Should Twice a Year Be Enough for Palestinians to Access Their Own Land?

Palestinian families wait in line at the Anin gate at the West Bank wall. State Prosecutor’s Office’s recommended the court to quash the petition.Credit: Nidal Eshtaya

Of the village’s approximately 17,000 dunams (4,200 acres) in the West Bank, 11,000 are trapped between the separation barrier and the Green Line, in a 31,000-dunam enclave. This is the Barta’a enclave, home to 7,000 Palestinians in seven villages, the largest of them Barta’a itself. Around 3,000 settlers also live there in four settlements; there’s also an Israeli industrial zone.

It’s hard to tell that this is the West Bank, not Israel. Construction and other development work in the Palestinian villages is severely restricted. Palestinians who don’t live in the enclave are banned from entering, though a precious few receive a special permit. These include residents of villages east of the barrier whose land is to the west of the concrete wall (until recently a fence), like the residents of Anin.

Grueling journey, long wait

Soldiers open the gate at Anin only on Mondays and Wednesdays, and only twice a day for brief intervals: from 6:50 to 7:10 A.M. and from 3:50 to 4:10 P.M. The gate is about a five-minute walk from the petitioners’ homes, and their land is a five-to-20-minute walk from the gate.

“Before 1948, Anin had about 45,000 dunams,” village council head Mohammed Issa told Haaretz by phone. “Around 27,000 of this ended up in Israel. Since 2002, most of the farmland left to us is beyond the wall. Every single family has land there.”

It’s a highly complicated process to receive a permit to enter the farmland; permits only go to residents whose ownership documents satisfy Israel’s Civil Administration in the West Bank. Plus you have to prove direct kinship to the owners (meaning spouses and children; grandchildren don’t receive permits). All this is subject to rigorous bureaucratic and security vetting. The permit must be renewed every few months, every year or every two years depending on the type of permit.

Anin residents who make it through the screening by the Civil Administration and the Shin Bet security service may enter their land through the Barta’a gate 25 kilometers to the south. While this gate is open every day, it’s a journey of about an hour and a half from Anin, as the route partly consists of dirt tracks that only a tractor or off-road vehicle can traverse.

This far-away checkpoint is used by hundreds of Palestinians from other villages who live in the Barta’a enclave or have permits to cross it, so to pass through there’s a long wait, especially in the morning – the best time for farming.

To begin with, crossing with a tractor requires a permit that puts applicants through a bureaucratic obstacle course. Farmers carrying work tools through the Barta’a gate have to endure a long security check – and then, after around two hours on the road, they must turn back north to drive to their land that’s within view and walking distance of their homes.

The high travel costs also deter the applicants: 80 shekels ($21.20) per day with your own vehicle, or 60 shekels per day by public transport, which isn’t available at all hours of the day.

All these explanations, detailed in the petition by HaMoked’s Meir, failed to persuade the justices. Ronnen sided with the army and the Civil Administration in all aspects, stating that “the only crops currently present on the lands are olive groves that only require seasonal cultivation during the plowing and picking seasons.” She added that “the petitioners do not dispute this claim.”

But the petitioners did dispute this claim. A reply by Meir to the State Prosecutor’s Office’s response to the petition states that before the separation barrier was put up, the villagers grew grains such as wheat and barley, and vegetables such as tomatoes, onions, sesame and cucumbers. The very construction of the barrier and the limitation of days for traversing it forced the farmers to forgo crops that require daily irrigation, care and oversight, Meir said.

The court’s hard line

At a visit to the gate in May, initiated by the army and the State Prosecutor’s Office after the petition was filed, the farmers explained the situation to senior officers, as documented by Meir, who took part in the meeting along with other people from HaMoked. Meir attached to her response an opinion by Bimkom, an Israeli rights group that advocates for equality in planning and has been working for many years with Palestinian communities in the Barta’a enclave.

Providing data and aerial photos, Bimkom shows that many of Anin’s plots of land, which were intensively cultivated before 2000, withered due to entry restrictions. The trees in Anin’s olive groves, which don’t need irrigation, are meticulously groomed.

When asked if the villagers hoped to resume growing vegetables, wheat and barley, Issa, the village council head, told Haaretz: “We’re now talking about guarding and saving what we have, the trees we have.”

He’s outraged by the ruling that the gate will only be open twice a year. “A herd of cows [from a nearby village in Israel’s Wadi Ara area] comes up to our trees and damages them, so we have to be there every day,” Issa said.

The fear is that what happens in other places where the army and the Civil Administration only let farmers enter two or three times a year will happen at Anin: The olive groves will be overrun by thistles and wracked by frequent wildfires, with their yields declining sharply.

In their reply to the petition, lawyers from the State Prosecutor’s Office, Yael Kolodny and Jonathan Berman, claimed on behalf of the army and the Civil Administration that the gate is used by Anin residents with agricultural permits mainly for unauthorized entry into Israel. They said they were basing this on drone footage and an unannounced visit to the gate in late March, when people passing through were questioned. They said many people had a change of clothes with them and some were “dressed formally.” No one passing through carried work tools, the lawyers added.

In response, the farmers told Meir that some of them indeed leave home in clean clothes and change into work garb, which they also wear in jobs in car repair, construction, house painting and other industries. Also, workers passing through the gate usually leave their tools at their plot rather than carry them back and forth. The groomed olive groves, Meir wrote, quoting Bimkom, show that the farmers regularly visit the trees and tend them devotedly.

As for the drone footage, Meir wrote that it was taken in the West Bank and did not show anyone entering Israel. The petitioners, who noticed the drone, say the footage is selective, showing people getting into cars (which the army claims take them into Israel) but not showing those who continue on foot to their plots. The petitioners add that some farmers catch rides in Israeli cars (owned by Palestinian citizens of the state) to reach their land quicker.

Meir told Haaretz that the ruling shows a drastic deterioration in the court’s recognition of the state’s obligations to Palestinians harmed by the separation barrier. She noted that the court approved the building of the barrier back in the early 2000s after the state undertook to reduce harm to Palestinians cut off from their land to the minimum degree necessary, while allowing them reasonable access to their land.

Now, when it turns out that access is not reasonable, the court rejects the farmers’ appeal without a hearing, she noted. “It’s sad to see how little is required for harm to the human rights of Palestinians seeking to work their land to be considered justified,” Meir said.

HaMoked also noticed another troubling aspect of the ruling: The justices ruled that these lands “formally” belong to the “Judea and Samaria area,” the West Bank, which has been occupied by Israel since 1967. This statement indicates that essentially, as opposed to formally, this Palestinian territory, known in military lingo as “the seam zone area,” does not belong to the “Judea and Samaria area.”

Thus there’s just one step between the court’s ruling and the court’s consent to the annexation of land beyond the barrier. The justices know well that only Israelis and foreign tourists are allowed free access to this area, while Palestinians are uniformly banned, and that only settlements and the Civil Administration can carry out construction plans there, while Palestinian local authorities, whose land this is, cannot. After all, the court approved this state of affairs in 2011.

Basically, over 500 square kilometers of land (9.4 percent of the entire West Bank) is trapped between the separation barrier and the Green Line. So the reality is that an enormous chunk of land has essentially been annexed to Israel without a “formal” declaration.

To uphold the state’s promise to let the farmers work their land, 79 gates have been built in the separation barrier. Only five are open all day, 11 are open briefly two or three times a day, and 10 are open for several brief intervals two or three days a week.

With the closing of the Anin gate, this last number will fall to nine, and the Anin gate will join 53 other “seasonal gates” that are only open a few days a year for plowing, picking and sometimes weeding. The people of Anin have until Monday to appeal the decision to close their gate.

This article is reproduced in its entirety.