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B'tselem Report: Dispossession & Exploitation: Israel's Policy in the Jordan Valley & Northern Dead Sea, May

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B'tselem Report: Dispossession & Exploitation: Israel's Policy in the Jordan Valley & Northern Dead Sea, May Dispossession & Exploitation Israel's policy in the Jordan Valley & northern Dead Sea May 2011 Researched and written by Eyal Hareuveni Edited by Yael Stein Data coordination by Atef Abu a-Rub, Wassim Ghantous, Tamar Gonen, Iyad Hadad, Kareem Jubran, Noam Raz Geographic data processing by Shai Efrati B'Tselem thanks Salwa Alinat, Kav LaOved’s former coordinator of Palestinian fieldworkers in the settlements, Daphna Banai, of Machsom Watch, Hagit Ofran, Peace Now’s Settlements Watch coordinator, Dror Etkes, and Alon Cohen-Lifshitz and Nir Shalev, of Bimkom. 2 Table of contents Introduction......................................................................................................................... 5 Chapter One: Statistics........................................................................................................ 8 Land area and borders of the Jordan Valley and northern Dead Sea area....................... 8 Palestinian population in the Jordan Valley .................................................................... 9 Settlements and the settler population........................................................................... 10 Land area of the settlements .......................................................................................... 13 Chapter Two: Taking control of land................................................................................ 15 Theft of private Palestinian land and transfer to settlements......................................... 15 Seizure of land for “military needs”.............................................................................. 18 Declaration of state land................................................................................................ 19 Closed areas................................................................................................................... 22 Closing land classified as nature reserves ..................................................................... 23 Minefields...................................................................................................................... 24 Chapter Three: Taking control of water sources............................................................... 27 Aboveground water sources .......................................................................................... 27 Taking control of underground water............................................................................ 31 Disparity in water consumption..................................................................................... 37 Chapter Four: Restrictions on movement ......................................................................... 42 Chapter Five: Restrictions on building and development................................................. 48 Wide-scale prohibition on building ............................................................................... 48 Restrictions on building and development in Palestinian communities........................ 51 Chapter Six: Further aspects of economic exploitation.................................................... 54 Exploitation of farmland................................................................................................ 55 Exploitation of tourist sites and archeological sites ...................................................... 61 3 Restrictions on tourism in Jericho ................................................................................. 64 Exploitation of mineral resources.................................................................................. 65 Environmental-nuisance disposal sites.......................................................................... 67 Chapter Seven: Prohibitions in international law on exploiting resources of occupied territory ............................................................................................................................. 71 International humanitarian law...................................................................................... 71 International human rights law...................................................................................... 73 Conclusions....................................................................................................................... 75 Appendix........................................................................................................................... 77 4 Introduction Toward the end of 2010, residents of settlements in the Jordan Valley and northern Dead Sea area demonstrated against rightwing activists who entered the city of , Jericho without army approval in an attempt to settle there. The settlers, like many Israelis, do not consider the Jordan Valley and the northern Dead Sea occupied territory, but part of the sovereign State of Israel. Placards carried during the demonstration, stating “This is not Judea and Samaria,” confirmed this belief. Similarly, successive Israeli governments have viewed the Jordan Valley and the northern Dead Sea as areas over which Israeli control must be maintained. This view is based on the plan of Yigal Allon, a leading force in the Labor Party and minister of labor at the time, which was submitted to the government in July 1967, shortly after Israel occupied the West Bank. Under the plan, which was never officially adopted by any government, the Jordan River marks the strategic border of the State of Israel and serves as a buffer zone between Israel and the “Eastern Front,” as a potential Iraqi-Jordanian-Syrian military coalition was referred to. The plan also called for Israel to annex a strip up to 15 kilometers wide along the Jordan Valley and Judean Desert, in which a relatively small number of Palestinians lived after 1967, and to leave a land corridor in the Jericho area that would link Jordan and Palestinian population centers in the West Bank. The settlements in the area were to be “permanent advance-position lookouts that would avoid having to call up military forces and could not only alert the military to a sudden attack by the enemy, but also attempt to halt, or at least delay, the enemy’s advance until military forces could control the situation.”1 1 See Lee Cahaner , Arnon Sofer and Yuval Kna’an, Future of the Jordan Valley – Keeping It under Israeli Sovereignty – Pro and Con (Reuven Chaikin Chair in Geostrategy, University of Haifa, February 2006), 25-26 [Hebrew]; Anita Shapira, Yigal Alon: Native Son (Sifriyah Hadasha, Hakibbutz Hameuchad/Siman Kriya, 2004), 486, 488-491 [Hebrew]; Yerucham Cohen, The Allon Plan (Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1972), 171-180 [Hebrew]; B'Tselem, Land Grab: Israel’s Settlement Policy in the West Bank (May 2001), 12-13; Edith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, Lords of the Land – The War for Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007 (Nation Books, 2007), 279. 5 From 1967, when the Allon Plan was presented to the government, to 1977, the government initiated the establishment of 19 settlements in the Jordan Valley and northern Dead Sea area. The prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, wrote that these settlements would reflect the “political and security conception with respect to the peace borders in the Mideast.”2 In September 1977, following the rise of the Likud to power, Ariel Sharon, who was minister of agriculture and head of the Ministerial Committee for Settlement, presented a plan that referred to the Jordan Valley as “the eastern security zone” and proposed expanding the chain of settlements in the area.3 From 1978-1992, under Likud- dominated governments, 11 more settlements were built. Following the beginning of the Oslo Process in 1993, Israel’s government, headed by the Labor Party, undertook not to establish new settlements and not to expand existing settlements. However, it did not consider the undertaking to apply to the Jordan Valley. In his speech to the Knesset on approval of the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement (Oslo II), Prime Minister Rabin explained clearly that “the security border to protect the State of Israel will be set in the Jordan Valley, in the broadest meaning of this term.”4 The present government, headed by Binyamin Netanyahu, continues this policy, opposing any withdrawal from the Jordan Valley. In a speech to the Knesset, Netanyahu quoted Rabin, saying that Israel’s security border will be set in the Jordan Valley, and during a 2 Yitzhak Rabin, Pinkas Sherut [Army Service Book] (Ma’ariv, September 1979), 551. [Hebrew] 3 Government Decision 145, 11 November 1977, announcing the expansion of the settlements in the “Judea, Samaria, Jordan Valley, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights, by increasing the population of the existing communities and by establishing additional communities on state-owned land”; Shaul Arieli, “Settling in Judea and Samaria – The Strategy: Gathering Together with Minimal Exchange of Territory,” paper given at a conference on shaping the spatial environment in Israel: 1948-2008, held at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, on 13 April 2008, 5-7 [Hebrew]; Zertal and Eldar, Lords of the Land, 285. 4 Announcement made by Prime Minister and Minister of Defense Yitzhak Rabin to the Knesset plenum on approving the Palestinian-Israeli Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, 5 October 1995, available on the Knesset’s website, http://www.knesset.gov.il/rabin/heb/Rab_RabinSpeech6.htm (visited on 6 March 2011) [Hebrew]. See also the comments of the vice-premier, Shimon Peres, indicating the intention to annex the Jordan Valley settlements to the State of
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