The land is ours

The land is ours

We depend on it for food, shelter and work, it represents culture and identity – but also it causes violence and worry. It’s time for us to act, writes Amy Hall.

@A group of women growing vegetables in Senegal, in 2019. This is part of the Great Green Wall project: to grow food on 100 million hectares of dry land across Africa by 2030. Simon Townsley/Panos

Rezeq Abu Nasser, 58, showed us the remains of his house. He told us that this land, Wadi Qana in the West Bank, used to be a beautiful valley. His family had owned this land in Wadi Qana, in the West Bank, for generations. Abu Nasser told us about learning to swim here, the storms and olive harvest. The valley kept him safe for two years when he hid from Israeli authorities in the late 1980s.

People from the village of Deir Istiya, like Abu Nasser’s family, use this part of Wadi Qana for small-scale farming. It’s also in Area C of the West Bank, and Israel controls the land. It’s almost impossible for Palestinians to get permits to do any building. Palestinians cannot even plant trees.

On 12 February 2018, Israeli soldiers arrived at 7.00am to demolish his house. Why? The family had done a few repairs: a tarpaulin on the roof, stones in some gaps in the wall and some cement on the floor. They gave Abu Nasser five minutes to take what he could: cigarettes, some flashlights, chargers, batteries, a few dishes.

When I visited, a few months later, it was calm. Palestinian families and groups of tourists were having picnics, or relaxing by the river. But looking down on the wadi were the Israeli settlements. Waste water comes down and pollutes the water supply – even though the area became a nature reserve in 1983.

Controlling land has always been an important way of controlling people. For Abu Nassar, Wadi Qana was his land, to farm and enjoy. But for the Israeli authorities, it is land that they control, land that serves them. The powerful often cut off people’s connections with the land.

The people who challenge that domination, the people who protect the land, are often made to be criminals and even killed; the protection of private property often has more importance than life. In 202, 227 people were killed – more than four every week – for defending their homes, lands and lives. More than one third of the deaths in 2020 were indigenous people. They are often the best people to defend the land. But they are almost always shut out of conservation plans, or moved to protect habitats or wildlife.

It is very important to change the way humans relate to the land. Land is essential to life, in the way it relates the climate and as a source of greenhouse gases (and a way to dispose of them). But, like so many other essential things, we are destroying it. Humans directly affect more than 70 per cent of the land on earth with no ice. Even the soil we grow our food on is suffering. According to The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the loss of nutrients in the soil is one of the most important world problems for food security and sustainability.

Now read the original: https://newint.org/immersive/2022/10/24/land-ours-redistribution-justice (This article is in easier English so it is possible that we changed the words, the text structure, and the quotes.)