Palestinian farmers are being treated like criminals

Ha'aretz - Amira Hass
Under the cover of the incessant noise from the roads in the Hebron district, an anonymous Arab is perpetrating a serious crime: With a small hammer, he is digging a cistern so he can collect rainwater on his rocky land. Other such criminals have other methods of carrying out their evil schemes - which is to say, to prepare their land for cultivation of vegetables, grain, grapevines or almond trees.

"When someone builds a terrace on his land, he does it by taking a stone from the ground and adding it to the supporting wall once a month or once a week at most, so that it will be hard to discern the change," a Hebron resident said, explaining one of the methods.

Experience shows that if you use heavy equipment to rehabilitate the land, it immediately attracts Civil Administration inspectors and local settlers, and is followed shortly afterward by stop-work injunctions.

In the spirit of the popular saying along the lines of "Give a man a fishing rod rather than a fish," the European Union has been devoting attention and money to Palestinian farmers in recent years......

"And we were actually convinced that the Palestinians and Israel have a common interest: developing Area C, which supports the Palestinian economy, and projects that suit both sides in terms of the environment," said a European diplomat - who discovered he was mistaken.

Over the past two years, the Civil Administration in the Hebron area has issued dozens of stop-work orders to Palestinian farmers trying to reclaim, rehabilitate and prepare the land on their property. That is how European officials, representatives of the donor nations, discovered that Palestinians "are not allowed to move a stone or plant a tree or collect rainwater on their land without the approval of the Civil Administration," as one of them told Haaretz.....

............Nobody wants to experience what happened four months ago to the family of Rabi'a Jaber . In October, Israel Defense Forces soldiers and the Civil Administration raided the family's dry, rocky 10-dunam plot, southeast of Hebron. An IDF bulldozer scattered the stones of the terraces, turned over the ground and destroyed the cistern...  Full story