Naivety or fault?

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By: Razan Zuaiter - 05/08/2009 

 

It is naive to take the burning of trees in Mansheya and Qas on the Palestinian-Jordanian border by the Zionist enemy in isolation from the incidents of deliberate and systematic burning of trees in the Jordan Valley that occur almost on an annual basis. It is naive not to conclude that there is a deliberate plan for the elimination of agriculture on the entire border with Jordan on both banks of the river and through multiple satanic means. And we can not view this crime as accidental or separate from the strategy against the farmers in the Jordan Valley in particular and against Jordan in general. And among those means is the release of wild pigs invading Jordanian and Palestinian to damage them. When I asked about how the enemy protects its farms from this scourge, who is responsible for firing it, I understood that Israeli farms are fully fenced, while the Jordanian and Palestinian farms are open to the burning and razing of the pigs' appetite. Some of these pressures come through nefarious means, some donors also as the USAID that has always tried to preach the need to shut down agriculture in the Jordan Valley under the pretext of protecting water resources and the pretext of lack of contribution of agriculture to GDP, ignoring the factors of food security and injustice forced on the waters of the Jordan Valley by the Wadi Araba treaty. And we do not hear the U.S. asking Israel to ease its cultivation, but we hear about the need to open our markets to their products wide open.

This systematic campaign disguised with a mask of peace and normalization on the east side of the river erupts without a mask against the trees and agriculture in the west side. In Palestine, we have noticed and since the beginning of this century that the campaign of uprooting trees is vigorous and systematic as well. In the year 2000,  two hundred thousand trees were uprooted since the Oslo agreement and kept increasing until the numbers now reached a million and a half without the trees uprooted in the Gaza Strip during the recent criminal attack that reached up to half a million trees. In Gaza, for example, 185 thousand agricultural acres were contributing to the seventies and eighties with thirty per cent of GDP that has now fallen to 7.7% as 75% is the proportion of food aid dependency, 75% unemployment, 50% now live below the extreme poverty and 40% suffer from chronic malnutrition.

And as the development expert from the agricultural relief in Gaza, Ahmed Al-Sorani, Says the intensity of agricultural destruction affects the largest Northern and Eastern borders of the Gaza Strip and is not a random destruction, but aims at eliminating the basket of agricultural production and animal population of Gaza. And these spaces are the actual and only way to any urban and population expansion expected in the coming years. 

And here I must say it is not only naive, but is a fault not to support the Gaza Strip and Palestine developmentally directed to save its farming industry and food security if we can not liberate it completely!

And to go back to Jordan, the Israeli strategy is clear towards the Jordan Valley. It insists that its secure borders would be along the river and that the Jordan Valley area, which constitutes 30% of the West Bank announced a closed military zone and so far 21 settlements has been established. And it wants to interfere in how to use the Jordan Valley and aspires to be a partner in the development of the manner they deem appropriate. We have already talked in the past years and in several forums about the repeated and deliberate burning of trees in the Jordan Valley (and you can return to this in statements of the Ministry of Agriculture) and unfortunately, there was no response to our call. We thank God today for this necessity to defend our farms and trees, but we hope that our confrontation be tied to study the Israeli policy of the past and subsequent to the Jordan Valley and not just only at the request of compensation. And we wonder if Jordan objected and showed dissatisfaction with the first fire, would we have seen this indifference and this huge number of new fires? It is clear that Israel is working to isolate the Palestinian farmers in the west of the river from their brothers in the east by building settlements that are growing rapidly. This seems evident in the systematic confiscation of land and human settlement creating a wall separating the Jordan Valley from the shattered remains of the West Bank that is separated by the apartheid wall. Also the destruction of agricultural areas surrounding Jerusalem city secured the expansion of settlements and thus isolates the West Bank from its south and the isolation of East Jerusalem from its vital surroundings.

 

After all that has been said, does logic and experience lead us to explore the nightmare that the Zionists wish for us, and that is to empty the Jordan Valley farms while it is the breadbasket of Jordan to increase dependence on imports and to make the valley - God forbid – one day a place for more settlements?