West Bank village, proudly self-reliant, now faces wartime hostility

While most villages across the beleaguered West Bank lie dormant, Farkha buzzes with activity.

Farmers plant summer vegetables and wheat, blacksmiths weld iron gates, women prepare jarred pickles and jams for sale, and dozens gather in the recently opened cafe.

This Palestinian village, which a year and a half ago was found to be witnessing a revival built on self-sufficiency and an everyone-pitches-in philosophy, is faring better than most amid Israeli settler attacks, military road closures, and a suffocated economy.

Yet the feel-good vibes and flurry of activity mask a harsher reality: Farkha is under threat.

While its indigenous concept of Al Ouneh – collective philanthropy and communal farming – is keeping it afloat, residents say that this is not enough to shield the village from the closures and a legion of armed and organized far-right settlers.

Residents say that in a war, it takes more than a village.

“We are better off than other towns and villages,” says home-garden farmer Maher Rizaqallah, “but we can’t survive alone.”

A call to farms

The outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, although a blow to the West Bank economy, initially bolstered villagers’ buy-in to the communal farming model pushed by Mayor Mustafa Hammad.

When Israel canceled work permits for West Bank workers, some 90 Farkha residents who worked in Israel and were skeptical about farming began picking up shovels, hoes, and rakes and returned to their families’ lands.

Riad Damdoom and his nephew Khalil, both of whom worked in construction in Israel until Oct. 7, are clearing and irrigating a plot on their family land soon to be planted with zucchini.

“We made good money in Israel, but here the land gives year-round,” Riad Damdoom says as he adjusts a drip-irrigation hose over a field of okra and fava beans. “It’s tiring, but it’s ours.”

For the first time, Riad’s brother, Nidal Damdoom, is planting an acre of wheat, he says proudly, and a quarter-acre of barley.

“If I live on my own land, I don’t have to import, purchase, or wait for a work permit. We can flourish on our own land,” he says.

“If Israel places us under a siege, we will have our own flour; we could make our own bread – we will be able to live.”

Also driving this resurgence in farming is the existential question of whether Farkha residents can stay on their own land.

Settlers from the nearby hilltop outpost extending from the large Ariel settlement city leveled dozens of acres of Farkha farmland last October to build new settler roads, allegedly with soldiers’ assistance.

Residents have watched settler extremists push Bedouin communities off other West Bank farmlands and fear they may be next.

“We are asserting our presence on our ancestral lands,” Thameen Badah says as he tills and irrigates a corner of his farm.

With a bag of seeds handed to him by the mayor, he plants sesame, pumpkin, and kidney beans and pats the soil. “If we abandon the land, the settlers will take it. This is our resistance.”

Intimidation, uncertainty

But Farkha’s utopian plans are running up against the reality of settler violence.

Musa al-Wahsh, standing atop the ruins of his dream home, knows it better than most.

Looking for greenery, calm, a fresh start, and a chance for his children to enroll in school, Mr. Wahsh came to Farkha one year ago from Jub Al-Dhib, a herding community near Bethlehem penned in by settlers.

After months of research, he purchased a tranquil acre of land for his home and a dairy farm, downhill from Farkha and surrounded by olive groves and farms, with no building in sight.

At the time, there was only one nearby settler outpost, with one single settler.

To encourage Mr. Wahsh, Farkha’s mayor cleared a road leading to his land and extended electricity lines, in the hope that others would follow suit and settle and farm the village’s outskirts.

Then the settlers came.  

As Mr. Wahsh and a contractor were finishing his home’s foundations and walls in December, settlers wearing military uniforms came and ordered him to leave – despite the lands being under complete control of the Palestinian Authority and legally his.

“I told them I legally own this land. I have a permit from my government, the Palestinian Authority, to build here. They have no right to stop me,” Mr. Wahsh says. “Then they fired into the air.”

One settler placed a gun to his contractor’s head and forced him to bulldoze the cement foundations and walls. The settlers then broke his water tanks, flooded stacks of iron, and set fire to a thousand dollars’ worth of wood.

Mr. Wahsh rebuilt, albeit a smaller house a dozen yards or so away from the original site.

In late March, the settlers returned and threatened him and his children at gunpoint, warning him, “Leave or else.”

“I thought this land would be our sanctuary,” Mr. Wahsh says. “It’s not safe here at all,” he says, holding his 3-year-old daughter. “I’m looking to rent a house up in the village. We can’t stay here.”

Mr. Hammad, the mayor, says ruefully that he wishes Mr. Wahsh “could have held out a little while longer.”

“We would have extended water networks, there would have been neighbors, and he would not have been alone, and not a vulnerable target.”

The mayor is still encouraging “any new project or building” at the same site at the village’s edge.

“If we don’t show our presence and use our land now, we will lose it,” he says.

Yet settlers are visibly getting closer, and multiple settler outposts established near Farkha in the past few years have been legalized by Israel’s far-right government within the last year, according to the settler watchdog Peace Now.

The Farkha municipality and monitoring groups worry that settler construction projects, linked by new settler roads, could soon encircle the village, cutting it off from farmland and most of the West Bank.

A wave of settler attacks last fall prevented many Farkha residents from picking their olives, leading to a record low harvest.

As a result, production of organic olive oil, a Farkha lifeblood, has almost dried up; olive oil is even scarce in the village, forcing villagers to buy from elsewhere.

Tired and wary

Mr. Rizaqallah and his wife, Hanin, are visibly tired.

While their garden is flourishing with tomatoes in-season, and bountiful zucchini and eggplant are weeks away, the markets they sell to are shrinking.

“The market is dead. No one is there and no one is buying,” Ms. Rizaqallah says, recently returned from Nablus, once the main hub to sell goods. She has stopped posting photos of her goods on Facebook. “Most people just don’t have the money,” she says.

Due to the depressed West Bank economy, the couple have had better success selling pickled eggplants to the United Arab Emirates than to neighboring villages.

Yet the couple, like the village itself, are still planning for the future. In their backyard, Mr. Rizaqallah has cleared a small plot for citrus trees; the chicken coop is alive with chicks.

The municipality is preparing a nursery for indigenous crops and plants to share across the West Bank, and it is teaching organic farming.

Its home-garden program now has 300 households growing, trading, and selling produce in what it bills as the “home economics of resistance” to occupation.

But when Farkha sought Palestinian Authority funding last year for 12 projects ranging from water to agriculture to infrastructure, it did not receive a single reply. The PA did not respond to a request for comment.

There is an unshakable feeling here that the village is on its own.

“We are surviving, but these are all individual initiatives; we are going at it alone,” says Mr. Rizaqallah. “A village cannot stand up to an entire army and settler militias. We need national initiatives. We need unity and support in order to endure.”

“If we were placed under siege, we would have self-sufficiency for 20 or 30 days,” Mr. Rizaqallah says, “but after that we couldn’t last.”

Gazing at the hilltop outpost and the settler road, Mayor Hammad is defiant.

“This is our ancestors’ land and our land,” he says. “We will cling onto our land no matter what it takes.”