Israeli campaign of West Bank destruction moves on to region’s food basket

Arraba, occupied West Bank – As Kamal al-Uraidi drove a beat-up Volkswagen down the Arraba-Ya’bad road, an otherwise pleasant early September day was disrupted by the whirring clang of bulldozers and the snapping cracks of olive trees being ripped from the ground on both sides of the road.

The destruction stretched for kilometres: Whole fields of olive groves razed, structures reduced to twisted metal, Israeli flags planted as far as the eye could see – all the way to the strategically significant Arraba Junction and even past the red pylons marking the boundary of Area A, which is technically under the control of the Palestinian Authority.

Al-Uraidi passed the first bulldozer completing its destructive work on the al-Fari family’s land on Thursday. Briefly, two Palestinian women from the family could be seen pleading with two soldiers, who kept them back from the machines finishing off the last of the family’s olive groves. The family later said their phones were confiscated during the uprooting so they could not film it and their IDs taken and photographed.

A second bulldozer worked simultaneously further down the road, demolishing more olive trees; on another destroyed plot, families salvaged wood from uprooted trees. Along the road, rubble of demolished homes and structures remained – days, weeks and months after the Israeli military first began widespread razing operations here.

“This is a settlement plan – settlers over there, confiscations here, uprooting trees, Judaisation of the land, expelling people from this land – they want to drive people out,” al-Uraidi said. “Soon, there will be nothing left.”

A ‘state of siege’

Often backed by Israeli soldiers, settlers have long attacked Palestinian-owned homes, businesses and farmland across the occupied West Bank. Such attacks have gathered pace after the launch of Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in October ۲۰۲۳ and have become particularly violent in recent weeks. Experts say the attacks increasingly fit the definition of a pogrom.

In his office, Ahmed Arda, the mayor of Arraba, sat with his top button undone. His phone rings non-stop these days as his town is suddenly hemmed in, he said, by the Mevo Dotan settlement to the west, the newly founded Emek Dotan settlement to the north and several new Israeli settler outposts to the south.

Israeli settlements and outposts across the West Bank are illegal under international law.

The Arraba military camp and four settlements in the northern West Bank were evacuated as part of Israel’s ۲۰۰۵ disengagement – leaving the area relatively free of settler infrastructure for two decades, except for Mevo Dotan to the west.

After October ۲۰۲۳, Arda said ۱,۵۰۰ dunums (۱.۵sq km) of farmland west of Arraba and close to Mevo Dotan were rendered inaccessible by settlers – one dunam equals ۱,۰۰۰ square metres. But the situation has deteriorated dramatically since March, when the Israeli military announced the reoccupation of the Arraba military camp to the east.

Two months later, in May, the first moves came to establish Emek Dotan, a new religious settlement on ۲۲۰ dunams (۰.۲sq km) of Arraba’s land to its north. Caravans and bulldozers soon arrived under military escort.

On August ۹, Emek Dotan was formally inaugurated, with a ceremony attended by Israeli ministers. According to Arda, settler attacks from the new settlement commenced the same day, while settler outposts have since been built to the town’s south.

Around the same time as the opening of Emek Dotan, Arda was awoken in the middle of the night by Israeli security forces. He recounted the soldiers demanding he suppress what they called “incitement” – telling him to instruct mosque imams to stop posting updates on Facebook and stop locals from “going after” settlers.

“I’m in my own house and they’re all armed, mind you,” he said. “I told them: We are not responsible for incitement. You are responsible. You are the occupation force. Not one Palestinian has hit any settler in the area – but every single day there are attacks by settlers on Palestinian citizens”.

He refused the soldiers’ demands outright. “We are people living on our land, living in our country – we want to live in peace,” he told them. “You are the ones who came at us and this land is ours. It’s ours today, it was ours yesterday, it’ll be ours tomorrow.”

Killing trees that are ‘like my own son’

The Arraba Plain – dotted with rows of cultivated fields, greenhouses, and olive trees in every direction – is the most agriculturally productive area in the northern West Bank. Its ۳۳,۰۰۰ dunums (۳۳ sq km) of arable land sustain not just Arraba but surrounding communities across the Jenin governorate, which annually yields the most olive oil of any governorate in the West Bank.

In recent weeks, Israeli authorities have issued notices ordering the removal of trees and vegetation along a roughly seven-kilometre (۴.۳-mile) stretch, raising fears among dozens of landowners in the area of a much larger clearance in the coming days and weeks. Separately, Israeli authorities issued a cluster of military orders this summer covering more than ۳۰۰ dunams (۰.۳sq km) in the area.

Roughly ۲۵۰ trees belonging to the extended al-Uraidi family have also been uprooted this week, according to Kamal’s brother, Ahmed, on land classified as Area A, rather than Area C, which is under complete Israeli control. At night, residents say, armed settlers have begun destroying trees themselves and grazing animals on villagers’ land; one Palestinian was treated for gunshot wounds last month after a settler shooting.

Landowners with olive trees have been presented with notices ordering their destruction for “security purposes”; locals have been told it is to provide soldiers in the new military bases in the area a clear line of sight across the fertile Arraba plain.

At night, armed settlers have begun destroying villagers’ lands themselves. On September ۱, Naim al-Sha’er lost ۴۰۰ fig trees after settlers cut through his iron fence in the middle of the night. “It’s not near the road, it’s not bothering any settler – nothing,” said Sha’er. “Every day … you check on [your trees], you feel good watching it grow, little by little. Like your own son.

“And then, [without warning], they kill it.”

The mayor and residents say the coordination between settlers and soldiers makes the campaign’s purpose clear. “They want to destroy, they want to take control, they want to confiscate – all under the banner of these labels,” said Kamal al-Uraidi.

According to Arda, the Arraba mayor, ۲۲۰ dunams (۰.۲sq km) have been confiscated for the Emek Dotan settlement. So far, an additional ۲۲۳ dunams have been bulldozed during these recent uprooting operations, with more notices being presented to landowners daily. An additional ۲,۸۰۰ dunams (۲.۸sq km) of Arraba’s farmlands have recently been rendered inaccessible by either settler attacks or closed military zone orders, said the mayor.

While about ۷۰ percent of Arraba’s ۱۳,۰۰۰ population depends on farming the fertile land, now, all of that is under threat. “They want to turn most of the Palestinian people into refugees, living in camps,” said Arda. In addition, ۱۳ agricultural, commercial and industrial facilities have already been demolished stretching to the nearby Arraba junction, with an additional ۵۴ demolition notices waiting to be carried out. About a quarter of the greenhouses in the area have been damaged, destroyed, or rendered inaccessible.

“This is what their Zionist idea is trying to achieve,” said Arda, “that nothing is left to tie us to the land, so that we start thinking about emigration and leaving”.

Al Jazeera reached out to Israeli authorities and the military for comment on the events described in this article, but no response has yet been received.

‘The whole Israeli terror package’

Arda sees a strategy behind the particular targeting of Arraba and its junction, a key route towards Jenin and the surrounding villages. “Look at Arraba’s geographic location,” he said. “There are three governorates [nearby] – Jenin, Tubas and Tulkarem. When you control Arraba, you’ve controlled the northern West Bank. You’ve cut off the north of the West Bank from its centre.”

Dror Etkes, co-founder of the Israeli settlement-watchdog organisation, Kerem Navot, has spent nearly two decades mapping Israeli land seizures across the West Bank. He says what is happening around Jenin is an increasingly brazen application of a model used elsewhere.

Jenin, he said, had for years been an outlier – one of the few areas of the West Bank relatively free of the “settlement package” applied around other Palestinian towns. That is changing. “With this package comes everything – military presence, Shin Bet presence, police, demolitions,” said Etkes. “The whole Israeli terror package.”

What stands out about the current moment, he said, is that the campaign is reaching into Area A itself. Israel has established a new military outpost in the emptied environs of the Jenin refugee camp within Jenin itself, while south of Arraba, it has issued land seizure orders for a new settler road bypassing the nearby village of Qabatiya and connecting the Mevo Dotan bloc with settlements east of Jenin, ultimately towards the Jordan Valley.

The road, Etkes said, would physically bisect the northern West Bank along an east-west axis. “This is absolutely the most extreme measure which the Israeli authorities have taken until today,” he said, arguing that it fundamentally violates the Oslo Accords, which were first signed by Palestinian and Israeli leaders in the early ۱۹۹۰s.

The method, he said, is familiar, with similar tactics under way in the Jordan Valley further east: “Dissect and control – you need few settlers, soldiers, a lot of violence, and this is how things work”.

‘You can’t erase our roots’

Shortly after the bulldozers finished, family members gathered beside Khalil al-Fari’s home, still in shock, on lands they had tended since their expulsion from Haifa during the ۱۹۴۸ Nakba.

“The guy in the bulldozer was even ashamed for us to look at him,” said Khalil’s ۳۶-year-old nephew, Ahmed al-Fari. “He didn’t let us stay up on the roof – ‘get down and stop looking at me. Go inside your house – and if I find you outside, I’ll come and take you from the house’.”

All of the al-Fari family’s ۱۵۰ trees have been wiped out completely and ۳۰۰ of their neighbour’s trees have also been destroyed in recent days. “There are households depending entirely on the [olive picking] season,” said Khalil, who was also given separate demolition orders in March for a car wash he owned. “You just came and you cut off the season – two weeks before it begins – and the years after that.”

The mild chatter among the group of family members beside Khalil’s home suddenly stopped when another bulldozer approached. At a snail’s pace, it crawled its way past them. All the family could do was sit in silence and stare.

“I’m one of the people who grew up living among these trees,” said Ahmed, who has two small children himself. “When we were kids, we would swing from the trees and we taught our kids how to.” Nearby, his young cousins – Khalil’s daughters – hung around gnarled tree stumps. There were trees from the al-Fari properties that were more than ۸۰ years old, they explained.

“My grandmother used to pick from these trees. I remember how she’d move through them, the branches and the trunks, how she’d gather from them,” said Ahmed, his speech quickening with passion. “Even the branches we used to hang the swings on, we still remember them.

“Today, the tree was lying on the ground and we were just watching – knowing we used to tie string to it and play on it.

“Just like that, they wiped out all our memories.”

Nonetheless, the young father remained defiant. “For us, it’s always the olive tree that keeps us rooted to this land. You come and uproot it thinking you can erase our roots? No, you can’t erase our roots. Our roots go deeper,” said Ahmed. “Sure, you uprooted the tree and you broke the trunk and you pulled the tree out of the ground – but the roots are still there.

“In the end, maybe you took one tree, two, ten, a thousand – but you’re not going to take away the will inside us.”