Burin, occupied West Bank – Ghassan Najjar’s phone starts ringing the moment the Israeli army rolls into Burin. It happens most days now – the whirring convoy of armoured personnel carriers working its way through the village’s narrow streets as soldiers fan out to shutter shops one by one. Along with roughly two dozen other farmers, Najjar is a member of Burin’s Land and Farming Cooperative.
They know that they don’t have the capability to fight back against Israel’s military might with arms so instead focus on the land and keeping their connection to it. But in addition to the military raids, they also face settler attacks, part of a pogrom against Palestinians that has reached fever pitch across the West Bank. Those settlers live in outposts and settlements built on occupied Palestinian land, which makes them illegal under international law.
On July 13, a settler tried to graze his flock inside one of the cooperative’s five greenhouses. Cooperative members struggled to keep the livestock away until Israeli border police arrived. Najjar recalled challenging the officers over why a settler had been permitted onto land the army itself had designated a closed military zone, from which Israeli citizens are, on paper, also barred.
In Arabic, he told Najjar: “You’ll see.” The next night, roughly 10 settlers arrived, gutting all five of the cooperative’s greenhouses, cutting away their plastic sheeting and destroying their irrigation networks. The damage, by the cooperative’s estimate, ran to roughly 30,000 shekels (about $10,000) in plastic sheeting alone. About 9,000 tomato seedlings worth 8,000 shekels ($2,670) had been bought that same morning for planting.
They died within hours because there was nowhere else to put them. For a cooperative that pools land, labour and produce among about 25 families, the loss reverberated beyond the five greenhouses themselves. We’re facing many attacks by the settlers and the army.” Just weeks later, Burin lost more than 1,500 olive and other trees, according to Najjar.
Some were burned by settlers. Others were cut down or uprooted by military bulldozers along a local route accessible to Israelis but not Palestinians. The wheat harvest fared little better: Of the 10,000sq metres (2.5 acres) the cooperative planted, 7,000sq metres (1.7 acres) were burned before farmers could harvest the crop this summer.
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