Printed below is an excerpt from Palestine and the Arabs’ Fight for Liberation by Fred Feldman and Georges Sayad. This is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for June. The item quoted is from the chapter titled "The West Bank and Gaza: a cheap labor pool for Israeli capitalists," which originally appeared in the Militant in the late 1980s. Copyright © 1989 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission. Subheadings are by the Militant.

BY GEORGES SAYAD  
When Israel invaded its Arab neighbors in 1967, it not only sought to capture land but to incorporate more than one million Palestinians into the Israeli work force. Military rule was established in the most populous of the conquered territories, limiting the people’s ability to resist measures designed to drive them off their land and into Israeli factories. At the very heart of this process were the Israeli regime’s land and water policies, which effectively bankrupted the Palestinian farmers.

In 1968 some 50 percent of the West Bank labor force was in agriculture. This was comprised of small farmers who owned their land, sharecroppers, and agricultural wage workers. By 1980 the figure had dropped to 26.3 percent.

In the Gaza Strip, where the level of economic development was lower, the economy centered on citrus plantations employing wage labor. Agriculture accounted for 90 percent of exports and 40 percent of employment. But by 1980 only 18.3 percent of the work force was in agriculture.

As of 1980 more than 49 percent of the total active labor force in the West Bank and Gaza was employed across the pre-1967 borders. In the Gaza Strip alone, it was 65 percent.

After the 1967 conquests, the Israeli military administration began wholesale expropriations of Palestinians’ land. By 1981 one-third of the land in the West Bank had been taken out of Palestinian hands. The usual procedure was for the army to declare an area indispensable to security, seal it off, and force the farmers off the land. Fraudulent sales were engineered, taking advantage of the fact that incomplete record-keeping under the Ottoman Empire and British colonial rule often made it impossible for Palestinians to prove title even though their families had worked the land for generations. Israeli policies also blocked farmers from using their land. The military government then confiscated it because it had been left fallow. Some villages lost half their land to Israeli confiscations. Those farmers who resisted faced arrest for "terrorist activity," destruction of their homes, expulsion from the country, or spraying of their crops with defoliants.

Much of the confiscated land was turned over to Israeli settlements. By 1988 there were 130 in the West Bank and Gaza. In Gaza, one-third of the land had been turned over to some three thousand settlers. With military considerations in the forefront, the settlements are built on hilltops overlooking Palestinian villages. Surrounded by huge coils of barbed wire, they resemble forts more than farming communities, and are strategically located amid clusters of Palestinian villages to keep the latter separated and terrorized. The settlers, often right-wing émigrés from the United States, are armed. They get aid from the government and from Zionist organizations.  
 
Discriminatory water policy
Land confiscation has also produced a marked deterioration in the quality of the remaining Palestinian-owned land, which is being overgrazed. The declining quality of the land lays the basis for forcing more impoverished farmers off the land and into the bosses’ pool of cheap labor.

Outright confiscation is supplemented by a discriminatory and restrictive water policy. "Palestinians are strictly forbidden," reports Palestinian professor Yusif Sayigh in the summer 1986 Journal of Palestine Studies, "to develop any springs or other surface or underground water reserves not already tapped and under utilization at the time of occupation in 1967; to utilize any quantities of water in excess of those drawn and utilized in 1967 in already developed sources; or further to develop wells already in use. Thus, while villages are deprived of their vital well and spring water and underground reserves, neighboring Jewish settlements, built on expropriated Palestinian land, can be seen to enjoy the luxury of spacious swimming pools, as well as abundant piped water for agriculture, industry, and domestic use." In 1985 settlers in Gaza consumed 3,040 cubic yards of water per capita, while Palestinians consumed 161.

The military authorities have also barred the planting of fruit trees on a commercial scale without a permit, and such permits are rarely granted. This especially targets Palestinian olive, citrus, and other fruit farmers who must replace aging orchards; the citrus growers of the Gaza Strip have been particularly hurt. Numerous orchards have been uprooted by the military.

The Israeli regime has imposed a land tax, value-added tax, and export tax on Palestinian agricultural products while Israeli farmers get tax breaks, subsidies, and credit unavailable to Palestinians. Interest rates on loans to Gaza’s Palestinian farmers in 1985 were running at 36 percent per year for borrowing U.S. dollars, and 95 percent for borrowing Israeli shekels. Arab banks have by and large been closed by military order.

With the advent of Israeli military rule, the traditional export markets for products from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were closed. The regime prohibits exports of West Bank and Gaza products to Western Europe since these would compete with products made in Israel.
 
 
Related articles:
Israeli regime transforms occupation of West Bank  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home