Ethnic Cleansing in the Jordan Valley

A chilling account of the ethnic cleansing of the Jordan Valley, in preparation for its annexation. The eastern side of the 'Fence' is being built, and Israeli agricultural combines like Agrexco (Carmel) are reaping the benefits, while strangling Palestinian farming possibilities. This epitomises the most brutal and blatant land grab, and the further erosion a Palestinian state to enmeshed slivers of land.

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PLANNING RIGHTS IN ARAB COMMUNITIES IN ISRAEL: AN OVERVIEW

Planning in Israel is not unconnected with the larger political, national, and economic context, and not infrequently appears to reflect biased priorities on the part of decision-makers. The result is a sense of ongoing discrimination among large segments of the population attributable to, among other things, discriminatory planning.

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Israel's E1 Plan: Isolating East Jerusalem

Amid the chaos of the Israeli army's abduction of Palestinian member of parliament and Secretary General of the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Ahmad Sa'dat (among other activists) last Tuesday, 14 March 2006, international attention has been distracted from Israel's continued policy of expanding its illegal settlement infrastructure in and around occupied Arab east Jerusalem.

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THE WALL - A Line in the Sand

Just north of this city, you can climb to the top of a bluff overlooking part of the dark concrete barrier that is slowly snaking its way northward along the West Bank. For now, it stops abruptly in a cloud of construction dust at a makeshift checkpoint a few hundred yards from here. But at dusk, its future path is outlined by a necklace of lights. Following routes traveled by Israelis, the lights turn eastward, to trace the contours of barren hills before coiling tightly around the Kochav Yaakov settlement.

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The Mountain

The West Bank is distinct in its topographical extremities, ranging from between 400 meters under sea level, at the shores of the Dead Sea, to about 1,000 meters in the high summits of Samaria. The fact that the conflict is ‘played out’ in a mountainous region influenced the emergence of particular forms of engagements and relationships. Israeli state planning made strategic use of height. It adopted the mountainous landscape into an instrument of domination and power by placing settlements on the hilltops and laying them out as optical devices according to geometric systems that maximize visibility. By strategically overlooking the lower valleys where most Palestinian villages are located the settlements precipitated the creation of two parallel and self-referential ethno-national-geographies that manifest themselves along the vertical axis in the physical ‘above’ and ‘below.’

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