Palestinian schoolchildren walk towards the entrance of their village where an Israeli settlement looms large on the opposite hilltop November 12, 2008, in Kherbet Zakaria near Hebron in the West Bank. (Photo: David Silverman / Getty Images)
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.
These workers are often forgotten about by the outside world and activists, vilified by their fellow Palestinians, and used as propaganda by settlement companies and the Israeli government who portray the settlements as good by providing Palestinian workers an opportunity to work and put food on the table for their families.
However this is the rhetoric of the occupier — simply the dominant narrative, and that shouted loudest.
Travel the rural West Bank villages where Palestinian settlement workers are mainly from, sit down in their homes, and talk to them about their lives and work, and a completely different picture emerges. These workers talk of dangerous conditions, of life-altering injuries, of being paid well below the legal Israeli minimum wage (to which they are entitled), and being subjected to…