Israelis Use Palestinian Land Near the Separation Barrier as a Cattle Pasture
Monday, May 1, 2023 at 11:42PM For 20 years Palestinians have been forced to sell many of their sheep, goats and cows due to the takeover of grazing land after the construction of the fence
by Amira Hass 27 April 2023 Haaretz
About a dozen fat cows emerged from an olive grove and nimbly climbed a green hill before disappearing on the other side. On the wide slopes of a nearby hill, 15 or 16 of their sisters were resting and enjoying the sun on a Wednesday early last month.
Their calves didn’t know that their freedom would be short-lived – all the males and about half the females are earmarked for slaughter. According to the Agriculture Ministry, meat consumption in Israel climbed to 196,000 tons last year, up nearly two-thirds compared to seven years earlier.
A few dozen meters from there, a sleepy bull remained alone in the shade of tall pines. It was the end of the iris season on Mount Gilboa in the north, with the last flowers still adorning the sides of an unpaved path on a peak overlooking the Beit She'an Valley to the east.
There, five or six cows stared at a few unfamiliar guests who got out of a car belonging to the organization Kerem Navot, which investigates the Israeli takeover of West Bank land.
Here the land belongs to the Palestinian villages of Al-Mutillah and Jalboun, while the cattle is Israeli. Dry mounds of droppings show that cows regularly roam these routes on the southern and southeastern slopes of Mount Gilboa. Two weeks earlier cows were seen calmly walking around Jalboun's olive grove. The separation barrier separated us, but the cows had no idea they were trespassing.
While wandering almost freely in the Gilboa's pasture lands, the cows enter the so-called seam zone – the West Bank lands caged between the separation barrier and the Green Line.
Nobody has asked the Palestinians for permission to graze these herds on their land, which has served them, their parents and their grandparents for planting, sowing and grazing for decades, and which since the 2000s they've been blocked from, unable to graze their sheep, goats and cattle.
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“Already in 2003, a few months after the construction of the separation barrier on the land of these two villages, we discovered that the [Israelis'] cows were walking around on our land and damaging our olive groves,” said the head of the Al-Mutillah Council, Nasser Menaizel. “These cows are bigger than the olive trees. They don’t eat like sheep, they devour, and along the way they break everything.”
In fact, each cow weighs about half a ton and each bull as much as a ton – and they can crush the trees along their path. They even eat them. Cows can survive by eating trees, a researcher at the British-Swiss agritech company Mootral once told The New York Times. Mootral investigates whether changes in cows’ diet can get them to emit less methane, one of the most harmful greenhouse gases.
Each cow weighs about half a ton and a bull as much as a ton – and they can devour or crush trees in their path.
The heads of the two Palestinian local councils told Haaretz that due to the construction of the separation barrier, which significantly reduced the residents' grazing areas, they've had to sell most of their sheep and goats.
For example, in Al-Mutillah around 400 sheep remain, about a fifth of their number before the construction of the barrier. In Jalboun, the larger village, the herd of sheep is one-third the size of 25 years ago.
“Almost no cows remain, maybe 20 or 25 in each village,” said the head of the Jalboun Council, Ibrahim Abu Al-Rub. “People keep a cow or two for nostalgic reasons.”
In 2013, because the invasion of village land by Israeli herds continued, the Red Cross helped build low fences around plots registered as private – but not around public land – hoping that this would prevent the trespassing.
“But every time, somebody cuts the fence,” Menaizel said. “We and the Red Cross fixed the fence, and it was breached again.”
The Red Cross told Haaretz that it helped the farmers place and refurbish fences on Jalboun’s land "to protect the olive trees from destruction. The [Red Cross] is mandated to protect and assist those protected under the Geneva Conventions," including the Palestinians and their property.
"An occupying power is obliged to administer the territories it occupies for the benefit of the occupied communities," the Red Cross added.
At Al-Mutillah, Jalboun and wherever the separation barrier was built, no sign shows where the seam line – which is within the area occupied in 1967 – ends and the State of Israel begins.
About 6,900 dunams (1,700 acres) of Palestinian land is trapped outside the separation barrier in the northern West Bank, from the Bezek checkpoint in the northern Jordan Valley west to the Jalama checkpoint, where the northern West Bank leads into Israel. Of this, about 4,900 dunams have been turned into grazing areas for Israeli farmers, as calculated by Dror Etkes of Kerem Navot, who in recent months has been following Israeli cattle's invasion of Palestinian land.
During Haaretz’s first tour of the Gilboa with Etkes, in early February, no cows were seen in the seam-line area. But an inspector from the Israel Nature and Parks Authority said the cows grazing there belong to the Ya'arot Hagilboa farm, which is owned by a man named Erez Kahaner. The cows we saw in March were branded with the letter aleph and two serial numbers.
Kahaner says he has about 500 head of cattle and they graze only in the area leased to him, in Israeli territory. “The aleph branding isn’t mine. We’re not supposed to have cows anywhere [in the seam-line area],” he said by phone. “These areas don't belong to the State of Israel, so why should anyone graze there? I don’t know what you saw and where you saw it, but I don't think you saw cows there. And if you did, maybe a fence had been breached.
“The fences, especially fences built by the Palestinian folks, which they try to maintain, are in very bad shape. When they made them we saw that there was a problem; they didn't use high-standard materials and did very poor work. A winter and a summer go by and these fences are finished. Corrosion.”
When asked if the cows come by themselves, he replied, “That could happen,” but he added: “I don’t know about such cases.”
In the seam-line area in the southern West Bank, Israeli-owned cows graze on land belonging to the town of Idna. This is only about 108 dunams, trapped beyond a high concrete wall with barbed wire at the top. But the loss is no less painful.
While the residents of Al-Mutillah and Jalboun don’t know who the Israeli cows belong to, in Idna they know that cows from Moshav Amatzia invade their land. "We used to work in Amatzia," an elderly Idna farmer said last month, referring to himself and a comrade.
Shimi Rosen, who is responsible for Amatzia’s cattle, confirmed that out of about 500 cows, around 50 graze on Idna’s land. “After all, the residents of Idna don’t go out there with their sheep; they can’t go there, they can’t graze animals there,” he said.
He said that grazing there is done with the authorities' approval, “only on condition that we don’t enter the grove and damage their olive trees.”
Rosen added that because he has been in charge only for a year and a half, he doesn’t know which Israeli entity gave permission. He referred Haaretz to the moshav’s financial manager, whose first name is Yossi, but he declined to give his last name or answer questions on the subject.
Etkes says that several times he has noticed cows from Moshav Amatzia roaming in Idna’s olive grove, not just the grazing land surrounding it. But in Idna the people are more concerned about the sheep interlopers in the north of their land. They know that the owner is a Bedouin from the Negev, but they don’t know who he is, the farmers said.
Down south in Idna, the local Palestinians know that cows from Moshav Amatzia invade their land.
The villagers are worried mainly about fires; at least three have scorched their groves beyond the wall in the past eight years, ruining soil as well as trees. Do these blazes originate at the Israeli army firing zone that was declared in the 1970s on the village's agricultural land?
“Several times, when we were working in the grove, soldiers were training near us with live fire,” one of the farmers said. Could the fire be ignited by a different source? They don’t know.
They added that often, when they arrived for the olive harvest, most of the olives had already been picked. Here, as everywhere beyond the separation barrier, Israel has increasingly restricted farmers from reaching their plots and has granted far fewer permits to this end, which are valid for fewer days per year to far fewer people.
“We overcome one obstacle [receiving a permit] and immediately a new one crops up,” Menaizel of the Al-Mutillah Council said. In Jalboun, where the built-up area is nearer the separation barrier, one particularly painful problem is the army's injunctions against construction.
At one time the ban applied to buildings 150 meters from the fence; now it's 200 meters, said Abu Al-Rub, the head of the Jalbun Council. But on the other side of the barrier, the Jewish communities are clearly expanding.
On the Israeli side of the Green Line, the Israel Land Authority allots grazing land to cattle farmers. The authority told Haaretz that in 2021 about 1.6 million dunams had been allocated for grazing, not including seasonal grazing in areas run by the Jewish National Fund and the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, about which no details have been released.
But in the West Bank the requests for allotting land for grazing are sent to the military’s Civil Administration, which did not respond to questions on whether it had allocated land of the villages Al-Mutillah, Jalboun and Idna to Israeli cattle farmers.
According to the Agriculture Ministry, the number of heads of cattle earmarked for slaughter in Israel jumped to 110,000 this year from 70,000 two years ago.
Still, most of the meat consumed in Israel is imported. Only 39 percent of the meat consumed by Israelis is slaughtered here, after most of the animals are stuffed with antibiotics on torturous journeys from Australia and Europe. Of that, only 12 percent of the animals graze in nature during the first months of their lives, before the male calves and about half of the females are transferred to be force-fed, against their nature and needs.
Israeli cattle ranchers cite consumers' health and better treatment of animals when they criticize the lowering of taxes on imported meat and demand an expansion of grazing areas. It makes sense, then, that when there’s accessible land good for grazing and the owners aren’t allowed to go there, the Israeli farmers are tempted.
And so the Israeli lust for meat plays a role, even if a small one, in the de facto confiscation and annexation of Palestinian land between the security barrier and the Green Line.
The seam-line area includes excellent agricultural and grazing land under private and public Palestinian ownership, as well as hiking routes against a delightful landscape. The land and routes have become inaccessible to Palestinians, including the owners. But Israelis have free access; the only “border” for them is the one that's visible – the separation fence or a high concrete wall reinforced by kilometers of barbed-wire fences.
The Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories responded: “The cases described are known to the Civil Administration agencies and are enforced with the existing legal tools. When handling these cases, an ongoing discussion is held with the residents while providing an explanation on the division of the permitted grazing areas, to prevent trespassing onto private land. When we receive a request regarding grazing and damage to private land, this is handled by the coordination and liaison administrations in Judea and Samaria” – the West Bank.
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