It seems quiet and peaceful. We are with Jibrin, planting a small crop of tobacco, which he sells, and I suppose, smokes. Since my last visit, his wife Wadha has had an operation on her back and I am happy to see her bending down to plant in the straight furrows he plows in the tiny field.

Musa, son of Jibrin and Wadha, is a supervising engineer at a private infrastructure firm in Yatta. He has business nearby today and is here to help. He waters the plants after they go into the ground and banters lightheartedly in excellent English. “Stay here,” he says to Zeev, a middle-aged architect. “My dad will be happy to hire you and the pay is great!” Musa studied engineering abroad; Many families here place a high value on education. Another son of Jibrin is a doctor in South America. He asks about Palestinians in the United States and when I tell him about the Palestine Museum near me in Connecticut, he asks for information and I promise to send him some links.

The family insists that we have some of Jabrin’s excellent tea and they watch us drink it. It is Ramadan, and they can’t partake.

But is not quiet and peaceful. Nothing is, here in Masafer Yatta. People are afraid even to leave their houses. Since the war began this family has not been able to spend nights in their comfortable house where we are having our tea. It has become too dangerous. They are instead living in a friend’s spare room near Comet, the NGO that supplies their energy. The situation has improved recently. The settlers used to come several times a day to harass them there. Now it is more like once a week.

The settlers have been into the olives, too. Jibrin built a fence around the trees, but the settlers cut it. They can no longer sell Akoub, a form of thistle (in English, Gundelia) because to harvest wild Akoub takes scissors. It is now far too dangerous to be caught with a “weapon.”

Balagan #1

Otherwise, the day was one balagan* after another.

* I have written about the Hebrew word “balagan” before. It means a messy situation, usually a very big mess.  Bālā-khānah, the Persian word generally (but not definitively) considered the source of Slavic and subsequently Hebrew balagan means literally a high (bālā) house or chamber (khānah, sometimes shortened to khān), and hence can refer to a puppet theater, which is a booth set above the main room where the show is held. "Originally the idea is to compare any unedifying public spectacle to a Punch and Judy type of lowbrow puppet show,” Whether the etymology is correct or not, I am reminded that that angry activists sometimes refer to the occupation forces as “marionettes,” their strings pulled by settlers.  - thanks to Professor Samuel Hodgkin, of Yale University.

If today near Susiya is any indication, these shows have become far more popular since the beginning of the war with Gaza. The word balagan is used for every one of them today; and all these spectacles are unedifying. No sooner did our bus leave us off this morning on the road above the town of Susiya, than soldiers surrounded it.

Police were called, and the soldiers tried to convince them to give our driver, Sami, a ticket for letting people disembark at a spot with no designated bus stop. Were this actually illegal, there would have been a large fine associated with it. In the end, Sami, backed by activists, was able to show a police officer acquainted with the law, that there had been no offense.

Balagan #2

Meanwhile, the performance we had come to see was dispersing below the village.

I never found out what it was about, but it involved lots of soldiers.

Balagan #3

In Susiya I renewed my acquaintance with Ahmed, Nasser’s son, whom I remember as a small child. Now he has grown into an intelligent young man. He told me that next year he will graduate from high school and he asked me if I knew the University of Chicago (my alma mater, as it happens). He would like to attend college there. Other people made new friends. A young girl, disappointed when we left, asked us to please stay.

Ahmed and I watched a group of boys from the nearest settlement, also named Susiya, who came to the wadi below the village of Susiya to throw stones. There was much pushing and shouting at our activists. Shouts of “al ti-gabi!” (don’t touch me!) were intended to give their efforts to beat activists with their sticks and brass knuckles, as documented in videos, the look of self defense. We have been there before.

Whenever they got close enough to anyone to spit at them, they did.

The Palestinians were asked to stay out of the wadi. So was I. As we watched from above, the settlers eventually calmed down.

And left.

One soldier guarded the large area between the two Susiyas, perhaps to protect villagers from entering the wadi next to their homes. Settlers might have been tempted to return and harass them.

***

Another Ahmed is a shepherd watering his flock from a recently broken ancient cistern.

There had been a small structure nearby.

The landowner built a small house for his own use when visiting his land, but before he could stay in it the war arrived and settlers demolished it.

All that remains of the kitchen is a hearth; the shower room and the sleeping room are just a broken pile of cinderblocks.

Balagan #4

I followed activists to another place very near the town, where settlers were forcing Palestinians off a small patch of grazing land (they don’t dare graze any farther away). Young Ahmad saw me from the village as I passed by and ran up the slope to the street. “Please don’t go there. It is dangerous. You can come sit with our family. Let Amiel take the pictures.” “I have to go.” I said, “I am the photographer.” He understood, but he looked worried. I told him that I appreciated his running up to express his concern and try to keep me safe, but I continued on my way, thinking about how the proximity of these events to the village means that the residents themselves can barely move.

I met up with a settler, also arriving to attend the show. He called to me: “Hey, why do you keep coming here to start a balagan?” We became part of one another’s entertainment. I watched him laugh little smirky laughs and just missed making a photograph of one of the soldiers greeting him with a warm hug. He glanced at me and laughed a big, gleeful laugh whenever the soldiers forced more the shepherds off the fields.

The settlers came to expel two Palestinian herds. The thirteen-year-old boy they brought with them, from a religious settlement near Bethlehem, is on a program for at-risk children. The settlers who run the program have accordingly been setting him on the straight and narrow path by siccing him and his strong, rock-throwing arm upon the Palestinians. Now Palestinians are more at risk than he is.

Soldiers watched and did nothing. The company commander declared a closed military zone. The entire area, he said, including the cultivated fields, is forbidden for Palestinians. After the shepherds left, the commander admitted to the activists’ recording device that only part of the area is forbidden. Eventually the activists showed the commander that the entire zone is open to Palestinian grazing.

By then, the shepherds were long gone; two activists had rushed off to balagan #5, which may not have been a real threat. Nerves were so frayed that a lone settler walking along the highway was enough to frighten people. A few women passed by on their way home.

***

In all, I witnessed less than a third of the approximately fifteen balagan, all centered in a small area around one village. Police, soldiers and settlers surrounded and choked off the village. The long day was exhausting in every possible way: the running about, yet still feeling like you never arrive in time, the effort to photograph at fixed, long distances, and the disturbing changes in life in the South Hebron Hills, where people have good reason to fear leaving their homes. For us, “late” used to mean returning to Jerusalem at 4:00. Today it meant arriving at 7:30. Hungry, I stopped at “First Station” near where we were left off, and sank into a chair in the excellent hummus restaurant, Abu Shukri. Behind me at the next table, two Americans who described themselves as serious intellectuals were discussing the situation. “I mean,” one of them said, accompanied by sympathetic sounds from the other, “how can Blinken [the Secretary of State of the US] dare to say that they are people just like us? I mean, do they birdwatch? Do they study botany? All they care about is violence and revenge! Where does this lifelong obsession come from?”  

The next day, Musa answered my message with the link to the Palestine Museum. He evoked our time together the previous day, with its “peaceful ambiance and shared passion for planting.”

text and photographs: Margaret Olin ©2024. Thanks to Sam Hodgkin, Amiel Vardi and Zeev Arad for assistance with this post.

*Update: The following week, with less to do, the police had time to arrest Jibrin. They detained him for a few hours and released him.