Pollution, Apartheid and Protest in Occupied Palestine

By Ethan Ganor / Published in Earth First! Journal, September/October 2005

In late March, shepherds from Tuwani and Mufakara, Palestinian villages near Hebron in the southern West Bank, discovered strange, blue pellets littering their grazing fields. Suspecting these seeds as a possible cause of the mysterious deaths of goats and sheep during the previous week, villagers had them analyzed. The tests confirmed their hunch: The pellets were barley laced with fluoroacetamide, a rodenticide produced only in Israel and illegal in many other countries due to its acute toxicity.

Not just livestock, but also wild gazelles, migratory birds, snakes and other animals were poisoned. Palestinian farmers were forced to quarantine their flocks and stop selling or using their milk, cheese and meat. On April 8, a new poison—pink pellets tainted by brodifacoum, another highly toxic, anti-coagulant rodenticide— was found at a hillside grazing area near Tuwani. Later that month, Amnesty International issued a press release condemning Israeli authorities for failing to clean up the toxic chemicals from affected areas and bring the perpetrators to justice.

Local Palestinians blame Israeli settlers from nearby Maon and Havat Maon, two small outposts south of Hebron, whose male members are notorious for assaulting Tuwani children who are walking past the settlements to school. On April 1, solidarity activists videotaped one Maon security official admitting that he knew that Havat Maon settlers had planted the poisons.

Despite this, no arrests were made, and the crime has spread. In mid-April in Yasouf, a Palestinian village south of Nablus in the northern West Bank, large amounts of identical pink pellets—wheat seeds boiled in brodifacoum— were found.

Industrial Pollution and Dumps

While such poisonings may seem to be isolated attacks by rogue settlers, other forms of pollution in the West Bank are systemic and permanent. The landscape is blotched with Israeli factories. Based mainly on hilltops at Israeli settlements and border-area industrial zones, the factories manufacture products ranging from aluminum, plastic, rubber, fiberglass and cement to batteries, detergents, pesticides, textile dyes, leather tans and military items.

Illegal dumps are another chronic problem. On April 11, more than 200 people from Anarchists Against the Wall, Green Action Israel and the Palestinian village of Deir Sharaf blocked Israeli garbage trucks from transporting trash onto the grounds of Abu Shusha, the West Bank's largest quarry. In 2002, during its brutal "Operation Defensive Shield" invasion, the Israeli army seized this site from its Palestinian owners. Since then, hundreds of tons of waste were moved covertly into the quarry, in close proximity to four wells and only 250 yards from the aquifer that provides Nablus with half of its drinking water.

An investigation by the Palestinian Hydrology Group confirmed that runoff from the dump "has killed medicinal and wild plants in the valley. It has affected the biodiversity and aesthetics of the area. Most importantly, the land is no longer fit to grow olive trees."

Sustainable Apartheid?

While Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's right-wing government and extremist Israeli settlers are the immediate agents of this ecocide, a global system that benefits from and sustains the Occupation is also culpable. The United States supplies the military firepower, financial aid and diplomatic muscle that makes it possible; Caterpillar provides bulldozers that raze homes, trees and fields to build the Wall; and financial institutions like the World Bank bestow essential economic lubricants.

In 2004, the World Bank published two reports outlining a sick version of "sustainable"development for Palestine, which accepts the reality of the Wall rather than its illegality. As the Wall carves its path through the West Bank, isolating communities and annexing cropland, the livelihood of tens of thousands of Palestinian families is destroyed and unemployment becomes epidemic. In line with Israeli objectives, the World Bank proposes to solve this artificial problem by establishing new "industrial estates" alongside the wall where cheap Palestinian labor, working for one-fourth Israel's minimum wage, will be exploited to produce goods for export into the globalized economy.

Already, one such estate is under construction near Tulkarem, on Palestinian land that has been annexed behind the wall. In addition, Israel has asked for funds -- and the World Bank has conditionally agreed to grant them -- to create a more "secure," "efficient" and "growth-oriented" apartheid. Supplementing the Wall, the finished grid will include upgraded, high-tech checkpoints, watchtowers, border crossings with radioactive "naked spy" machines that peer through people's clothing, segregated roads, and underground tunnels to facilitate full Israeli control over Palestinian travel and a continuing monopoly on the land's natural resources. Under the apartheid regime, travel between any of the West Bank's eight population districts—Jenin, Nablus, Qalqilia, Tulkarem, Jericho, Ramallah, Bethlehem and Hebron—has been barred without special permission, and East Jerusalem will be completely cut off by the Wall. Rather than end this matrix of segregation and dispossession, the World Bank wants Israel to "ease internal closures and restore the predictable flow of goods across borders."

This normalization of apartheid not only shreds the basic human rights of Palestinians by confining them to ghettos and sweatshops, it also perpetuates the ecological devastation of the land. True sustainability can be based only upon the July 9, 2004, decision by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) requiring Israel to tear down the Wall and compensate Palestinians for damages caused by it. The decision mandates the international community "not to recognize the illegal situation created by the construction of the wall, and not to render any aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by it."

With international powers unwilling to enforce both the ICJ ruling and United Nations resolutions calling for an end to occupation, Palestinian communities are mobilizing to defend their lands from annexation and destruction. Since September 2002, after Israel began building the Wall's first ring to enclose the then-wealthy agricultural town of Qalqilya, the Palestinian Environmental Non-Governmental Organizations Network has coordinated the Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign (AAWC). AAWC is rooted in nonviolent direct action, organized by Popular Committees Against the Wall in dozens of communities that are directly threatened by the Wall's path.

Budrus is a small village of 1,300 people, located 20 miles west of Ramallah, where two years of fierce resistance have yielded the first case of a community successfully blocking erection of the Wall on their land. Mass rallies united the whole town, as everyone from toddlers to elders converged in targeted fields and olive groves, swarming construction crews with peaceful discipline and raising enough ruckus to prompt Israel's High Court to alter the wall's route, reducing the amount of land expropriated from Budrus from 300 to 15 acres. In March, after Israeli forces stormed a local wedding, opened fire and arrested a teenager, villagers spontaneously tore down 1,000 feet of a barbed-wire fence erected in lieu of the Wall. Yet the cost has been high: Hundreds of village residents have been wounded and detained, and at least one boy was shot dead, by Israeli army retaliation against the nonviolent struggle.

Current resistance is most active in Bil'in, a village of 1,600 also near Ramallah, where weekly demonstrations since February have opposed Israeli plans to annex 60 percent of the community's 1,000 acres via the Wall. With support from international and Israeli solidarity activists, villagers have been employing Earth First!-style tactics. On May 4, protesters chained themselves to olive trees to obstruct the razing of an orchard situated in the Wall's path. On June 1, they locked themselves to a mock fence in front of bulldozers, forcing soldiers to symbolically dismantle the fence before they could remove the activists. On July 20, seven protesters chained themselves inside a six-feet-long metal cylinder placed in the path of the bulldozers. These actions and other creative visual stunts have generated extensive media attention but also a brutal military crackdown. Tear gas, rubber-coated metal bullets, live bullets, shock grenades, curfews and a new device called "the Scream"—a huge loudspeaker that emits painful sound waves—are commonly used to prevent and disperse the demonstrations, which have not yet halted the Wall's construction.

About one-third of the planned 420-mile Wall is finished; 80 percent of it penetrates into the West Bank. Construction is occurring now in the Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Hebron regions, as well as around the Ariel bloc of settlements deep inside the northern West Bank. If completed there and along the Jordan Valley, around 46 percent of the West Bank stands to be annexed. More than 400,000 olive trees, which comprise 40 percent of Palestine's cultivated land and are the staple crop of rural communities, are estimated to have been uprooted during the last five years.

This Fall promises to be another season of intense grassroots resistance. Palestine's annual olive harvest peaks in October and November, and international activists will once again be present to challenge Israeli settler and army actions that deny Palestinians access to their land and the right to harvest their crops.

For more information about the 2005 olive harvest in Palestine, contact the International Solidarity Movement.