Farming Under Israeli Occupation Is Brutal
Israel’s attacks on Palestinians aren’t only carried out through guns and bombs. They also come through its vice grip on agriculture, including its system of “water apartheid.” We spoke to a Palestinian farmer and union leader about his labor under occupation.
Palestinian farmer Atta Jaber ploughs his land in the West Bank on April 4, 2021, with the Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba’a in the background. (Hazem Bader / AFP via Getty Images)
- Interview by
- Alex N. Press
The town of Bardala in the north of the Jordan Valley doesn’t lack water. Springs and reservoirs attracted the village’s earliest residents, and before Israel’s occupation of the West Bank in 1967, residents had plenty of water to sustain themselves and the agricultural activity that is their main source of livelihood. But today, Israel leverages its military control over the village, as it does in the rest of the Jordan Valley, to hoard the resource. It’s a system of “water apartheid,” one that leaves the area’s residents in a state of perpetual uncertainty, always at risk of running out of water.
In 1973, Israelis built a water well in the center of Bardala and began restricting Palestinians’ access to their own water. Instead, the Israelis diverted the land’s water to nearby settlements, a practice facilitated by the Oslo II Accords. To this day, Israeli occupation forces control the vast majority of Bardala’s water.
When Palestinian residents, left with no other choice, connect their own water pipeline to that of the Israelis to access water, the Israelis waste little time in trying to stop them. Accompanied by employees of Mekorot, an Israeli water company that has a virtual monopoly on the resource in the West Bank, they enter the village, dig up the Palestinians’ water pipeline, and disconnect it. If they find holes in the Israeli pipes, which Palestinians use to divert some of the water, they seal them.
In 2017, the Israelis conducted a particularly extreme operation against Bardala’s residents, bringing forty bulldozers and dozens of soldiers to town to destroy and confiscate the Palestinians’ water pipelines.
That undermines the ability of farmers like Rashid Khudairi, president of the Union of Public Institutions for Farmers, to earn a living. Already burdened with crossing checkpoints to bring their goods to market, farmers must endure Israel’s system of water apartheid. It all adds up to a systematic interference with Palestinians’ ability to live independently.
Khudairi, who is also a member of Jordan Valley Solidarity, a network that fights human rights abuses in the West Bank, spoke with Jacobin’s Alex N. Press about the conditions for Palestinian farmers in the West Bank nearly six months into Israel’s war on Gaza. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you tell me about yourself and what types of crops you grow?
My farm is in Bardala, in the north of the Jordan Valley. I’ve been farming for seventeen years, and my grandfather, father, and aunt farmed the land too. Two of my brothers and I created a farmers’ cooperative, and other farmers in the Jordan Valley are part of it too. I grow guava fruit, olive trees, and wheat. This year I grew corn and chickpeas too.
It’s really hard for the farmers, especially in the Jordan Valley. The main resource for farmers is water, and 85 percent of the water in the whole Jordan Valley is controlled through Mekorot, an Israeli company. They refuse to give us our right to water: drinkable water, agricultural water, or any kind of water.
We are really suffering without access to water resources. We have a lot of water, but we’re forbidden to access it because it’s controlled through the Israeli government and soldiers. They’ve created a system of water apartheid, and our community, farmers, and families aren’t even allowed drinkable water.
Just a few days ago, Israeli soldiers came to Bardala and destroyed our water pipeline, leaving the village, and especially the farmers, without water. So water is the main challenge, but it’s also difficult to export our produce. We don’t have a real border; it’s controlled by Israel, and they ask for a lot of taxes. Plus, there are the checkpoints around the Jordan Valley. When I need to send my products to the main market in the West Bank, I have to cross at least one or two checkpoints, which can entail waiting for hours. Farming under occupation is really, really hard.
You said that soldiers destroyed Bardala’s water pipeline just this week. Do they do that a lot?
Bardala is a special story. Before 1967, a Jordanian company dug a water well, and we received around 250 cubic meters of water per hour, and the population was only around three hundred people. So the water was enough for the entire population.
Bardala resisted after the war, so in 1971, Mekorot dug three water wells in the center of our village. Later, they had the head of our village sign a document to stop our water well; in exchange, they said they’d give us water for free. At first, they did that, but in 1996, they began giving less and less of it. They use water as a strategy and policy for destroying our economy and displacing our people outside of the Jordan Valley. The three water wells that the Israelis built in our village give the Israelis 1,000 cubic meters of water per hour. That’s a lot of water and would be enough for the whole population, both Israeli and Palestinian.
The Israeli wells and Israeli water pipeline that take water from our village to the Israeli colony cross our village and run under our houses, so the easy solution is to connect our water pipeline with the Israeli one that takes our water from the village. But every month, Israeli soldiers come with bulldozers and workers from Mekorot — sometimes they close the main road that allows access to our village — and they start digging. When they find our water pipeline, they destroy it.
Sometimes they confiscate it, sometimes they just destroy it and leave it in the village, and they close the holes where we connect our pipeline. But the only way to survive and to resist is to take some water back for our civilians who are suffering.
You’ve told me that the situation for agricultural workers has gotten much worse since October 7. Can you say more about that?
The situation is dire for workers whose jobs are inside Israel or in an Israeli colony in the West Bank. There are some 200,000 such workers in total, and a lot of those workers were detained and then ejected following October 7. It has been hardest for those from Gaza, as they have been ejected into the West Bank rather than allowed back into Gaza. We’re talking about thousands of people who don’t have homes or families here or anywhere to go, and most of them didn’t receive their final paycheck. Israel did not find a place for them to stay or give them any money.
As a trade union in Tubas Governorate, we’ve organized housing for them as well as some food and money. Israel doesn’t care about them. It released some of them out in the middle of the night on the high road near the main Israeli checkpoint. These are people who don’t know the area, don’t have friends there, and some of them tried to hide near the road because they were very scared of attacks from settlers or other kinds of attacks. They weren’t even allowed lawyers or a phone call to their families to explain what had happened.
So thousands of workers who are from Gaza were released from Israeli detention into the West Bank and are not allowed back into Gaza?
Most of them are still in the West Bank. They’re still bombing Gaza, and there is no way to enter or to go back. And it’s really dangerous for them to go back. In my town, fifty of those workers are there. As a trade union, we gave them around six houses, and we discovered their needs: water, electricity, food, and so on. And some families have also supported them, collecting money and food. We’ve organized for some of them to have work too, which means they don’t need a lot of support. When Israel kicked them out, it didn’t give most of them the last month of their salary.
Through our lawyers, we’re pursuing some cases to win them some money back, as is their right. Some of them are sick, and we got them to doctors or a hospital. A lot of these workers who were employed in Israeli colonies in the West Bank already had a hard life before the war. They were paid eighty to one hundred shekels per day, which is not enough to support a family. The Israeli labor law mandates a minimum wage of thirty shekels per hour, and they were paid far lower than that.
It’s hard to find work for these displaced people in the West Bank when you’re talking about this many people. Sixty-five percent of our land is under Israeli control, and we’re not allowed to have water or build houses or factories. We can’t even access our land. The only solution was for people to work inside the Israeli colony — Israel ensured that by controlling the land and water. When we speak about our own authority, the Ministry of Labor or whoever else, we are really talking about authority under occupation, which is authority without authority.
You described the Palestinian authorities as “authority without authority.” Is there anything you wish they were doing to ameliorate the current situation?
We wish a lot. We wish a lot not only from our authority, because we don’t have enough international political support from the West: the United States, England, Europe. If they supported ending the occupation of the 1967 area, we could have a chance for our authority to implement solutions to what we are suffering from. But we are talking about authority under occupation.
As a Palestinian, I don’t believe it’s the Palestinians’ problem. We are under occupation, and why are we under occupation? I don’t believe the United States and the whole Western world have democracy. If they had democracy, why would they be silent about what’s going on here? Why would they still be sending military support to the Israeli government while they see what Israel is doing, which is genocide, as well as different crimes in Gaza and the West Bank and in the Jordan Valley?
Here in the West Bank, we’re talking about water apartheid. Why is the international community still supporting Israel while talking about peace and democracy? How can we talk about peace and democracy when there are more than two million people in Gaza who don’t have food and water? What happened on October 7 is not the whole story. The history is from ’48 to ’67 until now, and so many of the world’s governments are still supporting Israel. We’re starting to feel some change over the past two months as some countries stop sending military support, and I hope we will see more change.
Is there anything you’d like to say to workers in the United States?
All workers should have the same rights and freedoms, whether in the United States or the Middle East. We need to unite to create a world with real democracy, with fair lives and full rights. I hope that workers, and the entire population in the United States, will decide to push for freedom for the world, to stop the United States’ wrong decision to support the Israeli occupation.
I hope they can pressure their government to make peace in the Middle East, and not just for Palestinians. The United States is trying to control the whole world, and they do so by supporting Israel. They believe they can keep power through total control of the Middle East. But they can’t do that forever.
Can you tell me more about the union you’re the president of, the Union of Public Institutions for Farmers?
We created this union in 2016 in the north of the Jordan Valley, and we have thousands of farmer-workers in this union. In the Tubar Governorate area, we have some four thousand farmers. We don’t belong to any particular political party; we belong solely to our workers, and we are fighting for the rights of farmers.
We’ve won free health insurance for our workers, so now any farmer-worker can have free health insurance. Through our lawyers, we’re pursuing cases inside the Israeli courts to fight for workers who are underpaid. We’re also bringing more olive trees for farmers and have a truck that can take farmers’ products from the farms to the market. We’re also organizing workshops on workers’ rights and workers’ safety.
Is there anything else that you think people in the United States should know about the situation for farmers in the West Bank right now?
We see in the media a lot of demonstrations in solidarity with Palestinians, and we really appreciate this solidarity and support. We hope they will keep taking a stand for our freedom and our rights.
I’d also ask the US population to visit and see the facts of life here if they can. Life is really difficult, but at the same time, the people in our area are lovely, and the area is beautiful. Our freedom is the freedom of the world, and this is why international solidarity is so important. We want freedom for workers, freedom for human beings, freedom to have a truly safe world without any more war and bombing and killing.