West Bank: the palm trees of discord

The peace plan unveiled by President Trump on January 28, 2020 proposes the annexation of most of the Jordan Valley by Israel. Reactions have focused mainly on the denial of international law that lies at the heart of this document (remember that Israel's military occupation of the West Bank has been condemned by several United Nations resolutions).

Julie Trottier, University of Montpellier

But it's also important to consider the economic context: if Trump's plan is feasible today, it's largely due to the agricultural transformation that the Jordan Valley has undergone in recent years.

Israel occupied the West Bank during the 1967 war. On July 30 1980, the Knesset passed a basic law annexing Jerusalem, without granting Israeli nationality to its residents. The map published in Donald Trump's peace plan proposes the annexation by Israel of the part of the West Bank least populated by Palestinians. This provision makes it possible to annex the land without incorporating a non-Jewish population into the State of Israel.

The advent of date palm cultivation of the medjoul variety plays a key role in this process, as this agricultural transformation has been emptying the Jordan Valley of its Palestinian inhabitants for several years. A brief historical review is in order to explain the reasons for this.

The expansion of medjoul palms

Large families from Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nablus had purchased land in the Jordan Valley from the late ^19th century onwards. Sparsely populated before the 1948 war, the valley experienced a sudden demographic surge with the arrival of Palestinian refugees following the Israeli war of independence. They provided an abundant workforce for the landowners whose land was irrigated by the Ein Sultan, Al Auja and Fassayil springs.

After 1949, the valley was in a situation where many absentee landowners employed farm laborers who lived on their land. Sharecropping soon became the main form of land tenure. In other words, in most cases, farmers did not own the land they farmed and lived on. Instead, they shared the income from their crops half and half with the landowner, a system called "nos-nos" by the Palestinians.

The 1967 occupation triggered the departure of many refugees to Jordan, but sharecropping persisted as the main form of land tenure in the Jordan Valley, a phenomenon distinct from the rest of the West Bank. The Israeli settlers who moved into the valley introduced the medjoul date palm. This variety of date only grows in an extremely dry, hot climate. The Jordan Valley is ideally suited to it. Global demand for this fleshy date is so strong that its price remains inelastic in the face of increasing production. Palestinian farmers followed the settlers' lead in the late 1990s. Since then, the date palm boom has continued. Our research has shown that in 1999, 524 hectares were covered by date palms grown by settlers and 25 hectares by Palestinians. By 2016, these areas had grown to 2,560 hectares and 1,584 hectares respectively.

The water question

Agronomists and economists generally approve of this agricultural transformation. On the Palestinian side, half of the area cultivated with date palms in 2016 had previously been a desert expanse, while the other half had been grown mainly for the local market. These crops, market gardening, cereals and bananas, generated little foreign currency. Medjoul dates, on the other hand, are exported with very high added value. Their contribution to GDP is incomparable with that of previous crops. Moreover, a date palm requires very little water for evapotranspiration, about a third of what a banana plant requires. Date palms tolerate relatively salty irrigation water. In an arid environment, they seem a priori the ideal crop rotation.

The Israeli state developed infrastructure to convey wastewater from the Jerusalem, Ma'ale Adumim and Bethlehem areas to a series of reservoirs and treatment plants scattered along the Jordan Valley. The settlements irrigate their date palms entirely with this wastewater. Palestinian farmers, on the other hand, with the exception of a few hectares in Jericho, irrigate their date palms using groundwater. The region's demographic evolution means that the supply of wastewater will increase in the future. On the other hand, groundwater is becoming increasingly salty. Uncertainty about the future of their water supply is the biggest risk facing Palestinian investors.

The interests of Palestinian agricultural enterprises

On the Palestinian side, date palm expansion is mainly driven by agribusinesses whose executives live in Rawabi, Ramallah or Jerusalem, far from the Jordan Valley. This elite often studied at the best American universities and speaks the language of the globalized elite. These executives are asking European backers for wastewater reuse projects in the Jordan Valley similar to those developed by Israel for the settlers.

At the same time, they understand that the cheapest and most technically reliable solution would be to connect to the Israeli sewage network. Should we be surprised if Palestinian businessmen were invited by the United States to the conference held in Bahrain from June 25 to 27, 2019? The United States has not discussed its plan with the Palestinian Authority, but it has sought to ally itself with the Palestinian economic elites. Their economic project specifies that it aims to "increase the ability of Palestinian farmers to shift their efforts to higher-value crop rotations and give them the opportunity to use modern agricultural techniques". The plan's projects, such as cold storage facilities, wastewater networks and "critical connections", are clearly geared towards supporting Palestinian date palm agribusinesses.

The negative effects of agricultural processing

Our research has demonstrated several deleterious effects of the advent of date palms. While they are seen as a means of reducing water consumption in agriculture, they have had the opposite effect. On the one hand, they require more water than the minimum needed for evapotranspiration. They have to be sprayed against mildew in February, for example. Secondly, palms planted on previously unirrigated land have generated a new demand for water. Finally, drip irrigation in an area with very little rainfall leads to salinization of the soil, which is never washed away. Ultimately, this makes the land sterile. This doesn't bother the agribusinesses, who don't buy their land but prefer to lease it for 40 years.

Far more crucial, however, is the impact of date palms on tenant farmers. Agribusinesses that introduce date palms dismiss their tenant farmers. They hire seasonal workers for two months a year at harvest time. The agribusinesses fence off their plots, preventing access to weeds such as khubbezeh, an extremely nutritious variety of mallow that guarantees food security for the poor. No one is allowed to live on fenced-in land. Previously, tenant farmers lived on the land they cultivated. They were self-sufficient in food. With the switch to seasonal workers, tenant farmers have lost their food security, their job security and their housing security. Our research has shown that between 1999 and 2016, a minimum of 7,567 members of sharecropper families were displaced by date palms, a significant population given the 51,410 inhabitants of the two governorates where date palms are grown. The accelerated expansion of date palms since 2016 has increased this phenomenon.

Driven out of their homes, with no economic activity for ten months of the year, the tenant farmers and their families are displaced from the valley by an economic process of agricultural transformation led by Palestinian agribusinesses partly supported by European donors. Emptied of its Palestinian inhabitants, the Jordan Valley becomes an area suitable for annexation by Israel, which can thus integrate the land without integrating a non-Jewish population.

Julie Trottier, Director of Research at CNRS, specialist in the Palestinian territories, ART-Dev, UMR 5281, University of Montpellier

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.