Last week I blogged about Israeli shootings of young Palestinians who were protesting Israeli expansion in Azzoun in the West Bank. Why are they protesting? The famous Israeli separation fence travels across Palestinian farmland in the area, well inside the Green Line representing the '67 borders.
In fact, the fence at Azzoun plays a role in the plans of Lev Leviev, the diamond merchant and notorious colonizer of Palestinian territory. One of his settlements, Zufim, is built on land near Azzoun. You'd think that the fence would travel just east of that illegal settlement. But it doesn't; it travels nearly 2 miles to the east of the settlement, gobbling land from Azzoun. Why? Because Zufim has plans to add an "industrial zone" on that land, and the fence is accommodating that future expansion. The wall thus gives Zufim space to expand by something like 10 times its current size, grabbing an additional 250 acres of Azzoun's farmland. And though an Israeli court ruled that the fence is not performing a security function here, just a landgrab, the army has ignored an Israeli court order to move the wall back.
David Bloom of Adalah-NY says the industrial zone is to be built by Leviev's Leader company, which appears to be the sole developer of the settlement. Bloom goes on:
I wonder whether that industrial zone is intended to be for Palestinian workers. This is an apartheid scheme Meron Rapaport has written about: give the farmers jobs in Israeli "estates" built on land their ancestors proudly tilled for centuries. And so passage into these industrial zones would not require entry into Israel proper.
It would be just like Leviev to take the natives' resources and put them to work in factories he's built, like his diamond polishing plants in Namibia — and Angola — which he claims are a great benefit to the local population.
I described the idea of putting Jayyous farmers to work in Zufim here ( in the last section called "the industrial agenda") and noted that David Makovsky of WINEP told Congress that Palestinian residents of Qalqilya (the large city on the other side of Zufim) would be willing to accept the loss of their lands if they were compensated. In his testimony,
Makovsky that "there is hardship" for Palestinians impacted by the
fence, but asserted that most "are very happy to hear the Israeli
government coming out this week with a 2-billion shekel or $500 million
program on the hardship. I happened to speak to the mayor of Qualqilya,
and I saw the wall on the Palestinian side, and I asked him, I said,
'if there was a compensation program to offset some of these hardships,
would you be for it?' He said absolutely. "
I never met a Palestinian who would accept compensation for
their land–regarding it as their ancestral and cultural heritage, the
selling of which amounts to collaboration with the Israeli occupiers
A common point raised is that the real purpose of the wall is political, to confiscate the most arable Palestinian land & water resources — there are six wells in Jayyous, trapped behind the wall — and to enclose the settlements inside Israel, de facto annex them, and allow them to expand on the confiscated lands. In both Bil'in and in Jayyous/Azzoun (plus a third village, Nabi Elias, which Rapaport mentions in his article), the path of the wall was deliberately drawn to allow Leviev to expand his settlements.
Here is a letter from residents of Bil'in and Jayyous to the actress Susan Sarandon, asking her to repudiate Leviev, whose store in New York she has patronized.
One more thing: some liberal Zionists will tell you that the Israel court has changed the wall route where necessary, weighing the "security" needs of the settlements against the humanitarian impact on the Palestinians whose land is being stolen. In fact there have been few improvements, and the army often ignores the court orders to move the wall anyway. As this article I wrote a year ago shows, the court is worse than useless.
