On Sunday Israel’s High Court ruled to freeze
state plans to build a part of Israel’s “separation” barrier that would have
gone through the middle of Battir, a victory for the farming village of 5,000
people located west of Bethlehem in the southern West Bank.
The decision comes after years of resistance
from locals as well as outside forces that worked to achieve recognition of
Battir as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Danger, and to raise awareness
in the international community of how the environment would be negatively
impacted by construction of the wall in the area. More than 75 percent of
Battir is considered part of Area C,
which, according to the Oslo accords is under full Israeli military and
civilian control.
The Green Line runs through a valley in the
center of Battir, with the majority of residents and their houses on one side,
and much of their agricultural land on the other. At present, while there is no
concrete wall, a fence marks the divide, increasing the time and energy it
takes for farmers and residents to access their land forcing them to trek
around the fence. The location of the wall as proposed would have cut through
several homes, as well as cut off the village from the single school in the
village.
is for “security reasons,” only a small portion of the wall’s path actually
runs along the Green line separating Israel from the West Bank. Eighty-five
percent of the wall snakes through the West Bank, separating Palestinians from
their own land and their own neighborhoods, and leading many to refer to it as
the “Annexation Wall.” According to the grassroots group Stop the Wall, once
completed, the wall would
de facto annex some 46% of the West Bank, leaving many communities
and even individual homes entirely surrounded by the wall and cut off from
their own communities.