Imagine If Your House Was Demolished Nine Times !

[Eva Libre]

The Jordan Valley. One of the most beautiful places of the West Bank, except for the people who live in it. Israeli occupation forces have imposed harsh restrictions on building and movement. Inhabitants have become hunted and spooked on their own lands.

For generations, long before the 1967 war that led to the occupation of the West Bank, the Bedouins let their sheep graze on their land, in the north of the Jordan Valley. These shepherds are very poor and have almost no food. But they do not complain, since this has always been the nature of their lives as shepherds in the Jordan Valley. They only want one thing: to be left alone. This desire was a reality for many decades. Under the British mandate in the 1940s, their fields were designated as an agricultural zone. According to these orders,

residents are permitted to remain in the area, and expulsion orders cannot change their status. But since the area fell under the occupation of Israel, the inhabitants of the Jordan Valley have been frightened away.

The difficulties for the inhabitants began in the 1970s, when the village was declared a closed Israeli military zone. Some years later the Jewish settlements of Ro’i and Beka’ot were founded in the east of their land. Since then, Israel and the settlers have pressured the residents to abandon their land. Harassment and house demolitions have become part of the Bedouins’ lives. “With their cars they destroy our farms, with their guns they kill our animals and with their bulldozers they demolish our houses”, explains Abu Sakri of the struggling life in the once peaceful village of Al-Hadidiyeh. Abu’s ancestors lived for centuries on the fields. “To tease us, the settlers call whenever they prefer the Israeli army or the police. Then, they take our tractors away, transport our sons to the checkpoints, confiscate our water tanks and give us fines.”
For more information see;

http://www.palestinemonitor.org/spip/spip.php?article1356

Netanyahu divulged his dastardly plan: He told his hosts he would proclaim the entire Jordan Valley a "designated military site."

"The tents are one thing, but why the water tanks? Sometimes they empty them of water. What will the children drink? And why do they destroy the taboun ovens? Do they want us to die of hunger and thirst? Is that what they really want?” Basharat

Testimonies from the occupied Jordan Valley: Al-Hadidiya

- Qais Yousef -

A Palestinian from Al-Hadidiya in the occupied Jordan Valley. The Israeli government is making the lives of the Palestinian residents of the Jordan Valley difficult, driving them out of their homes, with the aim of evacuating the valley of Israeli settlements.
Editing: Hadass Shuve

Twilight Zone / Gestures to the Palestinians

While the prime minister is dispensing promises about easing restrictions in the territories, Israel is expelling hundreds of shepherds from the Jordan Valley

Which is crueler? Expelling an urban family from its home in Jerusalem's Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, or bulldozing a meager tent encampment of shepherds living on private Jordan Valley land they leased, destroying their water tanks, their tents and their sheep pens, and expelling families with many children from the land on which they live? It's hard to say. But while the Sheikh Jarrah expulsions are attracting interest in Israel and elsewhere, hardly anyone notices or protests what's going on in the Jordan Valley.

	Shepherd Abdel Razeq Bani Awda (right) and one of his sons. In winter, they’ll have to leave here too.
	Photo by: Limor Edrey

There, far from view, Israel has been trying for several years to methodically remove Palestinian inhabitants from wide swaths of land. And in a week when the prime minister was making more promises about a "package of gestures" to the Palestinians, in order to curry favor in Washington, the Civil Administration bulldozers brutally destroyed several more encampments, leaving dozens of residents helpless and destitute under the open sky. But the Jordan Valley is far from the public eye and the public heart, and there Israel can do as it pleases.

One look at the landscape tells the whole story: The settlement of Beka'ot, with its lush greenery and plentiful electricity and water at one end of the magnificent valley, and the ruins of the meager shepherd encampments at the other end, with no electricity, no water, no nothing. One picture is worth a thousand words. It's a far cry from the words of the old propagandistic song once sung by the Central Command musical troupe, about the little settlement in the Valley that "guarded the line, called out for peace and served up hope in the form of colorful flowers." Calls for peace? Gestures of hope? Go ask the neighbors about that.

This week, Dafna Banai, an activist from Machsom Watch, described the most recent expulsions: 15 families were expelled from their encampments on July 1; the week before, another 16 families received demolition and evacuation orders. For more than a year, the entire valley has been strewn with dozens of cement blocks preventing entry and warning of "firing zones" wherever Palestinians live. Israel already has enclosed all the territory west of Highway 90 with impassable ditches, and residents can exit only twice a week, when Israel opens the locked gates on the roads.

Israel declares huge amounts of private Palestinian land as firing zones and expels the residents under the false and self-righteous guise of concern for their welfare, lest they be harmed by the military training; but these firing zones are always to be found solely on Palestinian land, and never on settlement land. Have you ever heard of any settlers being expelled from their homes because their settlement was declared part of a firing zone? But against these wretched shepherds in the Jordan Valley, anything goes. This is Israeli justice, this is equality as practiced by the Israel Defense Forces.

Perhaps the explanation for this appalling expulsion policy can be found in comments by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicized last Friday on Channel 10. During a condolence visit to the home of a settler family in 2001, Netanyahu divulged his dastardly plan: He told his hosts he would proclaim the entire Jordan Valley a "designated military site."

This is how the prime minister thought to mock the Americans at the time, so they would let Israel do as it pleases in the Jordan Valley. Now he is prime minister again, and his trick is working splendidly. A Jordan Valley cleansed of Palestinians will one day be more easily annexed to Israel.

The Civil Administration, naturally, attempts to deceive, dissemble and disregard all this. What connection could it possibly have with acts of systematic expulsion? After all, it is simply concerned with the welfare of the residents and the preservation of law and order. If an expulsion is taking place, the administration is not the one making the decisions; it's just acting as a contractor.

In any event, what's going on here is "self-evacuation," as the spokesman put it, and "abandoned structures."

"This is a matter of tin structures and tents, which were set up recently, without the necessary permits, in firing zones, endangering the inhabitants' lives," the spokesman said. "Most of the structures under discussion were abandoned independently by their residents, and a few were destroyed. Most of the people who built these structures own permanent homes in the valley, and most of the structures were already abandoned on the day they were destroyed."

Owners of permanent homes? Have you heard of settlers being evacuated because they have another house in Petah Tikva?

On second thought: The expulsion in the Jordan Valley is worse than that of Sheikh Jarrah. It is more systematic, more large-scale, and it's being committed against a weaker population. But the demonstrators won't come here. It's too far away.

The most closed open area

In an empty room that serves as the headquarters of a remote village council, local activists elaborate on their fears: Israel is seeking to expel all the area's shepherds to here. Two big spiders silently spin their web on the ceiling. In the past month, dozens of families have received demolition and evacuation orders, all in accordance with the law, of course, the law of the occupation.

The elderly Abdel Rahim Basharat says it's not a village, it's a prison.

"If you close off the shepherds from every direction, to them it's a jail, because their lives are tied to the land. If they are made to move to this village, they'll have to sell their flocks, their only source of income. Taking our lands from us is the same as taking our lives."

Basharat has a question: "Does Area C mean evacuation and expulsion?"

And what will you tell him? What can one tell him?

And he has another question: "Why don't you ask about the water problem?"

Ataf Abu al-Rub, the B'Tselem investigator in the area, explains: "Sometimes these shepherds hear water trickling through the pipes that pass through their fields on the way to settlements, but they are forbidden to use it. Sometimes they hear the crackle of electricity in the high-tension wires, but the electricity is meant only for the settlers."

Al-Rub says this is the most closed open area in the world. Four families have already left for the village, after the encampments were repeatedly destroyed and they tired of hopeless battle. The rest are persisting in a desperate fight for survival. We go out to see, driving past harvested wheat fields on our way to the sites of destruction.

Abdel Razeq Bani Awda's family already has erected a new encampment. On July 1, the previous one was destroyed, and its ruins lie on the opposite hillside. They'd lived there for 15 years, on private land that belongs to a resident of Tubas who leased it to them. They have documents to prove it. Now they are stuck in the middle of a wheat field; when winter and planting times comes around, they'll have to leave here, too. This is the fifth place they've moved to in the past few years, since Israel began implementing its policy of evacuation and expulsion. Two families - a father and son and their children, and 160 sheep, their only source of income. The sheep are now crowded into new pens, seeking shelter from the heat.

What will the children eat?

The road is too treacherous for our car, as we make our way up the hill from the ruins of their recently destroyed camp. Hardly anything is left of it. Strewn about the ground are some wrecked tent stakes, a spoon, a rusty kettle, a blackened coffee pot, a spilled container of tehina and a broken-down refrigerator. Remnants of a meager life. Basharat asks why Israel is also destroying the water tanks.

"The tents are one thing, but why the water tanks? Sometimes they empty them of water. What will the children drink? And why do they always come when times are the toughest, or in the middle of summer, when the heat is terrible, or during the rains, when there is no other shelter? It's not by coincidence. And why do they destroy the taboun ovens? They know it takes four to five days to build a new taboun, and in the meantime we have no bread. Do they want us to die of hunger and thirst? Is that what they really want? Our children know the Israeli army is the one doing this. And what do they expect them to remember when they grow up?"

Basharat's questions go unanswered, echoing through the valley. We sit beneath the remnants of a tin shack that wasn't thoroughly destroyed. An old refrigerator door serves as a bench, until it, too, collapses beneath us. The Bani Awda family will return here in the winter. They have no other choice. They have already re-erected one tent. Across the way, Beka'ot is blooming; there is a spa there.

On the western part of the hillside is another ruined encampment. This is where Hassan Bani Awda's family lived before they migrated eastward. Another encampment, closer to Beka'ot, is still standing. Nine times this family has had its home destroyed. We sit in silence and gaze out at the valley. It could be so beautiful, if not for the ugliness of the expulsion. We make our way to the next encampment.

An old wooden chair has an old sticker attached to it: "Israel is Strong with Shimon Peres." Israel is also strong with Benjamin Netanyahu, especially in dealing with the weak: Mohammed Bani Awda and his 11 children are also living under the threat of expulsion. He has 270 sheep and a combine that belongs to the landowner from Tubas. This family already has been forced to move four times. Now they've been instructed to tear down just the storehouse for the sheep's food. Is Mohammed afraid? He says: "They're going step-by-step. They started in the east and when they finish clearing out there they'll come here too. We'll be the next stage."

The two shepherds, Basharat and Bani Awda, consult with one another. What to do? Bani Awda suggests appealing to the High Court, and Basharat says there's no point.

"There's no point appealing to Israeli law and justice. They'll declare the whole Jordan Valley a military zone and that will be the end of the story."

Mohammed's son Jihad, a 19-year-old shepherd, wears a New York baseball cap. He says he dreams of going there one day, but all of us in the tent knew it will never happen. It's unlikely that he'll every get as far as Jerusalem.

[Irit Hakim-Keller]

Qais,
I am glad she has.

A wonderful day to all of you here
Irit

[Irit Hakim-Keller]

Dear Christine,
Daphna is Israeli, not Italian ,as much as I know.
And why, if I may ask, had you banned form the Mepeace, which is very tolerant place.?

[Qais M. Yousef]

Thank you Irit, Yes she sent a message to me, she told me about machsom watch and about her activities.
I was so pleased of that.

Together sure we will make the change. Christine, Eva, Irit, Daphne, and all our friends here and on care2.
Our strength in our unity.

[Irit Hakim-Keller]

Let me know when she is in touch with you. I have sent her your mail a couple of minutes ago.

I have seen your page in FB. Great!

[Qais M. Yousef]

Sure I like and appreciate that.

[e-mail]
that was my email

I appreciate your, Daphna and Eva's work and everyone who worked with us.
I posted the good news on F.B ,
see you there?

8th of August will be really special day.

I'm waiting the materials patently,

Peace and Love,

Qais

[Irit Hakim-Keller]

The children are coming on the 8th of August.
I have told Daphna about the petition - gave her the link. she asks for your mail , so she can send you all materials about what's going on there. would you like that? so pls write me the mail addr.

[Qais M. Yousef]

Irit, Another thing, if you and Daphna face any difficulty in the activities, in Jordan Valley, we still have the petition, and still collecting signatures, that indeed will give you support.

As I always say, one hand can not clap, two can, but the more the hands, the more the voice is loud.

Thank you Irit, Eva and all our friends.

Qais

[Qais M. Yousef]

Thank you sooooo much Dear Irit,

Very good news.

Please say to Daphna "Thank you so much, We all support her and her activities in Jordan Valley and appreciate her work". sure I will share this news on FB. you see Irit, and all my friends, that when we work together we will see the change.

I believe that those children will be very very happy on that day.

Irit, When will it happen? I'm waiting your pictures patiently.

Thank you so much. God bless you.

Best wishes.

Qais

[Irit Hakim-Keller]

Dear Qais,
I am happy to say that you and me - we do not know everything////:);):)
I shall translate here the mail I have received this morning:

Dear Irit,
The children of Jorden Vally are coming for a sea-day (what I call fun day/irit) on 8th of August. It is organized by the Muchtar of Hadidiyah. The group includes the children of Ras el Achmar, whose home was demolished 3 weeks ago.
It is going to be a very special experience - you are invited to take part of it.
I am very active in Jordan Vally with the Hadidiyha and other Ch'amula's (tribes). I was very thrilled to know there are more people who care.
Daphna.

So, you see Qais - and all of you dear friends here - things are done, too silently for my opinion. Active like this should be shouted all over, not only the bad active which happen and are known everywhere..

Of course I shall be there!!!!!!!!!

Have a nice day

irit

[Irit Hakim-Keller]

good evening,
I have signed the petition, Qais. I saw it on FB too. Now, I hope, more people will join.
good luck!!!