By Ben Lynfield, Christian Science Monitor, Nov. 26, 2013
Two days before last month’s Eid al-Adha holiday, the Israel Defense Forces arrived in this tiny Palestinian community in the Jordan Valley with an abrupt message: Clear out.
"An officer named Yigal came and told us we would have to leave our home on the holiday because there would be military training here," says Ha’il Hussein Turkman, a sheep and cow farmer and father of six. "Yigal said, ‘The army wants to train. You must go. Those who will not leave, I will bring soldiers to force them out’."
The IDF says training in areas like Khirbet Ibziq, where residents were forced to evacuate for 22 hours on Oct. 22 and 23, is “vital” because its topography—rocky hills within a valley—resembles the landscape of areas of possible future military operations. But the tent-dwelling herders who live here and Israeli rights groups see temporary forced evacuations as a means of making their claim to the land tenuous.
They charge that such exercises, coupled with nearby home demolitions and the IDF’s blockage of their efforts to upgrade a local road, have one motive: forcing Palestinians out of this sparsely populated area in the Jordan Valley region. The area’s status is a major point of contention in peace talks because, although comprising about a quarter of the West Bank, Israel says that keeping a military presence there is essential to protect it against attack from across the Jordanian border.
The IDF has carried out forced evacuations of Palestinians for military training in the Jordan Valley 35 times in the last year, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (the IDF did not respond to requests for a figure). Such evacuations date back to the 1970s, but Palestinians and Israeli rights groups say they have become more frequent, particularly in the Jordan Valley, in the last few years.
In Khirbet Ibziq alone, the IDF forced residents to temporarily evacuate on three separate occasions in March 2013 and once in October 2012, according to the UN and residents.
Dror Etkes, the director of Israeli organization Kerem Navot, which focuses on West Bank land use, says the evacuations are more than harassment. He argues that temporarily evicting the Palestinians is part of a larger effort to pressure them to leave the area permanently so that it can be more easily annexed to Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to keep Israeli troops in the Jordan Valley under any peace agreement.
According to Kerem Navot, 18.5 percent of the West Bank has been permanently closed off to Palestinians through designation of areas as military zones.
"Keeping Palestinians away from a very big part of the West Bank, especially the less inhabited eastern strip, allows Israel to de facto annex the Jordan Valley," Mr. Etkes says, adding that temporary evacuations have the benefit of drawing less negative international attention than permanent expulsions.
However, local council head Ali Sawafta says, “Even for an hour or a half hour it’s a problem to leave your things behind, your land, your belongings, your sheep, because they will say that this land isn’t yours.”
About 60 of Khirbet Ibziq’s 178 residents were forced to leave their homes to make way for the military training, according to Mr. Sawafta. Palestinians residing in the tiny Jordan Valley hamlets of Burj and al-Miti had to leave for shorter periods, according to Arif Daraghmeh, a local Palestinian Authority official.
The IDF spokesman’s office says that those evacuated in Khirbet Ibziq were “illegal dwellers” on land designated “decades ago” as training grounds for the IDF and stressed that the exercises were for the “shortest amount of time” possible.
Local resident Imad Hroub, a sheep herder, says the evacuation reinforced fears that Khirbet Ibziq could meet the fate of Makhul, a Jordan Valley village of corrugated structures with more than 100 residents that was destroyed in its entirety by the IDF in September for being illegally built.
"The problem is Israel doesn’t want Arabs in this place," he says.
Jad Ishaq, director of the Applied Research Institute Jerusalem, a Bethlehem-based Palestinian research center specializing in land issues, describes the temporary removal “a step towards evacuation on a more permanent basis.”
"Israel has so much land for military training, why does this have to be on Palestinian land?" Mr. Ishaq asks.
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