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Jayyous is a peaceful little village with 3000 habitants. It is green and beautiful, with kind and generous people. But the wall, the so called security wall, even called the apartheid wall, is now built through the village. Last night I could not sleep because of the machines and noise from the building not far from our house. All fertile land is being systematically confiscated at the moment, I am told again and again. The wall does not get built on the green line that separates The West bank from Israel, instead it is built far into the West bank, sometimes only some meters from peoples homes and the farmers in Jayyous are loosing their land.

“People know about the wall, but not how it affects the people on the west bank. It has nothing to do with security, that’s a big lie. Then it would not be built on people’s properties and so close to their houses. It is the settlements that are the reason for the wall. They want to expand their territory”, Jamal says, the coordinator at Pengon, The Palestinian Environmental NGOs Network, when I met him a few days ago in Jerusalem.

Pengon tries to stop the wall, through campaigns against the wall and with advocacy and media attention around it in Israel and internationally. I was at a meeting with them the other week, at the UN office in Jerusalem.

Jamal says that the wall is not even mentioned in the Roadmap, and shows us maps over the planned wall.

“There is nothing left for the Palestinians. No land, no water, no power. Tell us, what shall we do? Our future is to be cheap labour for the Israelis. We will live in ghettos and work in industrial zones within the settlements”.

He says again and again that we need to put pressure on our governments to act now, before it is too late. The plans for the wall started in 1996 he says, when a professor in Haifa University, drew up the maps for how to construct the wall, to have the maximal control over the Palestinians and put them behind the wall.

“In 15 years this land will be densely populated”, he continues. “The Palestinians do not have any more hope. The conflict will be even more bloody and this forces people to be extremists”.

Despite all this, we were welcomed with enormous hospitality in Jayyous, it was touching. The first day we met all the women in the village. They had a meeting and had all been gathered to welcome us. Most of them spoke very bad English, but somehow we found ways to communicate quite well.

We rent an old house of Sharif Omar Khalid. It’s very simple, but nice. He’s a farmer and has lived all his life in Jayyous. Rather proudly, he tells us how he is the biggest farmer in the village, and has been able to send all his seven children to university. But today all his land is on the other side of the wall. He sold his goats, sheep, and his wife’s jewellery to build a fence around it to protect the land from the Israelis. 72 percent of the total land of Jayyous and 168 greenhouses will be behind the wall when it is finished he says. 95 percent of the income in Jayyous comes from the land cultivated by the farmers. The people are suffering but don’t want to leave the village. They know that if they do that, they will never be able to return.

“My land is what I love most on this earth. The Israelis can’t take it away from us. I will protect my land if it means that they shut me on it. If they want to build a wall, build it on the green line, not 5.5 km into Jayyous. As they treat us now, they make us enemies forever. They destroy everything that we have built up. Democracy and human rights is only for the Israelis in Israel, not on the occupied territories”, he says.

He went early this morning to participate in a big demonstration in Ramallah, but had to come back because he wasn’t allowed in. Sharif told me about several demonstrations he has attended, peaceful demonstrations, which ended with harassment, arrests and teargas from soldiers.

I have spoken with many of the farmers in Jayyous and they all say the same thing. “I’m scared to go to my land now, because I’m always afraid that the soldiers will come. I can’t work, eat, or think. I think about it all the time”, says one of the farmers.

In a couple of months the wall may be so high that no one will be able to reach their land anymore. What do they do then? No one answers. They just look down. Many of these farmers have put all their savings, efforts and time into their land, which is their only income. To loose the land is something they can’t even bare to think about.