The start of the Week against the Apartheid Wall in Palestine was marked by a victory of the people of Eizarya over the bulldozers that came to continue the destruction of their village. Bulldozers arrived in the village on Thursday November the 10th to continue the Wall around Eizarya towards the east. They left after a large crowd of villagers physically blocked their work and threatened to escalate resistance.
At the first site of the construction work arriving, organizations and committees from the village called upon the youth, women and men to defend their land against the Occupationâs bulldozers. The people of Eizarya have been resisting the Wall since the project began and have already impeded construction work on numerous occasions. After a tense stand off against the bulldozers, the determination of the people not to surrender and the commitment to defend their lands with all means necessary, brought the bulldozers to flee from the area.
The Apartheid Wall is already isolates Eizarya from Jerusalem. For the village, the Palestinian capital has always been a major life source as most of the jobs, services and markets for the people of Eizarya were located there. Furthermore, Eizarya had in the last years become one of the few places where Jerusalemites could find housing as the racist Occupation policies in the capital restrict spaces for Palestinians to build and reside. Already 7000 Jerusalemites have been forced to move back to Jerusalem in order not to lose their jobs and services. Housing projects and entire neighborhoods in Eizarya have become abandoned ghost towns.
With this new 7 km long section of the Apartheid Wall that stretches north of the village towards east, the West Bank will be cut in half creating a corridor for the settlers currently expanding throughout the Jordan Valley. It further annexes large amounts of land to the Maale Adumim settlement where expansion projects are underway. Eizarya will be cut-off from the East, North and West by the Wall and completely deprived of its lands. Out of the original 11,000 dunums of the villageâs land, 6000 dunums have already been stolen by the Occupation Forces for the construction of Maale Adumim. The Wall isolates another 3000 dunums of land. The 23,000 villagers of Eizarya will thus be left with 2000 dunums of land (including residential areas). Not only will all agricultural land be lost, but the space for any development in the village has gone.
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