For the past week I've been staying in Palestinian village of Zeta just 2km from the Green Line in the occupied West Bank. What is someone with a good job and a nice house in
London doing in a warzone at Christmas you may wonder.
And it is a warzone. On average 4 Palestinians have been killed every day by the occupying Israeli army. That might not sound like much, but scale that up to the UK population and that's about 40 people a day.

Imagine that Britain was under occupation by a foreign military power which was killing 40 people a day - 85% of them civilians.

How would that feel? Imagine that that occupation had been continuing for the last 35 years, condemned by every country in the world except the occupying power and it s
paymaster - but in practice ignored.

If you can imagine how it feels then you can understand why I'm here.

Just over a year ago I decided to volunteer with an
organisation called the International Solidarity movement.
ISM volunteers travel to the occupied territories to take part in programmes designed to highlight the plight of
Palestinians to the world and simultaneously try and limit the brutlality of the occupation. The Israeli army generally don't like to harass and murder people when internationals are watching.

Zeta is a village of around 4000 inhabitants. It's history like many Palestinian villages is a tragic one. In 1948 90% of the farmland that the farmers of Zeta owned was stolen by the newly formed Israeli state.

In 1967, 8000 people fled Zeta when Israel invaded. 67 houses, the school and health clinic were destroyed by the Israelis. The remaining houses were saved in part because of the presence of Internationals who "stood by them". After 35 years of violence and persecution under military occupation, the villagers face a new challenge: Sharon's Wall.

Construction of the "Security Fence" began earlier this year. Intense speculation surrounds the construction. " At Camp David the Israelis proposed they would take 5% of our land. Arafat refused. I think this is the 5% and they're just going to take it anyway." says Tawfiq Sayed Ahmed, one of Zeta's many farmers.

In fact human rights groups who have been trying to plot the course of the wall from information they glean from goverment reports, calculate it will effectively annex some 10% of the the West Bank.

Instead of following the green line, the unofficial border between the West Bank and Israel, the wall veers into Palestinian territory, slicing off huge chunks of land and in some cases whole towns and villages.

The land around Zeta is some of the most fertile in
the Middle East. The plains of Tulkarem are crowded with orange, lemon and olive groves interspersed with row upon row of greenhouses. Blessed with ample water, good soils and climate, this area produces more than 60% of the fruit and vegetables comsumed in the West Bank. Palestinians have been making this area bloom for some time now. You can see
why Israel might covert its neighbour's land.

Of Zeta's 1800 donums of farmland, 900 will either be consumed by the construction of the wall or will be cut off from the farmers lying on the Israeli side of the wall. This 900 donums contains 160 greenhouses and 6200 trees mostly olives.THe 90% of the population of Zeta who depend on this land for their livelihoods will be losing half of their land.

Construction of the section of wall around Zeta began on October 15th 2002. Ahed Eid was given 15 minutes notice to move his greenhouses - a job that would take 3 days. There are no planning enquiries or compulsory purchase orders with financial compensation here. This is unashamed and
naked power. Greenhouses and olive groves were simply
bulldozed flat on a swathe of land 80m wide. Some of the farmers have seen plans of the wall. Rumours abound about the fence and the location of gates. Best estimates are that a gate for farmers will mean a 6km
round trip.

For Tawfiq Ahmed the choice is stark. If he plants his
green houses on the other side of the wall for the next year, he may not be able to harvest them when the wall is complete and the investment in plants will be lost. If he doesn't plant them then he risks losing the land under
Israeli law on the basis that he has failed to continue to plant it.

The Israeli government say that the fence must be seen
in the context of the suicide bombings against its citizens. A more appropriate context might be the 40% of the West Bank and Gaza already effectively annexed by illegal settlements and the transformation Palestinians towns and villages into open air prisons, blocked in checkpoints and roadblocks and cut off from each other by settler only roads, controlled by patrols and curfews and now slowly being encircled by an 8m high concrete wall.


Footnote

one olive tree yelds, per year, 20-25 kilos of olives
1 kilo = 17 shekel
1 greenhouse = Us$9000