This report covers 11 villages in the Jordan Valley that are directly threatened by the illegal expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements. In October 2008 members of Brighton Tubas Friendship and Solidarity Group travelled to the villages and interviewed numerous local people. Their stories illustrate the way in which Israel uses planning controls, house demolitions, destruction of water sources, restriction movements, and harassment to pressurise the Palestinian people to leave their homes and their land.

However, this is no only an account of repression. It is also one of resistance.

Th authors wrote: “In every village we received one overwhelming message: that there is an absolute determination to stay. Many communities have already experienced exile from their towns and villages, being refugees from the Nakba of 1948, or settler and army land grabs and violence since 1967. They have had to re-establish themselves on the land they now live on, and they cannot allow this to be done to them again. The many projects to rebuild demolished houses, create playgrounds and football pitches, refurbish clinics, set up farming cooperatives, and build community schools, are all a testament to the resistance that is happening on the ground. For communities under occupation, under threat of removal by ethnic cleansing, all these projects are a direct challenge to the brutality of the occupiers.”

Download the report here:
Settlement expansion and ethnic cleansing in Palestine: A Jordan Valley case study