Toward sunset we arrive, Yigal, Koby, and I. It’s my first time in Wadi Jḥeish (probably “Valley of the Mules”):  a tiny hamlet of some 60 souls, all part of the large Nawaja‘ family that we know from nearby Susiya. Houses of cement blocks and stucco with flat roofs of aluminum and plastic. A trellis of dry grapevines. Potted plants and small garden plots of desert flowers. Rock underfoot. Two tall water tanks behind the houses, higher up the hill.  A sheep pen. A few trees, including a small olive grove. Many children. From every spot you stand or sit, a wide-open stretch of the brown, stone-ripe hills. They’ve never been more ravishing. The village has changed since Peg saw it in 2018, when it was mostly tents; it’s more solid now, but no less vulnerable. Someone has drawn and painted red and white hearts, lots of them, on both sides of the door to the kitchen and sitting room, where we are to sleep. There’s also an inscription: baytkum ‘āmir bi’l-afrāḥ, May your house be filled with celebrations.

But, like everywhere else in the South Hebron hills, Wadi Jḥeish has had its share of recent settler attacks, and more may yet come. Not much to celebrate at the moment, although everyone survived—and that is something. Ibrahim, the elder of the village, tells the story:

“Four soldiers, almost certainly settler-soldiers, heavily armed, came over the hill. They were shouting: ‘Don’t move or we’ll kill you.’ They started beating me hard on my head, over and over and over and over, as if forever. I had to be taken to hospital in Yatta. Luckily, there were no fractures. I am 68 years old, and these days are the hardest in my life. We hardly go out for grazing, there’s no food for the sheep, and we’re afraid. We’re completely closed in, nowhere to go, no money. We can’t even harvest our olives.

Then, on October 28th, at night, three masked settlers accompanied by soldiers—all in uniform, with guns—knocked on our door. One tall man had green eyes, I could pick him out from a thousand. They knocked hard and harder, never pausing, tak tak tak. The children were terrified. The settlers said to me, ‘Tomorrow by noon none of you will be here. Understand? No one left here.’ It was a threat. But we didn’t leave. And the next day, October 29^th, they did come back at noon. They went around photographing everything, the whole village.”

He tells the story straight, in words commensurate with the crime; he speaks with quiet passion. Then he asks: “What do they want from us? What does Netanyahu want? What makes sense, any kind of sense?”

There is more to tell. On November 11 settlers came back and broke the satellite dish that served the village for internet and also knocked down the wind turbine that Comet-ME had installed years ago to supply electric power. Apparently the villagers managed to fix it. The threat of violence remains constant.

left: Wadi Jḥeish, 2018, photograph: Margaret Olin. right: Wadei Jḥeish, 2023, photograph: David Shulman

We sit with the men and the young boys as evening comes on. We’re offered coffee. Then I have an hour to read, before dinner. In my knapsack I find the tattered, water-stained pocket copy of Iliad, Book XXI. I’ve carried it with me for twenty years, a kind of talisman, whenever I go into the Palestinian territories. I’ve never read more than the first 30 lines. The booklet, with its fine Greek-English glossary, once belonged to one Amanda Clement, probably a school-girl, who bought it for 80 pence in Cambridge in 1974. Since then it’s had a lot of adventures—if only it could speak; even some of my Palestinian friends were interested in it. Achilles, after the death of Patroclus, has come back to fight the Trojans, thus ending his long grumpy interlude, sulking in his tent. For the moment, the tide of war turns. He drives a mass of Trojans into the river Zanthus, “like locusts fleeing a fire,” and jumps in after them with his sword. The river turns red with blood. Not, perhaps, the most soothing text during these days of the Gaza war, and in the wake of the horrific massacre of October 7th. Actually, I never much cared for Achilles, except at the end of the Iliad, when he becomes human for a few moments.

Darkness comes early in the winter, and the air turns cold. A dinner of chicken and rice. The children are with us. Yigal plays with tiny San‘a, less than a year old; at first she is all smiles, then suddenly she is afraid. Her father tells me that for some time now he can’t sleep at all. Too much tension and fear. He goes off to his house with the baby. We prepare our cameras in case the settlers turn up—cameras are our only defense– and we decide the order of our shifts. Lights out, except for the moon.

But I, too, cannot sleep. For three hours I lie awake, thinking too hard. It’s a beautiful, well-appointed room. I  study the wooden cabinet with its elegant ceramic jugs, the glass decanters, the little round mirror; I count the prayer beads hanging from a hook on the wall. There is another, bigger mirror, it’s bottom frame broken off (by the settlers?), facing the couches, the thick blankets, the pillows, the windows, the TV. Yesterday the army destroyed two such houses along with sheep pens in Sha‘ab al-Butum, not far away, as if the raids by settler thugs were not enough. The Civil Administration likes demolishing homes in the winter; sometimes the families have to sleep under the open sky.

An entire way of life and of feeling the world, a good life, is on the brink.

At first, concentric whirlpools of pain, endemic to this kind of work, revolve in my mind. After a while, they subside. Toward midnight, clarity arises from nowhere. Peg says that in those hills you can see clarity in the air. Or maybe it’s the eerie visions of sleeplessness. I start my shift, at peace, for once. I make a round of the central village, keeping out of sight of the army’s watchtower just 150 meters or so away. It’s quiet, except for the high-strung dogs and the thud of the army’s bombs exploding in Gaza.  At one point, the house we’re staying in shakes and trembles from the shock.

What am I doing here in Wadi Jḥeish? I know I’ve come for Ibrahim and Mhammad and San‘a and all the others. That part is clear. In Susiya the young girls always ask us, “Will you sleep here tonight?” They live in fear, they need us there. It seems our presence in the villages is having some effect.

But this odd, gentle, crystalline peace I am feeling—where did that come from?

It seems we humans are born to say no to the wrong. That little word is our gift. It’s the best word in the language, if uttered or enacted without violence or inflicting hurt. You have to learn how to say it if you want to be free, and you have to find your own way to say it. There is never an end to those who would take away our freedom, and (even worse) that of others; we also spoil the little freedom we have by our own doubts, by our minds. 

Then a second axiom, a variation on the first. We are born to seek truth, and to understand it. Then to speak it. An endless task. It’s even harder than saying no. You have to strip away the lies, the stock in trade of governments, and the fog of forgetting, as the Greeks would say. Truth, aletheia, is a non-forgetting. (It’s far beyond the powers of an Achilles). That kind of truth is hiding right before our eyes. Sometimes you have to come to Wadi Jḥeish to find it.

Or so my body tells me tonight, not in words. Perhaps it’s coming from the rocky slopes and the fragrant, dusty cold. Something  unimaginably simple that you also know.

For three hours I scan the hills, whence trouble might arrive. At 2:30 Yigal relieves me, and now I can sleep. You know a place only when you sleep there, dream there, wake there. I can’t remember what I dreamt.