Between a wall and toxic waste

Fayez has spent much of his life farming land near Tulkarem. Like many of the farmers in this fertile district of the West Bank, he used to sell his produce in bustling markets in the town centre. Since the second intifada began in 2000, Israel’s separation barrier has killed much of this trade. But it is the presence of a nearby chemical factory that has caused the most damage to Fayez’s livelihood. 

The Gishuri Chemical factory was set up in Tulkarem in 1984 after it failed to get a license to operate in Israel’s Telmond settlement due to its damaging effects to the environment and to human health. (Wafa News Agency, 27 April 2005). The surrounding lands have been blighted by pollution ever since. 

Soon after this, Fayez started noticing damage to his crops. He repeatedly saw black effluent flowing out of the factory and damaging his land, but it was when four hundred of his almond trees were killed by a poisonous white dust that he decided to act. 

A group of Israeli and Palestinian farmers brought a joint lawsuit against the factory’s owners, not without drawing some press attention. But legal loopholes, afforded by the Israeli ownership but Palestinian location of the factory, sheltered its owners from having to pay damages. Fayez has received no compensation for the poisoning of his crops. 

Noting that prevailing winds blew the poisons into the West Bank and away from Israel, the company offered the Israeli farmers guarantees that on the rare days when this was not the case the factory would not run. This is how Fayez’s land was spared the hazard – it lies between the city and the Green Line, the de facto border with Israel, and is usually upwind of the factory. Most of Tulkarem’s 60 000 inhabitants are not so lucky. 

But other chemical enterprises started developing in an industrial settlement on Fayez’s doorstep. During the Second Intifada, Fayez found himself at the business end of a bulldozer that headed for his orchards, smartly scooping him up when he refused to move. His wife threw a stone at the driver, drawing blood and forcing him to back off. 

It was a short lived victory: the factory owners had the farm flattened. Fayez replanted, rebuilt and replaced the irrigation system. But suffered two similar attacks, and lost 60% of his land to Israel’s separation barrier. 

Fayez says he does not believe in violence. He fights his battle largely through peaceful demonstrations and the media. But after he rebuilt his greenhouses, the Israeli army opened the wall to allow a bulldozer to ravage once again this inconvenient Palestinian obstacle between Israel and its industrial settlement.

Finally, the Israeli army declared the whole area a “closed military zone” for 14 months. Fayez and Muna said they will nonetheless find ways to enter their blockaded farm and restore its sabotaged irrigation system. 

Their experience is an extreme version of the fate suffered by many farmers in Tulkarem’s outlying villages. Deir al Gushun and Attil, for instance, have lost a quarter of their land, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA). In order to farm, they must run the gauntlet of “agricultural gates,” manned by soldiers and opened at specific times to allow a limited number of farmers to access their land. 

Yet in spite of all this, Palestinians still struggle to farm their land. Farming here is driven by necessity, but also by ties to the soil, and by a knowledge that if they do not work it, it will be taken away from them.