Activities with the villages located in the seam zone. Thur. 06.06.13
Last week Tami Cohen, Miki Fisher, Miriam Shayish and Karin met at Karin’s home to discuss the continuation of our activity in the seam zone, the form it should take and its goals. We spoke of the need to focus on obtaining information about what’s happening in villages whose lands are in the seam zone beyond the fence, making a list of the lands (as much as possible), their accessibility, the gates associated with them, the situation regarding access permits to them, collecting and organizing the information and, in particular, alerting the relevant authorities in the DCO and higher, and ongoing follow-up in the field of responses to our alerts. We divided the list of villages among ourselves and began working.
Jubara – meeting with A., the head of the village
Miki Fisher, Miriam Shayish
On 1.5.13 construction was completed on the fence that cut off 25 dunums of olive trees from the land of the Jubara family, and 10 dunums of olive groves and fields of za’atar belonging to the Uda family. Two gates were put in the fence, one near Kafr Zur and the other at Aras. Residents of Jubara were told that the nature of the gates had to be determined (seasonal, agricultural, other) so that arrangements could be put in place to open them. As of today, a month and a half after the fence was finished, Israeli DCO staff haven’t yet come to conduct the required inquiry. The gates are closed, the groves that have to be prepared for the olive harvest are inaccessible and the za’atar fields must certainly have dried out long ago without cultivation and irrigation. More than 1000 trees were uprooted during construction of the fence and moved to the village – isn’t that simply a way to annex the land?...
The villagers don’t agree to our suggestion that they request the gates be opened for a few days so they can carry out the necessary work, since such a request might set a precedent for an undesirable arrangement and because the land belongs to them and they want daily access to it, as in the past. They say that the fence cut off much agricultural land from the neighboring village of Far’oun and they’ll also need gates and permits (we intend to visit Far’oun on our next trip).
The discussion moved on to politics, the possibility of another intifada and Israel’s inability to understand that Abbas is the last remaining obstacle to its eruption, their nostalgia for the time they could visit their Israeli relatives and to see the homes that were taken from them.
On our way back we saw extensive development work in S’la’it – they’re called “settlements ‘lite.’”