MIDDLE EAST: New army restrictions have left Palestinian farmers high and dry, writes Nuala Haughey in Bardala.
When Israel seized the "west bank" of the Jordan river in the 1967 Six Day war, it viewed the fertile valley which rises to western hills as a natural line of defence against Arab attack from the east.
Military outposts sprung up amid Palestinian villages and Bedouin encampments dotting the sparsely populated valley and its western slopes, and some were later transformed into civilian communities aimed at defining land that the Jewish state planned to eventually annex.
But Jewish civilian settlement of the fertile valley never really took off. While Israel's enterprise of illegal colonisation flourished in the stony central heartlands of the occupied West Bank, the 27 isolated Jewish colonies along its eastern strip have stagnated, and their population today barely scrapes 7,000.
However, Israel's desire to annex this prime slice of agricultural land - about a third of the occupied West Bank - never faded. It even resurfaced in an early proposal for an eastern section of Israel's vast illegal West Bank separation barrier.
Now the Jordan Valley is firmly back on the agenda as Israel forges ahead with its unilateral policy of fixing its borders with an emasculated Palestinian entity entirely on its own terms, terms which are inimical to internationally-backed peace proposals for a two-state solution.
Acting Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert last week announced that his plans to fix Israel's borders mean retaining permanent control of the valley, as well as major settlement blocs in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, while relinquishing some other settlements. "Control over Israel's eastern border cannot be renounced," he said.
Human rights groups argue that Israel has in effect already annexed the valley by almost completely barring the two million residents of the rest of the West Bank from entering the eastern area.
A recent tightening of the army's checkpoint and permit regime has isolated the valley's Palestinian residents from relatives and neighbours in the rest of the West Bank, according to a report this week by the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem.
The army insists the restrictions are based solely on security considerations, but locals counter they do not correlate with any rise in terrorism in the area.
"In order to prevent terrorism the Israeli army has taken measures to defend Israeli communities and traffic in the Jordan Valley," the army said in a statement.
B'Tselem says the permit regime, combined with recent declarations by senior officials, "give the impression that the motive underlying Israel's policy is not based on military-security needs but is political: the de facto annexation of the Jordan Valley".
This is a view widely shared by the valley's Palestinian residents, mostly subsistence farmers or semi-nomadic Bedouins who graze sheep and grow crops on the rich red soil of this northern stretch of an ancient rift valley.
Mustafa Mohammed Hassan (50), a farmer and father of six from Bardala village, said he is among many villagers facing financial ruin because checkpoint closures have made it almost impossible for him to sell his vegetables in Israel.
"This is the worst year we've ever had," said Hassan, who grows tomatoes, cucumbers, courgettes and cauliflower on a five-hectare farm set amid the potholed dirt roads of the village.
"We can hardly feed our kids and we are all in debt, because we've had to borrow to buy all our seeds and fertiliser and chemicals." Even at the best of times, the movement of the valley's 53,000 Palestinians is severely curtailed by a complicated Israeli regime of closed military zones, off-limit conservation areas and settler-only roads. The military restrictions intensified last May when a permit system was set up for non-resident teachers and seasonal agricultural workers as well as farmers from outlying villages who find themselves cut off from their own land, which lies beyond the new line of separation formed by fixed Israeli checkpoints.
People who have lived for decades in northern villages, including Bardala, can now only remain in their homes if they are officially registered as residents.
Locals say Israeli soldiers now go from house to house at night detaining men whose identity cards show their official residence in adjacent West Bank villages. They are then "dumped" on the far side of the checkpoints controlling access to the valley. For the moment, locals say, the Israeli military authorities are allowing most applicants to re-register as Jordan Valley residents, while keeping most non-residents out.
Dotted amid the fields of date palms and banana trees that line the valley are the rusting hulks of tanks installed in the wake of the 1967 Israel-Arab war, their guns trained eastwards towards an invading Arab enemy which has yet to arrive.
Only the most hardline of Israel's hawks today argue that a militarily strong Israel at peace with Jordan and Egypt faces any threat from across the Jordan Valley.
The Palestinians argue that Israel's permanent annexation of the valley would deprive them of the viable independent nation they seek. But the valley's Palestinian residents have a more immediate existential concern.
"If they carry on with what they are doing we will end up having to leave the valley," says Bardala resident and farmer Hussein Nimir Suwafta (35).
"They are forcing us into evacuating ourselves, because we won't be able to live here anymore."