An Israeli army checkpoint near Nabi Samwil in the West Bank. Credit: Yahel Gazit

Piles of garbage and ruined cars with flat tires stand between new cars welcoming visitors to a small village northwest of Jerusalem, Nabi Samwil. A peek through plywood panels shows small houses’ withered yards that were once well-groomed.

The road is rutted, while a pile of building stones indicates that a house was recently demolished by the Israeli authorities. The grocery store’s shelves are empty.

“We’ve grown tired,” says Nawal Barakat, a math teacher who now works as a secretary at the little school near the entrance to the village. Her statement is surprising. Despite everything, she’s still smiling and welcoming, and constantly active, trying to organize things and improve the people’s lives – and their spirits.

The school occupies one room of an ancient structure that the Israeli authorities won’t allow the residents to expand. In the past, students from the higher grades attended school in nearby villages, including Beit Iksa to the west. But since 2006, the various components of Israel’s separation barrier – fences, walls, the army’s patrol roads and checkpoints – have cut off villages from each other.

Nowadays, the school is also attended by children from Khalaila, which is around 5 kilometers (3 miles) to the north. Administratively, Khalaila is a neighborhood of the village of Jib, but a capricious checkpoint has been placed between the two, so Khalaila’s kids attend Nabi Samwil’s tiny school, not Jib’s.

Nabi Samwil, late last month. Until the early 2000s, the area north of the village thrived. Credit: Yahel Gazit

The teachers at Nabi Samwil’s school, which is under the authority of the Palestinian Education Ministry, are all from East Jerusalem, because Israel prevents Palestinians from other parts of the West Bank from entering the area. A few prefab structures have been added to the school, which is surrounded by a makeshift partition.

The area from which Palestinians are denied entry is bounded on the north by the Ofer army base and the for-Israelis-only Route 443, and to the south by East Jerusalem’s Ramot neighborhood, a settlement outside the Green Line, the 1949 cease-fire line. When you drive on this highway toward the constantly growing settlements of Givat Ze’ev, Givon and Givon Hahadasha, everything seems like Israel – the roads, signs, red roofs and tidy streetlight network. This is one of the places that clearly demonstrate the success of unofficial annexation.

On September 7, Central Command chief Avi Bluth signed a decree declaring this area, along with the village of Beit Iksa, as part of the so-called seam zone – the parts of the West Bank that stretch between the Green Line and the separation barrier. Palestinians who don’t live there are banned from this area. This announcement confused local Palestinians, considering all the prohibitions and restrictions that have been in place for nearly two decades.

According to the Israeli Defense Ministry’s Civil Administration in the West Bank, at the security cabinet meeting on August 26, the ministers made a change regarding the seam zone. And, “accordingly, staff work has been moved up at the Civil Administration in order to implement the decision,” a spokesperson at the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, COGAT, a Defense Ministry unit, told Haaretz.

With this, Israel increased the seam zone by nearly 7 percent by adding the 20,000 dunams (20 square kilometers, 7.7 square miles) of the Nabi Samwil and Beit Iksa enclave. And with this, the seam zone and the barrier at its current length of 492 kilometers (306 miles) swallow up around 320 square kilometers of the West Bank, whose total area is 5,800 square kilometers. These numbers are from Shaul Arieli, a researcher of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The announcement of the closing-off of the area and the issuing of Israeli movement permits got Palestinians worrying that this was the beginning of the formal annexation of the West Bank advanced by far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. A security source, however, told Haaretz that these steps are not an indication that the Civil Administration has launched an annexation process for the area. “Any decision on the matter will be taken by the government,” he said.

Barakat notes that a few months ago, Civil Administration officers showed up at houses, did a head count and wrote down the people’s names. A similar census was done last decade.

In early September, she says, residents received word from the local council that they would find the permits letting them stay in their homes in the special app provided by COGAT. The person who reported this to the council is from the Palestinian Civil Affairs Ministry, which receives its instructions from Israel’s Civil Administration.

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Meanwhile, the people were told to go to the Civil Administration premises at the Qalandiyah checkpoint and obtain a Palestinian biometric ID card. Confusingly, the permit says there is no need for a biometric ID card, whose orange color – rather than the usual white – also confused residents.

Also, some sections of the permit seem to contradict each other, adding to the confusion and anxiety. As with any permit allowing limited freedom of movement issued by the Civil Administration, it mentions the reason it was issued; here, it was to denote a “new resident in the seam zone.”

This designation is hard to understand, Barakat says; Palestinian families have been living in Beit Iksa and Nabi Samwil for centuries. Khalaila was built in the early 1970s.

The security source agrees that the phrase “new resident in the seam zone” is inaccurate but means that the permit is new. He says no particular significance should be ascribed to the orange color. Residents have received an extension until November 9 to get their affairs in order, after which the permits will go into effect.

The destination mentioned on the permit is the “seam zone,” though the document itself is titled “Entry permit into Israel,” and this “does not include Eilat,” the resort city in the south. It adds that “people carrying this permit are permitted to enter Israel, but only to the place and for the purpose stipulated.”

“We’ve grown tired,” says Nawal Barakat of Nabi Samwil. Credit: Yahel Gazit

As mentioned above, the place is the seam zone. From the Israeli authorities’ concoction of phrases, it may be deduced that they consider the seam zone an Israeli territory where certain Palestinians have received an Israeli permit to reside in their homes.

The same phrases can also be found in the permit given to residents of other seam zone areas such as the Barta’a enclave in the northwest West Bank. In their permits, too, the land in the seam zone is designated as Israel, while in the same breath the people are forbidden from leaving the area for Israel. This is an example of de facto annexation through language and the consciousness it shapes.

Until the early 2000s, the area north of Beit Iksa and Nabi Samwil was a thriving area that connected East Jerusalem and local villages, the towns of Bir Nabala and Beitunia and the city of Ramallah. For the past 20 years, this area has been nearly empty of Palestinians. The army and the Civil Administration even ban villagers from nearby villages who own agricultural land in the enclave from getting to their land and working it, save for a few days a year.

The residents of Nabi Samwil and Khalaila were previously allowed to go in and out of the area via the Jib checkpoint, which had a list of their names. For nearly 20 years, Beit Iksa residents have been banned from driving on the road connecting Beitunia and Jib with the eastern entrances to their villages, which have been blocked. They have been forced to take a longer route, a sunken road dug by the Israeli army in the 2000s. At the western entrance to their village, on the way from the town of Biddu, a checkpoint is there for them – and only them – to enter through.

The hardships of such isolation have produced several petitions to Israel’s High Court of Justice. The state’s designation of Beit Iksa as part of the seam zone was its response to the latest petition.

According to the security source, by the end of the year, residents of Beit Iksa, Nabi Samwil and Khalaila will have to prove they have not relocated to other areas. They will then receive a four-year permit to remain in their homes. This requirement to prove residency has also raised concerns and fears among the residents.

Relatives – even first-degree relatives – and friends who live in other parts of the West Bank are not permitted to visit the three communities, except for rare circumstances. Permits for service providers are scarce.

Barriers near Nabi Samwil late last month. It’s not the only large area of the West Bank closed to Palestinians. Credit: Yahel Gazit

Thus, for example, a garbage truck only comes to Nabi Samwil once a month. Soldiers at checkpoints have been limiting the type of items and quantities of food people have been transporting in their cars, even though these are large families and despite their need to economize by buying food in large packages.

In 1971, the army expelled Nabi Samwil residents from their ancient homes at the foot of the crusader fortress, the mosque and the traditionally accepted burial place of the Prophet Samuel. Those who remained after the expulsion and the destruction of their homes have relocated downhill to the small houses of other residents who never came back from the east bank of the Jordan River, where they were or went to in 1967.

For years after that, the authorities and Jewish individuals tried to buy the local Palestinians’ properties, with just partial success tainted by claims of forged documents. In 1995, the village and its houses, ancient buildings and agricultural lands were designated an Israeli national park. The park boasts ancient terraces, but its residents are banned from working their land and engaging in livestock farming.

Also, in Nabi Samwil, Khalaila and large parts of Beit Iksa, the Civil Administration has banned residents from carrying out construction work and even from adding second floors to their houses to fit them for growing families.

All these factors have hindered the natural development of the three villages, forcing some people to look for alternative places to live in the West Bank, though the address on their IDs remains as it was. Some people also have been living abroad for long stretches.

Thus, the number of residents in these communities is lower than what it could have been under natural circumstances. Now, with the imposition of the new permit, the concern is that many people who have been working and renting a house beyond the Jib checkpoint will not be allowed to return to their homes.

In the early years of this century, when Israel established the rule of movement permits and prohibitions for the seam zone, it promised the High Court that farmers’ rights for possessing and working land would not be infringed. But over the years, the number of permits awarded to landowners to gain access to their land has dwindled.

In the past two years, Israel has almost completely banned access, and people have not been allowed to harvest their olives – including in the Nabi Samwil enclave. These agricultural areas have long since become hiking destinations and green lungs for settlements.

If and when all planned 719 kilometers of the separation barrier are built, the off-limits-for-Palestinians zone will be 540 square kilometers large, on top of other large areas of the West Bank that are officially closed to Palestinians. They are not allowed to live there, do grazing or agricultural work, or even enter – and all this under a host of pretexts, mainly military-training and firing zones, as well as proximity to settlements. According to the Kerem Navot research group, in 2015, this amounted to about a third of the area of the West Bank at 1,770 square kilometers.

In recent years, settlement outposts and Israeli shepherds’ lands have taken over, under the protection of the army – around 14 percent of West Bank territory, some 780 kilometers, according to a study by Peace Now and Kerem Navot released in April. According to the research, 324 square kilometers lie inside what the army designates as shooting zones.

That is, de facto annexation covers around 2,220 square kilometers, with a Palestinian presence banned or limited to a minimum, whether by official decrees or outposts’ guns and threats. When it comes to undeclared annexation and the treatment of the Palestinian presence as “incidental,” Nabi Samwil and Beit Iksa aren’t unique.

Amira Hass

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