The northern Jordan Valley ... Palestinian campaign against the peace plan

Mervat Sadiq-Ramallah

In the Palestinian village of Umm al-Quba in the northern Jordan Valley, the owners of the land have been busy since this morning, along with dozens of activists who have broken Israeli barriers and managed to reach them, by plowing them and planting them with wheat seeds, despite the agricultural season that is usually threatened by the IDF training and its incendiary ammunition for soil and crops.

Umm al-Quba is one of 17 Khirbet or a small community of al-Maleh in the northern Palestinian Jordan Valley, east of Tubas, on the eastern border of the West Bank. It is the target area of ​​the plan presented by US President Donald Trump yesterday evening, as the Jordan Valley considered the eastern borders of the State of Israel, and decided to annex it and extend Israeli sovereignty over it.

The official of the Jordan Valley file in the Tubas Governorate of Moataz Bisharat says that Umm al-Quba extends over two thousand acres of agricultural land, which is part of 180 thousand acres of area of ​​the northern Jordan Valley that Israel turned into military areas, in addition to about 60 thousand acres closed by the occupation and declared natural reserves.

In recent months, Israeli settlers have built a new outpost on the eastern side of Umm al-Quba, and in response, activists from the Popular Committees and the Settlement Resistance Authority participated Wednesday in cultivating and cultivating the lands of the region "to counter Trump and Netanyahu's plan" as well, Bisharat explained.

Bisharat said that the "campaign to protect the Jordan Valley" would reach every point in it, and we would cut off the road for the settlers to prevent control of other lands and remove the existing outposts.

The Jordan Valley is in the deal
The deal, which was announced under the title "Peace Plan", the Jordan Valley, which constitutes more than a quarter of the area of ​​the West Bank, is considered a region "critical to Israel's national security, and it will be under Israeli sovereignty," according to its text.

The plan, which supports the decision of the Israeli government to annex the Jordan Valley, on the grounds that it is the "eastern border of the State of Israel", also stipulates that "work on agricultural projects controlled by the Palestinians will continue without interruption", provided that this is done "according to appropriate licenses or rental contracts granted by the State of Israel."

Bisharat says that the occupation currently controls 88% of the Jordan Valley area by dividing it into closed military areas, natural reserves or agricultural settlements, and this has led to a repulsive environment that has displaced more than 50 thousand Palestinians since its occupation in 1967.

Currently in the northern Jordan Valley, about 11,500 thousand Palestinians live in 27 communities not exceeding 18 thousand dunums, all of which received Israeli notifications of evacuation, compared to 300 thousand dunums completely controlled by the occupation, including the water basins that feed the surrounding lands, including the Palestinian communities.

Bisharat says that annexing the Jordan Valley means that they are completely isolated from their Palestinian extension in the West Bank, and expelling Palestinian families who own lands and whose property documents are inherited. In addition to establishing a system of crossings and barriers that prevent any Palestinian entry to it.

The people of the Jordan Valley, as Bisharat said, reject the principle of obtaining Israeli licenses to access their lands they own and farm, or for the Palestinian to turn into a “tenant” in his land.

The Palestinian valleys generally extend, according to the National Information Center, from Bisan in the south to Safed in the north, and from Ein Gedi to the Negev in the south, and from the middle of the Jordan River to the eastern slopes of the West Bank in the west. The total area of ​​the Jordan Valley is 720 thousand dunums.

The importance of the Great Valley lies in the fact that it is a warm and fertile natural region that can be used for agriculture throughout the year, as it sits on the most important water basin in Palestine.

According to the Oslo Peace Agreement (1993), the Jordan Valley was divided into areas under the control of the Palestinian Authority and its area is 85 km, by 7.4% of the total area of ​​the Jordan Valley, and the joint areas between the Authority and Israel, an area of ​​50 km by 4.3%, and areas subject to full Israeli control and an area of ​​1155 km, and constitute the vast majority From the Jordan Valley, by 88.3%.

As of 2015, 31 Israeli settlements, the majority of which are agricultural, were built on the Jordan Valley, with 8,300 settlers. The oldest are the settlements of "Mihoula", "Musawah" and "Yataf", which were established in 1969.

The Palestinians call the Jordan Valley a "food basket", which constitutes 50% of the total agricultural areas in the West Bank, and it produces 60% of the total vegetables.

The annexation and its losses
In a first reading of the latest American plan, the director of the Areej Institute for Applied Research in Bethlehem, Jad Ishaq, says that the plan presents maps and details of the areas of land that will be annexed and expelled from the Palestinians, or offer to exchange it with the Palestinian Authority as the Triangle region in the occupied territories in 1948.

In addition to the lands of the northern Jordan Valley and its residential complexes, Isaac says that the American plan and the Israeli annexation decision will mean depriving the Palestinians of their right to the waters of the Dead Sea (on the Palestinian-Jordanian borders), their rights as a riparian state to the western side of the Jordan River, and their rights to agricultural land on an area of ​​61 thousand acres Used in these areas.

The director of "Areej" estimates the Palestinian losses that will result from the isolation and annexation of these lands at about $ 2.5 billion annually. This would outweigh the grants offered by the plan to the Palestinians, which are estimated to total $ 50 billion.

Isaac says that the Jordan Valley is considered to be the lung of the West Bank, through which the Palestinians plan to expand agriculturally and demographically, and because of the American plan, these people will be in a crisis of population expansion due to being squeezed in areas cut off from each other in the West Bank and Gaza, along with remote areas south of the Strip that are planned to be industrial areas.

Salah al-Khawaja, the official in the Popular Resistance Committees, says that Trump's plan is only a demarcation of the occupation plans that began since the occupation of 1967, when he annexed the rest of East Jerusalem and considered the entire city a unified capital for Israel, in conjunction with the promotion of settlement and theft of land in the West Bank, then building The Apartheid Wall on the borders of the West Bank, which confiscated 19% of its lands that were supposed to become the lands of the Palestinian state.