This wonderful piece about a Palestinian farmer was published two years ago in GRAIN's Seedling magazine. But today it remains every little bit as timely.

Sharif Omar

Sharif Omar is a farmers’ leader in Jayyus, a small Palestinian village in the West Bank. Jayyus is not far from the green line – the border between Israel and the West Bank established in 1948. When the Israeli government began to build a concrete wall to separate Israel from land in the Occupied Territories that might eventually become a Palestinian state, they did not follow the green line. They routed it in such a way as to embrace the illegal Israeli settlements, and in the process hived off a good deal of Palestinian farmland. Jayyus is one of the villages that the wall has cut off from its people’s farms.

It is impossible to say how long we have lived in Jayyus. The farms have been handed down for generations, and there are huge extended families. The farms next to my land belong to my cousins, and the land beyond that to more distant cousins. Jayyus is an old village. Archaeologists have found stones from Roman times and clay and glass pots from Roman or even Greek times. Some of my olive trees are thought to be more than 1,000 years old. So we feel that we’ve always been here. Now, coming forward into my lifetime, as you know, in 1947 UN Resolution 181 gave the Palestinians 51 per cent of historic Palestine, and the Jewish settlers 49 per cent. Palestinians refused this because they possessed 92 per cent of the land at that time and the settlers possessed only 8 per cent. There were 600,000 settlers and 2.5 million Palestinians. The Palestinians were deceived when the Arab armies, led by Glubb Pasha, ordered them to put down their guns, saying they would fight on their behalf. There wasn’t really a battle, and the Israelis got 78 per cent of Palestine and left us 22 per cent. And now, if the Israelis achieve their plans with the wall, they will leave us approximately 13 per cent of Palestine, and it will not be in one place, it will be in five compartments. And Gaza will be separate, so I don’t believe that we will have a state if we have this wall.

To see the rest of the story:
http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=474