BEIT IJZA, West Bank — One of the first statements under oath that I took for Al Haq, a human rights organization I helped establish [2], was from Sabri Garaib, a farmer from Beit Ijza [3], a Palestinian village ten miles northwest of Jerusalem. I remember sitting on the porch of his house overlooking the garden and the low, undulating hills planted with wheat and barley that spread out on all sides. All 112 acres, I was told, were in danger of being expropriated by the new Jewish settlement of Givon Hahadasha.
It was 1982. In the many years since then Sabri repeatedly fought the settlers in order to hold on to his land. He would go to the Military Objection Committee to counter claims challenging his ownership. He would appeal to the Israeli high court, using every recourse available. He would go to jail for fighting off settlers who tried to stop him from farming or for removing fences they’d put up. But the settlement kept growing all around his house, claiming his land one acre at a time [4].
Sabri died on April 18. He was 73. It had been several years since I’d gone to his house, and when I visited recently to pay my condolences to his family I was appalled by what I saw. The house was hemmed in on three sides, with only a few yards of space left for a garden between the house and a gigantic steel fence. To get to the front door, I had to pass through a metal gate that is operated from the army camp nearby and walk down a narrow walkway lined with more steel fencing. Two cameras placed by the army monitor all movement through the gate.
Sabri never expressed political views. He had inherited this land from his father and as an only child was determined to pass it on to his 10 sons. This emboldened him. A short stocky man with piercing dark eyes, he would force his way into whatever government office and declare: “I am Sabri and this is what I need.”
He ended up doing better than most. He did lose much of his farmland, but he kept his house. And the last battle he fought, he won. He had opposed the planned construction of the a separation wall, which would have placed his house on the side of the settlement and separated it from his village and the homes of his sons. The wall did get built but along a different path.
For me, Sabri’s death marks the end of an era when it was possible to believe that law could save Palestinian land from Jewish settlers. An Israeli court would never enforce the principle of international law that says all settlements built in the occupied West Bank are illegal. But at first Israel justified its settlement projects by claiming to be using only public land, and we thought we could safeguard the homes and fields of some Palestinians by proving they were privately owned.
But no. An official Israeli government study published in March 2005, the Sasson Report [5], revealed that at least 150 communities in the West Bank were established with no permits or incomplete ones. And the very government that commissioned the study has taken no corrective action. A 2007 report by the Israeli NGO Peace Now found that 24 percent of the land on which settlements stand is privately owned by Palestinians.
After I left Sabri’s house, I drove back to Ramallah, riding through tunnels burrowed under the highways that connect Jewish settlements to the rest of Israel. There’s no escaping the new geography of this land, I thought.
And then another thought struck, perhaps one even bleaker. Israel may have won the battle of settling into the West Bank, but it has lost the war of making peace with its closest neighbors, the Palestinians. And they are Israel’s only hope of gaining acceptance in the Middle East.
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