I reach Mu‘arrajat in late afternoon, the hills golden and speckled with sheep. Three months or more of my forced exile are over. My torn tendon may or may not be healing, but I’m walking again, and the pain isn’t too bad. Sulayman rushes to carry my knapsack down the steep hill to the gravel path leading to the mosque and the school. “How are things here?” I ask him, as if I didn’t know. “OK,” he says, “the last days have been quiet.” He wants to study medicine. I ask him how old he is. “Eighteen.” “And how old do you think I am?” He looks carefully and says, “Maybe 50.” “No,” I’m seventy five.” He’s shocked. “You’re a young boy like me.”

But the new settler outpost higher up the hill is flourishing, expanding, and eager to terrorize the Mu‘arrajat Palestinians. That’s the settler program. Some weeks back they dug a line of open graves near the school—a ominous sign of what they hope awaits their Palestinian neighbors. “In October the outpost settlers from across the main road were stopping Palestinian cars and telling them: “You have to leave within 24 hours. If you don’t, we’ll come and kill you.” In addition, the army has declared the vast grazing grounds north of the road to be off limits. How many times have we followed the shepherds there, often with many herds spread over the wadi? And now, after the rains, there is plenty of green grass for the sheep. But the Mu‘arrajat villagers can only look at it from afar, with longing. For the moment, they are stuck grazing the herds within the narrow confines of the village. Soon it will be summer. Nothing green left.

Last week settlers fenced off—that is, stole—another chunk of land for their own herd, close to the village school. Our activists called the army, and some officer from the Civil Administration turned up and told the settlers to go away. Which they did. But naturally they came back a few hours later. The new sheepfold is still there. The settlers were there again today.

We are invited for the Iftar dinner of soup, rice, chicken, mutton, and the luscious yoghurt they make in the village. There is time to talk. Shagar, 8 months old, strikes up a deep friendship with me. He isn’t quite ready to come and sit on my lap, but we have much to say to one another with our eyes and our smiles. When I think of the never-ending cruelty the settlers and the soldiers and the government inflict each day on these people, I think first of Shagar and his cousins, Aman and Ahmad. How is it possible for people to torture children, not to mention their parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and friends? Clearly, it is eminently possible. The settlers must love it.

Mhammad and his remarkable daughter ‘Aliya speak at length about the situation. They startle me with their detailed knowledge of Israeli politics. They know all about the racist-supremacist Smotrich, Minister of Finance, and the self-declared, convicted criminal Ben-Gvir, Minister of National Security, courtesy of Netanyahu. In one of the world’s great understatements, Sulayman shakes his head and says, “Netanyahu, he’s a very annoying man” (mu‘asseb ktir). But can we even call him a man? One has to earn that title. They also have much to say, none of it good, about Palestinian politics, above all the corruption that everyone knows about. They also know about and disown the massacre of October 7^th. In a way, it’s as if this level of existence, of lethal politics and now the war, were hovering somewhere above them, remote from sheep and goats and children and food and water and electric power and the Ramadan fast. But in fact the threat is all too near. They live with the constancy of grief and fear and helplessness, their lives hanging by a thread.

Something amusing comes up. Zvi Succot, an ultra-right-wing-religious-nationalist-fanatic fool of a man, is the chairman of the Knesset Subcommittee for Judea and Samaria, that is the Occupied Palestinian West Bank. Yesterday he held a meeting in the Knesset to discuss “leftist-anarchist violence toward Jewish settlers.” We have the honor to bear the title of anarchists, though I don’t think I’ve ever met an actual member of that archaic community. I know of no violent acts whatsoever committed by activists against settlers, or for that matter against anybody, in the last twenty-some years. We are Gandhians of one kind or another. And we know all too well where brute violence is coming from on a daily basis. Succot brought a settler, Gavriel, whom the Palestinians call Jibril, from Mvoot Yericho, close to ‘Auja, to testify. We know him. For years he was the first to stampede into the Palestinian herds with his boombox, or some other instrument of terror, scattering the sheep, traumatizing the shepherds. Sometimes the sheep miscarried or fell and died. From long experience the shepherds knew his precise daily schedule—when he woke up, when he had breakfast, and when he would set off from the settlement to drive them crazy. Eventually, he succeeded in expelling them permanently from their grazing grounds to the west of the main road. In short, a perfect witness in the Knesset.

Afterwards, the four of us—Avishai, Lia, Hagai, and me—sit up for a while, reminiscing, telling our stories. Most of mine come from long before this present generation of activists were born. They move me. They are a different species from the early Ta‘ayush volunteers. For one thing, they speak excellent Arabic. And many of them practically live in the territories, live a Palestinian life, with all its dangers. There is a lightness in their manner of speaking, no matter how many times they have been tear-gassed or beaten up or shot at or threatened or arrested or violently driven away. As if all that were nothing to be upset about, just part of doing what they have to do. They know why they are there. Avishai says that he is certain that but for our presence in the villages over the last few months, day and night, many of those villages would no long exist. Despite fierce international pressure, the settlers still have the upper hand, and they want total, irreversible ethnic cleansing. I won’t list the village names he mentions, it’s a long one; those names, lovely as the villages themselves, won’t mean much unless you have seen the sites, and the people, with your own eyes. Hagai was in Wadi a-Siq on the day the settlers kidnapped the activists and tortured the Palestinians there for hours. But guess what? There is talk these days that the people of Wadi a-Siq, who have been expelled from their homes, may come back after the war, if there is ever an “after” to this war.

I don’t know if you can sense the relief that washes over me just from being there. It is as if Mu‘arrajat is a place that is still largely immune to the deadly poisons of the public space in Israel. The lies, the gruesome hatred, the rigid numbness of mind and heart, the blood-lust, the racism, the smugness, the sordid corruption of conscience (does conscience still exist?), the total failure of empathy, in short, all these ways of taking the name of God in vain—it is as if none of this has seeped into this peaceful village, these minds. Here there is sun, birds, clouds, sand, and at night the barking of dogs and the wailing of jackals and the million stars that you can never see in any city. At 3AM I’m awake, I go outside to stare into the night, breathing in the desert. Across the Jordan, almost within reach, the lights are still on in the hill villages. There is something to be said for the beauty of evanescence, even for fighting a losing battle in a good cause, against all odds. Every moment counts. In the calculus of conscience, every moment is always now.

The great Indonesian poet Sapardi Djoko, who died four years ago, put it like this:

Text and all photographs, unless otherwise credited David Shulman © 2024. David wishes to thank Betty Susiarjo for introducing him to the poem by Sapardi Djoko.

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