The Great Wall in the Middle East
Ha'aretz Newspaper, Tel Aviv, Israel
Gate no. 542
By Gideon Levy
The occupation's latest wrinkle is the separation
fence and its permanent gates. A visit at `Open
Sesame' time.
About a dozen farmers stood around late last Sunday
afternoon, in the fields of Zita, a farming
village north of Tul Karm, waiting for the men in
the Border Police Jeep to open the gate in the
fence built without permission on their fields.
They knew the Jeep would arrive between 5:30 P.M.
and 6 and they waited patiently on both sides of
the fence, a few squatting on the ground. Those on
the way home stood to the west of the fence, and
those going out to their greenhouses stood on the
eastern side. Anyone going out to the greenhouses
now won't be coming home tonight; this is the last
time today the gate will be opened.
At six precisely, the Jeep arrived. Five armed
policemen in head-to-toe protective gear exited the
armored vehicle, made a report by phone and formed a
half-circle by the gate. Feet planted wide, weapons
cocked; one lit a Marlboro, another took out a key.
Wordlessly, he opened the big, silver-plated lock
hanging on the gate in the fence, a fence made of wire
and electronic sensors. Barbed wire, electric cables,
iron posts and dirt trenches to besiege farmers whose
lives, liberty and honor are now crushed a little more
thoroughly.
"That's how hatred is sown," comments Taysir Jeda, the
village lawyer and English teacher, and who has also
come to tend his fields.
Indifferent to the action around them, frogs croak
rhythmically from the drainage ditch, nearly 100
meters across, that borders the intimidating fence.
Shortly the gate will close. Whoever made it through,
made it; whoever did not, will spend the night in a
greenhouse. The Jeep with the key won't be back here
again until tomorrow morning, come what may.
"Danger. Military Area. Anyone crossing or touching
the fence does so at his own risk," is written on the
sign over the fence. The latest innovation of the
occupation, these yellow iron gates - the locked
transit points of the separation fence which, in this
area, separates farmers from their fields. This is a
"humanitarian" arrangement that will last, one may
venture to guess, a very brief time, pursuant to which
Border Police come periodically to open the gate for
the caged-in farmers, a good-will gesture from the
most
humane military force in the world.
Meanwhile, the chairman of the National Committee for
the Struggle Against the Separation Fence in the
Northern West Bank, Suheil Salman, reports a migration
of people eastward, it's not clear how sizable,
because
of the hardships the fence has caused: the people of
Qalqilyah, closed off and fenced in like in a ghetto;
the town of Kafin, north of Tul Karm, whose residents
lost 20,000 dunams [5,000 acres] of their land in 1948
and another 5,000 or so dunams for the settlement of
Hermesh. And now along comes the fence and takes most
of what is left.
In Jarushiyeh, near Tul Karm, the fence runs alongside
Jamal Othman's yard. Ten meters between it and the
house, with the sensors and the red warning signs. You
look out the window of the carefully designed living
room and see the fence. You go up to the roof, and see
the fence. You go outside, and see the fence. Not just
any old fence: tangled coils of barbed wire, a deep
trench, an electronic fence, a smooth strip of dirt to
detect unauthorized feet, a paved road for security
vehicles - and then the whole thing again, on the
other side, 100 meters of it. The olive groves are
gone, the water is gone, their livelihood is gone,
their freedom is gone. A 450-dunam grove of olive and
almond trees. The planners made a surveying error so
Othman lost another 30 dunams of olive trees that were
already uprooted before the regrettable error came to
light. Now the uprooted trunks peek out from under a
layer of dust and the fence route passes 20 meters to
the west.
No one explained anything, there was no advance
notice. They came, they dug, they smoothed, they
straightened, they paved, they built and they left, as
if they owned the place. Now Othman's house has
spotlights shining on it at night and he thinks the
object is to get him out of there. Four kids inside.
He knows he can't stay there for long, in a house by
the fence. Meanwhile, in his yard he has a few black
plastic cisterns, a gift from the government of Greece
to the farmers whose access to water was destroyed.
The bald mountainside visible from the window was the
family's olive grove. Heavy engineering equipment is
parked now on top of the bald mountain, a hint that
the work isn't finished.
For more articles about the fence, see Ha'aretz Newspaper.
Brought to you by Peacemaker Circle International.
11:32:16 AM 
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