This report tells the history of the process of fragmentation imposed on Palestinian rural land in the West Bank through a case study of three villages in the Nablus District - 'Azmut, Deir al-Hatab and Salem. What these communities have experienced since 1980, when Israel established the Elon Moreh nearby, is but one illustration of broader developments taking place throughout the West Bank.
Their story is similar to that of hundreds of Palestinian communities on whose lands Israeli settlements were established.Like many Palestinian villages, 'Azmut, Deir al-Hatab and Salem developed in keeping with the geographical features of the area. Farmland, pasture and natural water sources serves as the mainstays of the local economy and as the basis for the formation of an entire culture that ties the residents deeply to their surroundings. The villagers employed mostly traditional dryland farming, cultivating olives and fruit trees, legumes and grains. They also raised livestock, relying on natural pasture stretching across the hilly expanses of al-Jabal al-Kbir (literally: The Big Mountain) and the surrounding valleys.
For hundreds of years, the villagers largely subsisted off farming and shepherding.
Since the 1967 occupation, Israel has employed various measures - official and otherwise - to cut off the villagers from their land and hand it over to settlers. The first step was the 1980 establishment of the Elon Moreh settlement on 127.8 hectares (1,278 dunams) of village land already registered as government property under the pre-1967 Jordanian rule. Just two years later, the Commander of Judea and Samaria declared a nature reserve on some of the remaining land west of the settlement. This resulted in the creation of an area, far exceeding that of the settlement's jurisdiction,
where Palestinians must receive Israeli permission for carrying out any development, construction, new cultivation, or pasturing livestock. In 1987, 170 hectares of the nature reserve were declared "state land", and an illegal settlement outpost erected there in 1998.
Comment: Another abhorrent example of Israel's incremental ethnic cleansing at work.