By: Meir Margalit
Friday, March 02, 2007
Security forces and inspectors with the Interior Ministry and the Jerusalem municipality raided the village of Walaja at dawn on Tuesday, January 18, declaring it a closed military zone. The forces embarked a campaign of demolition and intimidation. After four hours of mayhem, the forces left behind them five buildings, and seven livestock and chicken pens destroyed. It was nothing new or surprising for the residents of Walaja. The military preparations that preceded the raid left no doubt that the day was nearing when the bulldozers would come and another round of demolitions would begin in the village.
The residents of the rural village of Walaja, located between Jerusalem and Beit Jala, have been exposed to extreme suffering. They were expelled from their lands in 1948, after which they moved to a hilltop overlooking the ruins of their village. The relative calm that characterized life in the village was lost when the authorities discovered in the early 1980s that half of the village is located within Jerusalem's municipal borders. Until that time, Walaja was considered a part of Bethlehem. Zariz, an attorney, discovered this fact when he filed a petition to prevent the Civil Administration from demolishing a house in the village. After investigating Zariz's claim that the Civil Administration did not have the authority to demolish the home because it was inside Israel , it turned out that after the battles of 1967 calmed, when surveyors had begun drawing the boundaries of Jerusalem , they had accidentally split the village in half, incorporating the western half into the city of Jerusalem . The municipality of Jerusalem—which knew nothing of this until the early 1980s—then went about making the western half of the village “an inseparable part of the city of Jerusalem.” Nevertheless, the city did not extend municipal services to the village, claiming there was no way to link the village with the city of Jerusalem. Moreover, although the area was proven to be part of state territory, the Ministry of Interior refused to give village residents an Israeli identity card, which produced an odd, humiliating situation: While they incorporated the village lands, they refused to incorporate its residents. Thus, although the village is inside Israel, its residents are not registered with the Population Registry, and to this day, they bear Palestinian identity cards.
As noted above, it is difficult to surprise the residents of the village, although they admit that they have never been subjected to the sort of boorish behavior they experienced recently. In the last few years, more than 20 buildings have been demolished, and demolition orders have been issued for 30 more buildings. For now, the orders have been frozen thanks to a legal measure that would require a structural plan for the village. In this downtrodden village, home to about 2,000 souls, one in every two homes is in danger of being demolished, since they were built without a permit. That is, the houses were built illegally. In fact, Walaja residents live an unbearable life. They cannot obtain building permits in the village because there is no municipal structural plan. They have thus grown accustomed to building without permits. Or, as they say, they build because the “law of life” is much more important than planning and construction laws. The law of life requires everyone to build a home for their children. Over the years, new construction has spread west of the village to the part that is inside the Jerusalem municipality, but is still part of the village.
It is not simply a matter of house demolitions. The state of Israel has targeted the village. For a year, security forces have been tightening the noose around the residents night and day, the pretext being that they carry Palestinian identity cards. Officers with the Border Guard habitually raid homes in the village, filing ridiculous charges against them, such as illegal residence in Israel. The village men are taken to jail, then to court, where they are fined and thrown on the other side of the checkpoint. Of course, they return once more to their homes, and the scene is repeated endlessly.
Recently, Walaja residents have filed a petition with the courts, which banned the state from harassing them because they do not have blue Israeli identity cards. But the security forces are clever: Since the order was issued, they have begun confiscating the residents' cars, including the one bus in the village, claiming they are driving in Israel without a permit. Many village residents say that following every raid or demolition, they receive a phone call from someone with an Arabic accent offering to buy their land. The residents have no doubts that the anonymous caller is a real estate broker working for the government or one of the settlers' groups trying to gain control of the village's land.
The secret of the abuse of the villagers is the plan, whose existence was revealed about a year ago, to build a new Jewish settlement. The settlement is set to cover 3,000 dunams and contain 13,500 housing units. The new settlement—naively named Givat Yael, after the spring at the foot of the hill—is set to be the link between Jerusalem and Gush Etzion, which would allow geographic continuity between them. An examination of the plan shows that the land deals to build the town began ten years ago. The Jewish National Fund's Himnuta Company bought the lands, in a deal that was almost completed until recently. At that time, vague news reached the residents of Walaja about the sale of village lands through forged documents, which created a wave of disputes, during with one family was expelled from the village and one villager was killed.
At that point, the state realized that given the legal complications, it would not be able to implement the larger part of the plan. Thus, from the caverns of memory, it dug up the long-forgotten Absentee Property Law, the last attempt to gain control of the village lands. This is why the state is methodically demolishing any building in the Israeli part of the village. This is why it refuses to grant the villagers residency permits and arrests them for illegally residing in Israel. Their existence on Israeli land has frustrated the possibility of declaring the lands absentee; as long as the land owners stay in the Jerusalem part of the village, they cannot be considered absentee. In turn, their land cannot be taken, except through a very long, expensive process, one the High Court of Justice does not always approve. This is why the Interior Ministry is lying in wait in the village. The harassment began last year when the planning stages of the project were completed and the state wanted to implement it. But the existence of the villagers on Israeli territory is holding up the entire project. Thus, the state is doing its best to clear the area of its residents, to declare them absentee and take over its lands.
What is happening in the village of Walaja encapsulates the entire story of Zionist settlement. That story includes land confiscation, dubious real estate deals using forged documents, the violation of villagers' basic rights, the harassment of villagers, and attacks on their property without the slightest concern for court orders. To all this, we can now add the construction of the separation wall, which threatens to turn the village into a ghetto and separate villagers from their land. Life in Walaja was relatively peaceful until the new neighbor moved in—that is, until the state decided to build a Jewish neighborhood nearby. Once more, as has always been the case throughout Zionist history, settlement comes with the abuse and expulsion of residents, house demolitions, and humiliation. There is now a battle on this land involving land confiscation and the violation of basic human rights. Since its beginnings, Zionist settlement has adopted a hostile method of destruction and separation. It has left no room to live; it is either them or us. Villagers in Walaja—most of them second-generation refugees—have become a target for abuse simply because the state decided to build a Jewish neighborhood in their village. Walaja symbolizes the Zionist history, in which “redeeming the land” has always involved expelling the local population. Those who do not yet understand how successful this method has been since the 1920s can look to Walaja as an example of the course followed by the entire Zionist project. What the sons are doing today, they learned from their fathers. This is how our nation was built. This is the genetic imprint of the Zionist project.
At present the government is pursuing the same course. Even more, it continues to look for a “legal” way to gain control of the maximum amount of land at the minimum cost. It believes that the ends justify the means. It possesses powerful institutions that are keen to grab land using any possible means. At the top of the list is the State Prosecutor's Office, which works to discover any loophole in Ottoman, British, Jordanian, or Israeli law that would allow it to steal land “legally.” In addition to the prosecutor, there are the security agencies, which have become the executive branch of an extreme nationalist ideology. One hundred years of settlement is a sordid story of land theft, which has only brought them and us one calamity after another. The Prophet Habakkuk spoke the truth when he said, “Woe to him that buildeth a town with blood, and establisheth a city by iniquity! [Habakkuk 2:12]”
* Source: www.hagada.org.il, February 5, 2005.
* http://www.hagada.org.il/eng/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=44
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment