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- December 11, 2009
Barkan Industrial site is in the foreground between two Israeli settlements with the Palestinian village in the background
Corporate Watch - 2 December 2009
In a climate in which the call for a consumer boycott of Israeli goods is finally gaining strength, one area of Israel’s economy is, as yet, surprisingly under-researched. Most of Israel’s industrial zones in the West Bank are connected to illegal residential settlements and provide an indispensable economic backbone to the local settler economy. Mishor Adumim is the second largest industrial zone in the Occupied Territories and the one through which the Palestinians have the most to lose.
Benny Kashriel is the mayor of Ma’ale Adumim (the collective name for the settlement block of which Mishor Adumim is part) and is not shy about the importance of the industrial zone for the continued expansion of the settlement. In an article by The Jerusalem Report he is quoted as saying “My dream is to build Adumim all the way to Jerusalem […] to be a legal part of the land of Israel, but to be economically independent of Jerusalem. That will be accomplished thanks to Mishor Adumim”i. Unfortunately for the Palestinians, he is not alone in this dream. Ma’ale Adumim is expanding faster than any other settlement in the West Bank; its population has grown from 15,000 when Kashriel became mayor in 1992 to around 35,000 today. It is at the centre of the controversial E1 (East 1) project, which aims to cut the West Bank off from East Jerusalem and facilitate the expansion of Ma’ale Adumim, therefore destroying any possibility of what is frequently referred to as a “viable Palestinian state”. Read More…
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