Jordan Valley Under Israeli Ihtilal: A Palestinian Story of Stark Oppression

The Jordan Valley of Palestine is a site of poverty and targeting of a population, subjecting the native Palestinian inhabitants to sub-standard living conditions worse than any other areas in the West Bank under Israeli military occupation for more than half a century. Taking a grounded theory approach, this paper aims at presenting the voices of marginalized ordinary Palestinian locals, to be heard and reflected upon within a critical analytical geography context. For its part, Israel’s strategies of occupation and colonizing are geared towards controlling and fencing in over 90 percent of the Jordan Valley’s land, and by extension securing its resources (i.e., water, fertile agricultural and pastureland) for the benefit of the incoming Jewish settlers, now numbering some 10 000. This is at the expense of the indigenous 60 000 Palestinians, whose daily lives are marked by a severe lack of the adequate basics in health, access to education and other facilities, let alone minimum human rights. The paper details the daily life of Palestinians in the Occupied Jordan Valley, embedded within a system of oppressive actions and suffering inflicted on a population by a state prioritizing one minority ethnic group in the area over its natives. A critical geographic lens reveals the stark details of the Jordan Valley’s Palestinian social and spatial reality.