Sumud in the Jordan Valley: ongoing Nakba and ongoing resistance
20 Sep 2010 10:11 PM by Buenaventura Vidal
Ethnic cleansing, perpetrated through forced displacement, persists as one of the main strategies of the Zionist colonisation and settlement of Palestine. Historically, displacement began with ‘The Nakba’, the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and property in 1948, which set the material basis for the establishment of a state with a Jewish majority in historic Palestine. The strategy of the Nakba however did not end in 1948, but is ongoing, albeit at a lower intensity. It’s objective, to consolidate the Jewish character of the state of Israel and to facilitate the creeping expansion of its deliberately undefined borders.
In a bid to counteract this process and faced with a wide variety of pressures to leave, Palestinians have reacted with a stubborn determination to stay put on their land. Over time, this impressive defiance has translated into a powerful life philosophy and an important ideological theme and political strategy underpinning all forms of Palestinian resistance. It is known as Sumud or steadfastness and encompasses a collective effort to defy and endure the continuous Israeli assault by attempting simply to carry on with daily life in what are often unbearable circumstances. Sumud has become both an active and symbolic form of resistance in of itself and one which opens a third way between submission and exile, passivity and direct confrontation. Its participatory nature allows all members of a community to play a role and thus remain widely democratic in character, open to various forms of agency and willpower. Sumud also directly obstructs the Zionist obsession with making the myth of a “land without a people, for a people without a land”, a reality. In the context of the ethnic cleansing of a territory, existence is resistance and remaining on one’s land is a direct challenge to the occupiers.
One of the places where the Israeli practices of apartheid and ethnic cleaning, as well as the strategies of Sumud are most developed, is the Jordan Valley.
When Israel occupied the Jordan Valley in 1967, 320,000 people resided in the area but mainly due to the Israeli campaign of creeping ethnic cleansing, today only 56,000 Palestinians still reside in the Valley on a permanent basis, while others settle seasonally to work on cultivating their lands and grazing their herds. 89% of the Jordan Valley is in Area C, meaning the Israeli army has both civil and military control and is able to enforce a despotic apartheid regime. The objective of such practice, to make living conditions for Palestinians ultimately intolerable so as to force residents into permanent exile.
Whilst approximately 9,400 settlers live heavily subsidized by the state, Palestinians are systematically excluded access to the majority of their land, which instead has been usurped for settlements, settlement farming and productive ventures, military areas and “green zones”. Palestinians have also seen their access to water, a key resource in the area, severely restricted and are forbidden to dig wells beyond 200 m in depth nor construct water infrastructure and pipes to service their villages and agricultural lands. Water resources remain under the direct control of Mekorot, Israel’s national water corporation, which has dug wells with no depth restriction to provide settlements in the Valley with unlimited water. As a consequence, many Palestinian wells and springs have either salinated or dried up, depriving those living in the area of both a basic a human necessity and right. Moreover, every settler who arrives in the Jordan Valley is offered a free house, whilst Palestinians are refused building permits and are forbidden to construct property anew. Any attempts to do so are simply met with harassment and the eventual force of the bull dozer. A recent example is the demolition of the entire village of Al Farisiya. Finally, in an effort to make life even more unbearable, severe restrictions are imposed on Palestinians who are not registered as Jordan Valley residents. This makes access to and from the region difficult, in effect cutting the area off from the rest of the West Bank.
In short, local Palestinians are being isolated, squeezed economically, their resources plundered and new generations remain unable to construct a tangible base upon which to begin to build their lives. These conditions are the direct result of plans by the Israeli state to consolidate its control of the Jordan Valley and to complete the process of “juedization” in the region. Long-term, this vision will lead to the total annexation of the area, a process which has already begun according to the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem. In 2006 it warned that the Jordan Valley was in fact already de facto annexed.
By way of resisting this process, members of local communities have networked and organized at a grassroots level around the Jordan Valley Solidarity Campaign and have engaged in an active form of Sumud. The strategy being used is one of nonviolent civil disobedience, through which Palestinians work to maintain their existence in the area against the will of the Israeli army, while simultaneously avoiding a direct confrontation with it. Confrontation is evaded due to the sparse population of communities in the Valley and the unequal balance of power which is simply too large to augur it any success. Instead, Palestinian residents disobey the construction and water restrictions and work to establish and improve the infrastructure that is desperately needed within their communities. Recent projects include the rebuilding of demolished homes, the improvement of school buildings and the laying of water pipe lines to communities where access to running water is prohibited.
In stark contrast with many normalization projects funded by large NGO’s, which respect Israeli regulations and are geared towards humanitarian assistance, these initiatives are highly political and do not accept Israeli jurisdiction over Palestinian communities. This important distinction is illustrated for example, with the differential response to Israeli water restrictions. NGO’s have spent thousands of dollars giving out plastic water tanks which force Palestinians to buy their water at a high cost and often from nearby illegal Israeli settlers who are the only vendors. The project of connecting communities in Area C to the water grid in Areas A and B (areas under Palestinian civil control) however, by laying out pipes and pumps, promotes Palestinian inter-connectedness and territorial contiguity and results in a much lower water consumption cost to the communities.
The initiatives of the Jordan Valley Solidarity Campaign also attempt to avoid creating dependency relations with outside aid and materials, focusing instead on promoting local sustainability. The result of this approach is a conscious preparedness in the face of an ever present risk of further restrictions and obstacles to freedom of movement, both of people and goods, imposed by the Israeli army. An example of the self sufficiency advocated by the Solidarity Campaign can be seen in the construction work that has taken place in the Valley. Building is typically carried out using mud bricks which are prepared with local land, materials and labour.
While the above tactics seek to empower Palestinians living in the Jordan Valley, disobeying Israeli regulations does come at a cost and many of the initiatives and projects are eventually destroyed or demolished. The Campaign though, has set itself for a long term strategy of patience, persistence and endurance seeking to respond programmatically to Israeli destruction with yet more construction. Fathi Khdirat, the coordinator of the Campaign insists, “our reaction to demolition orders is to construct more, our response to a house demolition is to reconstruct the house”. “The Israelis have succeeded in creating their country through facts on the ground,” he points out, “we shall create our own facts on the ground”.
Pitting hi-tech Israeli aerial surveillance and militarily protected bulldozers with a low budget community campaign can seem like a lost battle. There is hope however that the continuing insistence and absolute determination of the local communities to stay and preserve their livelihoods, will in the long run, and despite the odds, succeed in overpowering the colonizers lust for more land and resources.
