bank are systemic and permanent. The
landscape is blotched with Israeli factories. Based mainly on hilltops
at Israeli settlements and border-area industrial zones, the factories
manufacture products ranging from aluminum, plastic, rubber, fiberglass
and cement to batteries, detergents, pesticides, textile dyes, leather
tans and military items.
Because
Israel's own generally stringent environmental laws regulating industrial
processes and waste discharge are not enforced inside the Occupied Territories
,
the West Bank has become a sacrifice zone. Many of the factories
have no environmental safeguards and unleash solid waste burned in free
air, wastewater that flows into watersheds, or hazardous waste dumped and buried at outdoor sites. Lands near the
foothills of industrial zones
are especially vulnerable. One of the largest zones, Barqan, near Nablus,
encompasses 80 factories and generates 810,000 cubic meters of wastewater
per year. It flows into a wadi (a watercourse that is dry except
during the rainy season) and pollutes the agricultural lands of three
Palestinian villages.
International Solidarity Movement
activists joined Palestinians to demonstrate against Geshuri Industries
,
an Israeli-owned manufacturer of pesticides and fertilizers. Originally
located in the town Kfar Saba in Israel—until citizens obtained a court
order shutting it down for pollution violations—Geshuri moved to its
current site at the edge of the Palestinian town
Tulkarem in 1987.
Pollution
from the plant has damaged citrus trees, tarnished soil and groundwater,
provoked respiratory ailments among neighboring residents, and contributed
to Tulkarem having Palestine's highest cancer rates. This Spring, a
new wall (which itself annexed vast swaths of agricultural land) was
constructed around the complex. Wearing blue surgical masks to avoid
inhaling factory fumes, the protesters held signs and
painted messages
on the wall: "Remove the death factory,""Get your poison away from our
children" and "This is terror!"
Illegal
dumps are another chronic problem. On April 11, more than 200 people
from Anarchists Against the Wall,
Green Action Israel and the Palestinian village of
Deir Sharaf blocked Israeli garbage trucks from
transporting trash onto the grounds of Abu Shusha, the West Bank's largest quarry.
In 2002, during its brutal "Operation Defensive Shield" invasion, the Israeli army
seized this site from its Palestinian owners. Since then,
hundreds
of tons of waste were moved covertly into the quarry, in close proximity to
four wells and only 250 yards from the aquifer that provides Nablus with half of its drinking water.
An
investigation by the Palestinian Hydrology Group confirmed that runoff
from the dump "has killed medicinal and wild plants in the valley. It
has affected the biodiversity and aesthetics of the area. Most importantly,
the land is no longer fit to grow olive trees."
After three years of silence,
international outrage finally erupted in early April, when an Israeli journalist
exposed the scheme. With tacit government approval but no
official permit, settlers were churning profits from the dump by
selling their trash-transport services to Israeli cities. Environmental
justice scored a rare victory in July, when an Israeli court passed an injunction
shutting down the dump. Yet the reservoir of refuse remains,
and dozens of other dumps throughout the West Bank are still in operation.
Nor has a factory above the quarry been shut down, which pumps streams
of foul-smelling black sludge into olive groves below.
Sustainable
Apartheid?
While
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's right-wing government and extremist
Israeli settlers are the immediate agents of this ecocide, a global
system that benefits from and sustains the Occupation is also culpable.
The United States supplies the military firepower,
financial aid and diplomatic muscle that makes
it possible; Caterpillar provides bulldozers that
raze homes, trees
and fields to build the Wall; and financial institutions like the World
Bank bestow essential economic lubricants.
In
2004, the World Bank published
two reports outlining a sick version of "sustainable"development
for Palestine, which accepts the reality of the Wall rather than its
illegality. As the Wall carves its path
through the West Bank, isolating communities and
annexing cropland,
the livelihood
of tens of thousands of Palestinian families is
destroyed
and unemployment becomes epidemic. In line with Israeli objectives,
the World Bank proposes to solve this artificial problem by establishing
new "industrial estates" alongside the wall where cheap
Palestinian
labor, working for one-fourth Israel's minimum wage, will be exploited
to produce goods for export into the globalized economy.
Already,
one such estate is under construction near Tulkarem,
on Palestinian land that has been annexed behind the wall. In addition, Israel has asked for funds
-- and the World Bank has conditionally
agreed to grant them -- to create a more "secure," "efficient" and
"growth-oriented" apartheid. Supplementing the Wall, the finished grid will include upgraded,
watchtowers, border crossings with radioactive
"naked spy" machines that peer through people's clothing,
segregated roads, and
underground
tunnels
to facilitate full Israeli control over Palestinian travel and a
continuing monopoly on the land's natural resources. Under the
apartheid regime, travel between any of the West Bank's eight
population districts—Jenin, Nablus, Qalqilia, Tulkarem, Jericho,
Ramallah, Bethlehem and Hebron—has been barred
without special permission, and East Jerusalem will be completely
cut off
by the Wall. Rather than end this
matrix of segregation and
dispossession, the World Bank wants Israel to
"ease internal closures and restore the predictable flow of
goods across borders."
This
normalization of apartheid not only shreds the basic human rights of
Palestinians by confining them to ghettos and sweatshops, it also perpetuates
the ecological devastation of the land. True sustainability can be based
only upon the July 9, 2004, decision by the
International Court of Justice (ICJ) requiring Israel to tear down the Wall
and compensate Palestinians for damages caused by it. The decision
mandates the international community "not to recognize the illegal
situation created by the construction of the wall, and not to render
any aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by it."
Grassroots
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Resistance to the Wall
international powers
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United
Nations resolutions calling for an end to occupation, Palestinian communities
are mobilizing to defend their lands from annexation and destruction.
Since September 2002, after Israel began building the Wall's first ring
to enclose the then-wealthy agricultural town of
Palestinian
Environmental Non-Governmental Organizations Network has coordinated
the Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign (AAWC). AAWC is rooted in
nonviolent direct action, organized by Popular Committees Against the
Wall in dozens of communities that are directly threatened by the Wall's
path.
is a small village of 1,300 people, located 20 miles west of Ramallah,
where
a community successfully blocking erection of the Wall on their land.
Mass rallies united the whole town, as everyone from
converged in targeted fields and olive groves, swarming construction
crews with peaceful discipline and raising enough
stormed a local wedding, opened fire and arrested a teenager, villagers
spontaneously tore down 1,000 feet of a barbed-wire fence erected in
lieu of the Wall. Yet the cost has been high: Hundreds of village residents have been wounded
and
detained, and at least one boy was shot dead, by Israeli army
nonviolent struggle.
Current
resistance is most active in Bil'in, a village of 1,600 also near Ramallah,
where weekly demonstrations since February have opposed Israeli
plans to annex 60 percent of the community's 1,000 acres via the Wall.
With support from international and Israeli solidarity activists, villagers
have been employing Earth First!-style tactics. On May 4, protesters
chained themselves to olive trees to obstruct the razing of an orchard
situated in the Wall's path. On June 1, they locked themselves to
a mock fence in front of bulldozers, forcing soldiers to symbolically
dismantle the fence before they could remove the activists. On July 20, seven protesters
chained themselves inside a
six-feet-long metal cylinder placed in the path of the bulldozers. These actions
and other creative visual stunts have generated extensive
media attention
but also a brutal military crackdown.
Tear gas, rubber-coated metal
bullets, live bullets,
shock grenades,
curfews and a new device called "the Scream"—a huge
loudspeaker that emits painful sound waves—are commonly used to
prevent and
disperse
the demonstrations, which have not yet halted the Wall's construction.
About
one-third of the planned 420-mile Wall is finished; 80 percent of it
penetrates into the West Bank. Construction is occurring now in the
Jerusalem,
Bethlehem and
Hebron regions, as well as around the Ariel
bloc of settlements deep inside the northern West Bank. If completed
there and along the Jordan Valley, around 46 percent of the West Bank
stands to be annexed. More than 400,000 olive trees, which comprise
40 percent of Palestine's cultivated land and are the
staple crop
of
rural communities, are estimated to have been uprooted during the last
five years.
This Fall promises to be another season
of intense grassroots resistance. Palestine's annual
olive harvest
peaks
in October and November, and international activists will once again
be present to challenge Israeli settler and
army actions that
deny Palestinians
access to their land and the right to harvest their crops.
For
more information about the 2005 olive harvest in Palestine, contact the International Solidarity Movement.
To learn more about the nonviolent resistance against apartheid of Palestinian
communities, visit www.stopthewall.org
Ethan is an anti-Zionist, eco-anarchist Jew, a graduate from the Arava
Institute for Environmental Studies in Israel and the founder of the
Trees Not Walls Network. He owes a debt to forests for providing refuge
to his grandfather for two years in Eastern Europe during the
Holocaust. Contact him at
treesnotwalls@riseup.net
