IN STEREO

You know, I think anybody in their right mind would take care of the properties. We’re talking about big bucks. It’s a damn good investment. But people don’t realise that. It’s not the culture itself; we’re talking about the occupation. What Israel did when they took over [was] they opened up a lot of jobs for everybody. They opened up the gates for everybody to forget about their land and follow the money. That’s the whole thing. People are running after money. They know their land after the price becomes high. That’s when they start thinking about their land. But when it’s low: “Nah, I’ve got no time for it; I don’t have the money to spend on it.” I mean, hey, if you can’t take care of your land, you should give a chance to some people who don’t have the money and are willing to work. What do I expect? More settlements, absolutely. We’ve got a settler who owns a piece of land up in Al-Makhrour.

They bought this property about fifty years ago, OK? And just about a month ago, they came down with the machines and everything. Now they start spreading, looking at the vulnerable people, poor families who are in real need of money or something like that, and they start buying them up. They just start spreading like cancer. That’s what it is. And whenever you don’t have chemotherapy in the body, it will spread faster and faster. The more open land with nobody taking care of it, the more settlements we’re going to get. As long as there is empty land that isn’t being used by its owners, as long as the Palestinian Authority are not doing anything to help out those people who own these far-away lands like Makhrour and Battir, Israel are more than happy to take over. It’s sad but that’s the way it is. That’s a fact of our life. That’s what’s going on down here. – Jamal