Imagine if
raw sewage was dumped daily in the land where you are growing your lettuce,
tomatoes, cabbage and onions. Would you eat your vegetables?
For the
people in the village of Nahhalin, it has become impossible to use over 1000
dunnums of their land. Instead of growing their own produce to use in cooking,
they instead buy vegetables someplace else. Unfortunately this is not the end
of the tragedy. Not only can they not use the land, they are also running the
risk of losing it if it is not being cultivated. According to the Israeli adoption of old Ottoman law, land
that is not cultivated for a certain amount of time goes back to being state
land.
I cannot
tell you if the settlement of Beitar Illit deliberately dumps their waste in
Nahhalin’s farm land, so that they later can confiscate the land and use it
for themselves. That is an assumption I have no evidence to support. Yet I am
telling the truth when I say that the UNOHCHR is among the actors concerned
with the situation and asked us to document it further.
Last
Saturday we, my team members and I, met with the Village Council and the Major
of the village to listen to their complaints. Then we went down to the dumping
site, and documented with photographs and water samples. The dark water leaves
a very visible trace as it trails down the sand dunes from the settlement, and
it is collected in the village spring which has turned in to a nasty dark color.
Passing by the land was families on picnics and children playing, sheep herders
and donkeys. An old man sat contemplating by the pool collecting the water from
the spring, and there was a foul smell that the blossoming almond trees did not
succeed in hiding.
All I could think of was what a waste of land.
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