‘So Palestinians can't travel to the Jordan Valley and have a picnic with the kids’, I told the military official who replied to my questions regarding the severing of the Jordan Valley from the rest of the West Bank. His answers confirmed what the terrain clearly reflects: while the eastern separation wall that Ariel Sharon had planned to construct was in fact never built (perhaps it would be better to say, has not yet been built), it nevertheless exists by means of roadblocks, barriers, military orders to prevent entry of all but a few thousand, and night raids intended to expel Palestinians who are not ‘Valley residents’.
‘Palestinians picnic at Ein Bidan,’ the military official replied in total seriousness. In other words, they don't need the Valley for picnics. It's as if all Israelis were prevented from entering the Negev, but were comforted and compensated by being told that in any case Israelis picnic along the Yarkon River in the center of the country.
It may sound like a luxury to discuss nature outings at a time when Israel is enforcing a list of additional prohibitions that deprive Palestinians of far more basic needs: preventing Palestinian construction and development throughout most of the Valley; forbidding the sale of Palestinian agricultural produce directly to Israeli dealers or at the nearest goods transfer point at the Jordan Valley-Israel border; preventing travel along most of the main Valley road; forbidding neighbors and relatives to meet, landowners to reach their lands, and laborers to look for work; and forbidding people to maintain the traditional life-style they have practiced for hundreds of years by expelling herders and semi-nomads who used to descend from their mountain heartland villages to the warmer eastern slopes.
The explicit prohibition regarding entry to the Valley by all Palestinians except a small minority is relatively new. It has taken shape slowly in the course of the past five years. It has involved not a single order published by the media, but rather a series of cumulative prohibitions, now at this roadblock, later at another and another and yet another. The constraints on Palestinian farmers' freedom to market their produce directly and to nearby Israeli dealers are also new, dating from October-November 2005. Both types of prohibition constitute but the most recent manifestations of the policy practiced by Israel even during the Oslo years--what were ostensibly the peace negotiation years.
Everything can be interpreted as ‘legitimate security measures’: to protect Israelis traveling on the main road, to defend the settlers, facilitate the task of the soldiers, place as many filters as possible in the way of arms smugglers. But the security rationale persuades only those (sadly, most Israelis) who insist on ignoring a series of dispossessing measures invoked by generations of Israeli governments in the Valley and against Palestinians. These include construction of colonies based on depriving Palestinians of their water resources and taking control over their lands; turning some 500 square kilometers of the Valley into military training grounds and live-fire zones, thereby supplying an excellent ‘humane’ excuse for actively removing people from about a third of the land; and unilaterally proclaiming ‘nature preserves’ in 24,000 dunams (6,000 acres). The latter measure evokes a supposed love for nature that is belied when Israel destroys tens of thousands of dunams of scenic views, fertile land and primeval rock gorges in a unilateral effort to establish the state of Israel's final borders--and reduce Palestinian territory to isolated enclaves.
If not live-fire zones or nature preserves, then it is area C (full Israeli control) that prevents the Palestinians from developing and building. They need building permits from the Civil Administration. Yet that institution does not issue building permits in accordance with the natural growth and development requirements of the Palestinians, but rather on the basis of the unnatural growth requirements of the settlers.
‘Where can we go?’ the new exiles asked the soldiers. The exiles were Bedouin, herders and semi-nomadic farmers. They were evicted by Civil Administration officials, accompanied by soldiers, who handed out demolition orders or themselves demolished tent camps and lean-tos. That was a few years before the current intifada. ‘Go to area A’ the soldiers told them. Lower-ranking soldiers always say openly what their commanders and the politicians conceal with sanitized language. In their innocence, the soldiers revealed the political intention behind the ostensibly security-oriented measures. That's how the soldiers express themselves today when they explain to the ‘Machsom Watch’ women and me why a Palestinian in the Valley is now an illegal resident: because ‘the Valley is Israel’. The difference, then, between the dispossession measures invoked during the Oslo period and the eviction steps taken today is one of quantity and extent rather than substance.
Amira Hass has been the Haaretz correspondent in the occupied territories since 1993.