Children who work in the settlements. Photo: Hamza Zubeidat. All rights reserved.It seems every month there are new plans to expand the illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, with new housing units added to already burgeoning settler towns and cities that sit on stolen Palestinian hilltops looking down on impoverished Palestinian communities in the valleys below.
Settlement work is work they must undertake so they can survive.
The settlements split the West Bank into Palestinian islands surrounded by settler-only land, roads, and military zones. They are an integral part of Israel’s military occupation and a major aspect of the continued, decades long, suppression of the Palestinian people. Yet they also, in what seems like a political contradiction, provide employment to thousands of Palestinians – men, women, and children as young as 12 – who toil in settlement farms and factories, and who construct and build the very same buildings that deconstruct their own aspirations for self-determination.
