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On assignment with the ONE magazine, I traveled to the home of Riham Jahshan, who’s a Palestinian Christian living in Bethlehem. She took me to her land in al-Makhrour, which is a suburb of Bethlehem and one of the few open valleys still left accessible to Palestinians. And gradually their access to the land is becoming smaller and smaller, like so many Palestinians across the West Bank who have land in Area C, which is under full Israeli military control.
Her uncle told me about the time when Israeli settlers came and set fire to their neighbor’s land and how they were lucky that they were able to put it out so that it didn’t continue spreading and destroy all of their agricultural land.
And what’s really striking about all of these stories regarding settler attacks in the West Bank is they mirror each other. It’s the same story over and over again: armed Israeli settlers acting with impunity under the protection — most of the time — from the Israeli military; testimonies from Palestinians about settlers trespassing, burning land, burning agriculture, attacking, abusing Palestinians, shooting Palestinians, all with the aim of forcibly displacing them from their privately owned land so that Israel can confiscate it and then allocate that land to Israeli settlement expansion.
And what’s really not visible for people who aren’t on the ground in the West Bank is how big these settlements already are. These settlements are everywhere, most of the time located in Area C, which makes up about 60 percent of the West Bank. You can’t drive from one Palestinian city to another without seeing all of these ever-expanding Israeli settlements that are essentially Israeli-only gated communities, that usually start out as small outposts with a handful of settlers and, as more Palestinians are forcibly displaced and more land is confiscated, more Israeli settlers move into these areas, and they get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger until they have universities and schools and pools and villas and bars.
And meanwhile, at the same time as these Israeli settlements are expanding, Palestinians are hindered from building. Palestinians in Area C need Israeli building permits to build on their own privately owned land — building permits that are almost impossible to obtain, whether it’s for a wall to surround agriculture, or whether it’s for a pen for sheep, or whether it’s a home for a son who just got married.
Read more about Riham’s story in the ONE magazine web exclusive, “The Last Open Valleys.” Then learn about Israel’s E1 settlement expansion plan and its impact on Palestinian communities in the feature article, “Piece by Piece,” in the December issue of ONE.