RUMANI (West Bank): When Palestinians in this West Bank village hear the groan of Israeli bulldozers on hills along the nearby border with Israel, they worry that their world is about to get smaller and poorer.
“They are making the Berlin Wall of the Middle East,” said Hussein Abu Hammad, an unemployed teacher, listening to the guttural staccato of the bulldozers at work on a fence that will split Palestinians in Rumani from the Israeli town of Salem.
For Palestinians who live in towns and cities such as Rumani, the fence, possibly bolstered by obstacle courses and motion sensors, will mean an end to life-sustaining odd jobs found by sneaking into the Jewish state.
In Rumani, where about 3,000 people live in simple cement block houses, up to 90 per cent of male workers find jobs in Israel, about half by slipping through illegally.
Israelis hope the fence will mean an end to death at the hands of Palestinian militants who have crossed the porous boundary to carry out suicide bombings in Israel.
After a suicide bombing in Jerusalem on Tuesday that killed 19 Israelis, the Defence Ministry said work would be accelerated on the $220 million plan, launched on Sunday, to erect 110 kms of fence along the West Bank in its first phase.
Hills fringing Rumani are blanketed with olive groves and grassy patches where goats graze. Villagers dip water buckets into wells on paths weaving through the groves to Israel.
“This is the smuggling route,” Rasmia Abu Hammad said, pausing in her walk through the fields with two small children.
“That is where the workers hide among the olive trees when the Israelis set up a checkpoint.”
Palestinian official figures say unemployment runs at over 60 per cent, climbing steadily since the uprising started.
MARRIAGE AND CONFISCATION: Some Palestinians in Rumani and other towns in the area who have married Israeli Arabs and have Israeli identity cards are thinking of moving to Israel.
“There are no reasons for me to live in the village where I was born. I don’t have work here in the West Bank,” 37-year-old Awad Fayad said.
On Sunday, local families gathered in a mosque and signed a letter protesting against the fence, built mostly on land confiscated from the Palestinians.
On Tuesday they gave the letter to the Palestinian civil liaison officer with the Israelis. It said, “We completely reject the confiscation of our land to build the so-called security fence”.
“Our lands are a major source of our living. This proposal will destroy our weak economy, as most of the inhabitants of these villages depend on work inside Israel.”
The United States is concerned the fence, originally to be built over the next year, would make life harder for many Palestinians.
“To the extent that it affects ordinary Palestinians, I think we do remind the Israelis that offering hope to Palestinians, offering them a decent life, an end to the barriers is an important part of achieving security and peace and that remains on our agenda,” US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said in Washington before the Jerusalem bombing.
Some Israeli right-wingers oppose the fence project, saying it could set a de facto border for a Palestinian state, weaken their claim to land captured in the 1967 Middle East war and cut Jewish settlements off from Israel.
The political fallout from Tuesday’s bus bombing in Jerusalem may also hurt Palestinians in this border region.
Israel served notice on Wednesday that it would recapture and hold Palestinian-ruled areas in response to bombings in a 20-month-old uprising for an independent state. Rumani lies close to the Palestinian militant stronghold city of Jenin.—Reuters
