The Settlements and Their Sewage - Polluting Palestine

Every so often, the usually even-tempered Ahmad bursts forth with an exclamation of deep anger, almost startling in its intensity. He is talking about the confiscation of vast tracts of land belonging to West Bank Palestinian villages for construction of Israel's separation wall and to provide lebensraum for the network of Israeli settlements throughout Palestinian land. "Why you want to put your shit in my salon?" he exclaims. Then he catches himself. "Sorry for the language, but sometimes it gets on my nerves."

"Gets on my nerves" is quite an understatement. Although Ahmad is talking figuratively, of Israeli settlements and Israeli walls and -- something you don't usually hear about -- Israeli trash dumps throughout the West Bank, scarring the landscape and invading Palestinian space, the reference to what is being dumped in the Palestinian salon applies literally as well as figuratively in the small village of Wadi Fuqin southwest of Bethlehem. A large settlement, Betar Illit, looms over this village and has on two occasions quite literally dumped its sewage down into the fertile valley where the village's life-sustaining agricultural land lies. That's sewage from a settlement of 25,000 poured onto a village of 1,200.