Letter from Qalqiliya
By Michael Jansen
December 26, 2002
From: Middle East International (UK)
We were lucky. It took us only an hour to reach Qalqiliya. There was just one lenient checkpoint on the road. At the sole remaining entrance to the town we parked our four-wheel drive vehicle on the side of the road by dozens of lorries and cars and walked up to the armed Israeli soldiers sitting behind a barricade of cement blocks. While one examined our passports, the other inserted cartridges in the magazine of his M-16, waving the barrel in my face. “We have an appointment with the mayor,” we said. “OK,” said the soldier, returning our documents.
As we walked to the other side, my companion remarked: “We were lucky. Sometimes it can take an hour an a half, sometimes more. It depends on the mood of the soldiers on duty.”
We engaged a driver who had shown her round on an earlier visit and began the tour of the wall. He took us to the latest construction site, north of the town, driving down a narrow alley between ramshackle orchard fencing to a huge expanse of rich, red bulldozed earth. The taxi bucked over the rough ground, skirting a massive heap of olive branches and a Palestinian couple loading this detritus of devastation in the back of their truck. Last week this place boasted a stand of century-old olive trees which provided a livelihood for their owners, now anyone can come here to collect firewood. There was no sign of the shorn trunks and roots of the large trees: they had either been carried away by their owners or stolen by the Israelis to be replanted west of the Green Line or in the settlements to the east. On the rise above us squatted a tank, its gun pointed in our direction; below, a bulldozer shifted earth. “This has been done since we came here last week,” my companion remarked.
We turned back, drove through the once prosperous market town, its shops shuttered and streets empty of traffic. The wall is made of smooth, eight-metre-high, grey pre-fabricated slabs stood on end on a wide cement base. It is twice as high as the Berlin Wall and already three times as long, stretching out of sight to right and left. Every 200 metres or so there is a round watch-tower with a fat triangular top. When it is finished the wall will be bordered by a four-metre-wide trench, a barbed-wire fence and a military road. All Palestinian property within 35 metres of the wall has been or will be destroyed.
The wall costs $1m per kilometre and is 115km long so far. Because its course dips deep into the West Bank at certain points, the wall is likely to be two or three times the length of the territory’s 350km border and could cost billions of dollars. When construction is finished, Qalqiliya, a town of 42,000 people, will be enclosed in a round concrete bottle with a long neck closed by a gate through which residents will have to pass to come and go.
The mayor, Ma’ruf Zahran, saw us in his office. “Our lawyer went to the Israeli high court in mid-August to get a ruling to stop the work,” he said. “The court called a three-week halt until the case could be considered. But the contractor ignored it. ‘We receive our orders from the Ministry of Defence,’ they said.” The Israelis do not recognize the municipality since it is part of the Palestinian Authority, so they warn the owners of the land they are expropriating by hanging documents in Hebrew and maps on trees and fences. But the contractors do not follow the maps, they take much more land than on the plan. More than 33% of the town’s land has been taken.
Nineteen wells, 50 reservoirs and nine villages in the Qalqiliya area will be isolated on the western side of the wall. Zahran observed: “We believe this wall will force people to move out to nearby villages or emigrate to Jordan.” Businessmen who have joint ventures with Israelis have already relocated some factories to villages to the east. “Qalqiliya was a wealthy town. We have 70 wells, 365m cubic metres of water, half the water of the West Bank. We exported fruit and vegetables to Israel and the Gulf. The average monthly income of a family used to be $1,000, now it is $60. People live on charity. We had a job creation scheme to clean up the municipality. There were 500 jobs paying $6 a day; 6,000 people turned up.”
