Qalqilya Strangled by Israel’s Wall

All photos by Michael J. Keating

Delegate J. Brady Kiesling (l) listens as Qalqilya farmer Atta Atta reminds Israeli soldiers that they are standing on his land.

WE ASKED OUR hosts to show us Israel’s new separation barrier. They said it was impossible not to see from anywhere in the region. We discovered that the wall does not separate Israelis from Palestinians—Israeli settlers and soldiers often are on the Palestinian side of the wall. Instead the wall separates Palestinians from other Palestinians, and makes every Palestinian town a jail. Within 5 minutes Israel can cage an entire city. The wall will directly affect more than 500,000 Palestinians.

On July 18 we visited the town of Qalqilya, north of Ramallah. Israel’s new wall has surrounded the town and cut it off from the rest of the West Bank as well as from Israel. We wandered around fruit stands in the central marketplace with few other customers. Everyone asked where we were from, heard we were Americans and welcomed us.

Israelis are now forbidden by their government to shop for produce, get haircuts or fix their cars in Qalqilya as they used to. Israel has posted signs saying it is forbidden even to enter Qalqilya. This town will not survive without trade from Israel, and was dying before our eyes.


Qalqilya’s market now has few Palestinian and no Israeli shoppers.

Ringing the city of Qalqilya is its agricultural wealth. The cultivation techniques developed by Palestinian farmers over the centuries are characterized by the intense development of small plots of land, extensive use of greenhouses, and the jealous conservation of water.

Ringing even tighter round Qalqilya is Israel’s wall. Nowhere—except perhaps in Jerusalem—is the lie of security more clearly exposed. In looking at a map of the wall at Qalqilya, it is clear that it wraps tightly around the city, butts up close around other Palestinian villages, yet swings wide and generously around every settlement, thereby allowing for future expansion.

Israel is cordoning off Qalqilya’s fields from its farmers. Farmers can visit their fields outside the wall only when Israeli soldiers open the gates. They open these gates erratically and subject to whim.

Our guide for the day, who asked us not to use her name for fear Israelis will not renew her residence permit, introduced us to Atta Atta, who, until two weeks earlier, had an ornamental plant business with greenhouses on a couple of dozen acres on the edge of Qalqilya. In one night, he told us, he lost a half-million dollar business he’d worked 14 years to build. His family first lost land in 1948. For 35 years he had worked to buy this land, only to see it taken again. He now has no way to support his six daughters and four sons, he said.

Israeli bulldozers destroyed a number of Atta’s greenhouses, and cut off access to the rest when they built the wall. The water wells are on the Israeli side of the wall, he noted. We stared through a locked gate at the crumpled ruins of Atta’s greenhouses. The wall was concrete and six meters high, with a watchtower and electronic sensors to protect the land from its cultivators.


	A farmer and his son wait with permit in hand to pass through a gate to their fields outside Qalqilya. The gate is opened only two or three times a day.

“You know who owns the land you’re standing on?” Atta asked the young sergeant who told us to step away from the wall, after one ambassador had touched it, setting off an alarm. “I do. It’s my land.”

The soldier turned away.

“They don’t want the people,” Atta told us. “Only the land. Every child knows this!”

Next we met Jalal Zaid, a poultry farmer whose chickens are on the wrong side of the wall. When the wall was first built he was not allowed to pass through, and more than 15,000 chickens died. Finally he obtained a permit to work in his own chicken house. That permit was about to expire. Zaid is afraid officials won’t renew it as the area could soon be off limits, because it is near a new military road.

Only landowners can get permits, Zaid explained, and then only sometimes. Always they have to go through a paper chase. Moreover, because his 40 laborers do not have land registry papers, they are not entitled to receive permits to work in his chicken houses.

The gate opens three times a day, depending on the mood of the soldiers, Zaid said. His farm’s egg production has fallen from 1,500 cartons a day to 900. At this rate, he added, wringing his hands, he won’t be able to repay the loans he took out to pay for his new chickens.

Next we drove to Jayyous. The village was on land any negotiated peace deal would place in Palestine. Its orchards and water wells, however, had been placed on the Israeli side of the wall. Farmers without a “security file” could get permits from the Israeli military occupation authorities to pass through a gate—most of the time—to till their fields in the shadow of the electric fence protecting the Israeli settlement of Zufin. The clock is ticking, however.

Left: Sharif Omar won his court battle to keep his farm. Now Israel’s military may confiscate it anyway. Right: Mysterious signs in Hebrew have appeared on Omar’s property.

New Hebrew signs had gone up in the farmers’ fields, labeling sectors “Golda” and “Yisrael.” Jeeps and unlabeled trucks had been spotted going back and forth, our guide said. And now as we looked for Sharif Omar, who owned the land we were driving on, a settler kid with a radio who said he was Shin Bet—security police—accosted us, telling us to turn around. We could not return until after 4 p.m., he said, because military training was under way.

For good measure, when Kiesling asked where he was from, the settler security guard with the walkie-talkie and gun answered, “Israel. And I hate Americans.”

Our guide called her IDF contact, with whom she had cleared our tour. He advised her, most urgently, to get us “the f—- out of there.” As we drove away, we found Omar, owner of the 40-acre farm the settler now guarded, astride his tractor, which he affectionately dubbed his F-16.

Omar, who spoke excellent English, has put seven children through college by farming this cultivated land and harvesting his fruit trees. He told us the Israelis tried to confiscate his land and water wells in 1996, but Omar took his case to court and won five years later.

Now the water and Omar’s farmland will be expropriated on the unchallengeable pretext of Israeli military requirements.

“This land is my paradise,” Omar told us. “It’s my Jerusalem. It’s my Al-Quds.”

As we drove back to Ramallah, our guide told us that, during his five-year court battle, there were days when this vibrant man couldn’t get out of bed, he was so depressed. She was afraid he wouldn’t be able to handle this latest turn of events.

“This is Israel’s way to force Palestinians to leave. It’s a quiet deportation,” she warned. “It’s causing controlled despair, and forcing some people past their limits.”