Qalqilya

Qalqilya is an old village of the plain’s edge — a place of springs and groves where the foothills of Samaria fall toward the Mediterranean, recorded under one spelling or another since antiquity, and farming the same rich water table ever since. Under the Mandate it was a thriving large village of the Tulkarm district, famous above all for its oranges: the coastal plain west of the town was citrus country, and Qalqilya’s growers shipped fruit by the trainload.

The armistice line of 1949 ran just west of the houses and cut the town off from most of its land; then came June 1967. In the first days of the occupation Israeli forces demolished a large part of Qalqilya — hundreds of houses by the counts of the time — and drove out most of its people, an act condemned at the United Nations; the residents were later allowed to return, and they rebuilt their town house by house on what remained of its land. Under the Oslo arrangements Qalqilya passed to Palestinian administration in the mid-1990s, one of the first West Bank cities to do so.

What makes Qalqilya emblematic among Palestinian cities is the wall. Beginning in 2002–2003, Israel’s separation barrier was built not along the Green Line but around the town itself: concrete walls and fenced barriers closed in on Qalqilya from the north, west and south, leaving the city — some forty thousand people — a single narrow exit to the east, with a tunnel under the barrier road linking it to the neighboring village of Habla. Farmers were separated from thousands of dunams of their groves, many of them reachable only through permit gates. In its 2004 advisory opinion the International Court of Justice found the barrier’s route inside the West Bank contrary to international law; the wall around Qalqilya still stands.

A city ringed by concrete should, by every prediction, have withered. Qalqilya instead grew — one of the West Bank’s denser urban markets, its shops and its surviving groves still sending oranges across the West Bank, its single gate a daily lesson in what the occupation means in concrete. The springs still rise at the foot of the hills, and the town they watered for two thousand years refuses to leave them.

Sources

• Qalqiliya — Palestine Remembered
• Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (2004 advisory opinion) — International Court of Justice