Israel's "fence" provides not for security but for the grabbing of even more Palestinian land, as Annika Hampson, writing from Tulkarm, finds out Mohamed and his sons are cutting down their olive trees, piling the branches, heavy with olives, into a trailer. The olives are not yet ripe, but by the time they will be ready to harvest he fears the Israeli bulldozers would have already uprooted them. "My father planted these trees," he says and points to the markers, red ribbons tied to the gnarled branches of the olive trees, which stretch towards a giant scar on the hillside where the bulldozers have already begun their work. "This is where the fence will be, it will go straight through my land." The planned fence, which will ultimately run the entire 350kms around the West Bank, is one of the measures the Israeli government is taking supposedly to stop Palestinian suicide bombers. The Israelis will have control in regulating who goes in and who leaves, in a similar way to the Gaza Strip, which, since the Intifada began two years ago, effectively has been a prison for more than 3 million Palestinians who live there. However, at a time when hopes are focused on creating a Palestinian state, people in the Tulkarem area dismiss the Israeli arguments and believe instead that the fence is another excuse for expropriating Palestinian land and will create a new de facto border. "If they (the Israeli government) are worried about security, why does the fence not follow the 1967 borders and instead put more 'terrorists' on the Israeli side?" one villager asked. The first stretch of the fence will wriggle along the northwest edge of the West Bank, slicing between the Palestinian villages north of Tulkarem, and through the olive groves, hothouses, fields of vegetables and wells. The red ribbons mark out a zigzagged route from Shuweika, through Zeita, and up to Kafeen. Farmers have discovered, through IDF orders and secretly from Israeli contractors, that this 12km stretch alone will involve the confiscation of close to 11,000 dunams of land. The IDF gave them three days to evacuate their land. Along the route farmers are salvaging what they can: the remnants of a plant nursery lie scattered behind a broken gate, broken pots spilling shriveled tomato plants on the dusty ground, while uprooted pipes from a water irrigation system lie at the side of a field of maize. Further on, tattered plastic and a skeletal frame is all that remains of a vegetable hothouse, the hot peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers all torn out of the ground. For many Palestinians living in the villages north of Tulkarem, as in many rural areas throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip, agriculture is their main source of income. But for the past two years Israeli travel restrictions have hindered the products from reaching the markets: lorries transporting the products, for which the region is dubbed "the vegetable garden of Palestine," often wait for hours to pass through Israeli checkpoints, and during long curfews the products simply rot. Now land is being confiscated. "I ploughed a lot of the money I earned into my land. This is my investment. What will I do when they take my land?" lamented a farmer who introduced himself as Abed. "They are taking everything I have. Do they think this will give them security?" There is no talk, on either side, of compensation. According to a local official, the real issue is the Palestinian land and villages which will end up being on the other side on the fence, lying between the fence and the Green Line. "The planned line of the fence doesn't follow the Green Line, and this will create many problems," he said. "In many places it veers into the West Bank for many kilometres," he added. Meanwhile, the idea of living locked behind a fence is inconceivable for Tulkarem's residents, raising more questions on their future. What about the residents of the villages on the other side of the fence? Villages like Qaffin, Bartaa and Baqa Al-Sharqiya, and many others, will lie in an administrative no-man's land, socially and economically cut off from what will remain of the West Bank. What will be the status of the villages caught between the Green Line and the fence? Should there be a Palestinian state in the future, what assurances are there that the Palestinians from these villages will be in it? Yet, while these issues remain undiscussed and unresolved the bulldozers around Tulkarem are poised to start work. And people there have come to their own conclusion: that this has much more to do with land than with security.
