While Diplomats Debate Land for Peace, Palestinians Are Losing Their Land and Water

By Dr. Thomas R. Mattair

The Abu Tair clan has lived in the village of Oum Tuba, southeast of Jerusalem, for 1,200 years. Its members hold tide to the land granted in 1873 by the Ottoman Turkish authorities, who ruled much of the Arab world at that time. Last year, the clan applied to the Jerusalem municipality for a license to build some houses and a school on some of their open land, but no answer was given. Instead, in early June 1991, the family read a notice in a Palestinian newspaper that the Israeli government was confiscating 150 acres of the family's land as well as adjacent land belonging to other villages in order to build a new Jewish settlement.

The villagers of Oum Tuba will not be able to build housing for their expanding population. The almond and olive trees and grape vines planted on this land that provide crops for consumption and for sale will be bulldozed. There will be no land left for the grazing of this village's sheep. Their legal appeals will fall on deaf ears.

This story has been repeated again and again in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, and in the Gaza Strip as well, during the 24 years since Israel occupied the land and subjugated the people during the 1967 war. Along with the widespread confiscation of private property of Arab landowners in order to make way for the construction of new Jewish settlements, Israeli authorities have systematically exploited the water from the West Bank's aquifer by digging wells deeper than existing Palestinian Arab wells, by preventing the Palestinians from deepening their own wells or digging new ones, by restricting the amount Palestinians can draw from their wells, and by charging Palestinians about six times as much per cubic meter of water from the aquifer as Israeli users are charged.

Israel took 500 million cubic meters of water from the aquifer last year for Jewish settlements and for Israel itself, whereas the Palestinian Arab intake from the aquifer was reduced to 100 million cubic meters to provide for villages, towns, cities, people and farmland. As a result of the curtailed Palestinian consumption of the aquifer's water, the villagers of Kufr Ein had water piped in only one day per week this summer, farmers in Jericho could plant crops on only 30 percent of their cultivable land this year, and average use in some areas of the West Bank has dropped below the 44 liters per capita per day that the UN indicates is necessary to maintain minimal health standards. Inasmuch as the West Bank's aquifer is being over-utilized by about 80 million cubic meters per year, Palestinian access to this traditional water source will further diminish in future years.

In early July, Housing Minister Ariel Sharon promised an enthusiastic audience at Maale Adumin, a Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem which may soon be the first such settlement to achieve the status of a city, that Israel would never withdraw from the occupied territories and that the ambitious settlement program the Israeli government is implementing with haste will continue.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir regularly makes the same promises. Palestinian Arabs, on the other hand, can only watch the continued seizure of their land and water. Thousands of acres of land and hundreds of millions of cubic meters of water have been taken from them just since Secretary of State James Baker's first meeting with Palestinian leaders on March 12 of this year in Jerusalem.

In December of 1987, frustrated and angry with Israel's occupation policies, the Palestinian population erupted into an intifada "rising up and shaking off," that initially took the form of throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers and settlers throughout the occupied territories. Almost 1,000 Palestinian people, many of them children, teenagers and women, have died as the result of Israeli gunfire since the intifada began.

Fourteen year old Ibrahim Muham Abu Safiyyeh, from the village of Beit near Ramallah, was shot dead by Israeli soldiers in early June when he refused to for identification after soldiers had t stoned in the area. Tens of thousands of Palestinians again, many of them child teenagers and women have been wounded, many of them left quadriplegic or paraplegic as a result of Israeli gunfire.

Many of those, like 16 year old Fikri dul Rahim. of Tulkarm, a paraplegic since being shot by Israeli soldiers in July 1990, v killed or wounded while confronting Israeli military patrols or spray painting political graffiti on the walls of their refugee can towns and villages. However, there are o~ victims of random and unprovoked brutality as well. One of them, 25 year old 01 Manasreh, was shot in late June from a range of one meter by a Jewish settler who stop a taxi at gunpoint on a road near Hebron fired pointblank through the open window at the driver and at Omar Manasreh, leaving him a paraplegic. According to Dr. Fan Abdel Rahmin, the director of E Jerusalem's Makassed Hospital, the permanently disabled are an economic burden on their families that charitable institute cannot begin to alleviate.

Currently, about 14,000 Palestinians imprisoned in the territories, many of them never having been tried. Thousands m, have been imprisoned in the past and eventually released. According to Israeli reserve soldiers and Israeli human rights organizations such as B'Tselem, many of these pioneers are tortured and beaten until they p vide names of others for Israeli military E security forces to go out and apprehend

Ari Shavit, an Israeli soldier who recently did reserve duty at the Gaza Beach Internment Facility, reports "hair-raising human screams" coming from Palestinians being tortured by the Shin Bet, Israel's internal security police, in the camp's interrogation sections. "And our ambassadors in Washington have explained to the networks over and over that we are the good guys and they are the bad guys, " he writes. "And no one has risen to silence them in shame. No one has brought them a cassette with the screams. "

In addition, extended families of 15 to or more persons are exposed to the hot summer sun and the cold winter rains after Israeli military government has routinely demolished all or parts of their houses, particularly their roofs, as "collective punishment" for the violent resistance of one family member, in many cases a teenager. This is the fate of the extended family of Mar Moloch, a suspected Faith activist from the village of Kagawa Been Jedi in the West Bank. And it is the fate of the family Kaman Faith Ottoman Abu Seethed, a suspected Islamic Jihad supporter from the Gaza Strip.

Palestinian leaders who have met repeatedly with US Secretary of State James Baker this year fear that they may lose popular support for their continuing diplomatic efforts if they continue to have nothing to show for such concessions and compromises as recognition of Israel's right to exist, their acceptance of a two state solution, their willingness to form a joint delegation with Jordan for upcoming peace talks an consider a solution involving a less than fully independent Palestinian state that demilitarized and confederated with Jordan.

Being able to trace their ancestors living in Palestine for more than a thousand years before Zionist immigrants came to build Jewish state at the turn of this century, Palestinians like the Abu Tiaras are stunned when Shamir calls them "brutal, savage invaders. " While they bravely assert that' force on earth can stop us from protecting land, " the Shamir government's policies and the US economic and military assistance that make them possible mean that the Tiaras and others like them will continue to lose their land and water if the US does not link its aid to a cessation of Jewish settlement activity while the peace conference considers the future of the occupied territories. As Dr. Faro Abdel Rahmin insists, however, "We are human beings. We deserve self-determination, not to be kept on reservations like American Indians. We hope peace will prevail, so we can enjoy our lives like most people on earth."

Dr. Thomas R. Mattair has taught at Kent State University, the University of Southern California and Cornell University. His article on The Bush Administration and the Arab-Israeli Conflict appeared in the Spring 1991 issue of American-Arab Affairs. He traveled in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the summer of 1991.

SIDEBAR

Living Under Israeli Occupation

The Toll of Human Rights Violations by Israeli Forces Since Dec. 9, 1987

Deaths: 968

Injuries requiring hospitalization: 115,970*

Expulsions: 66

Administrative detentions: 15,100

Curfews: areas with 10,000 + population under 24-hour curfew (Plus almost constant curfews over entire West Bank and Gaza from Jan. 16-Feb. 28, 1991)

Land confiscation (acres): 94,825

House demolitions/sealings: 2,013

Tree uprootings: 118,735

Source: Palestine Human Rights Information Center, Jerusalem/Chicago, (312) 271-4492. Figures through July 31, 1991.

*Estimated number