The Bitter Landscapes of Palestine, by Margaret Olin and David Shulman is now available through Intellect Books, Great Britain, or The University of Chicago Press, USA, or any of the usual places, like Amazon. Perhaps your local bookstore carries it.

The Mini-War of the Water continues apace.

It’s hot in Ras al-‘Ain, in more ways than one. It’s become a flash point. The settlers are fully focused on driving the shepherd families of this village out of their homes and fields. And it’s high summer. Nights are stifling in the tent where we sleep, though the flaps are open to the stars and the distant lights across the river, in Jordan. At 4 AM there’s a cool breeze, a tease; as soon as the sun rises, at around 6, the temperature hits 40 degrees Centigrade; by mid-morning, it’s somewhere between 45 and 50. Sometimes a strong wind blows boiling dust over everything and everyone—our tent, the sheep in their pens, the few vehicles parked on the gravel paths, the shacks of tin or asbestos, the scraggly trees. At first you don’t notice how thirsty you are. Then it hits you and won’t go away, no matter how much you drink. I feel the thirst, first, in my eyes, every minute (even drier than usual). And then there’s the other kind of thirst, in the heart.

Muhammad welcomes us, Zvi Mazeh and myself, when we arrive late afternoon, the hour when Palestinians fill up their tankers with water from the ‘Auja stream. He looks worn and worried, more than when I saw him two weeks ago. I say to him, “I see there are problems every day.” He says: “You mean every hour.” Problems is the Arabic code word for violent attack.

We go to the sweet flowing stream, a desert miracle descending from the hills of central Palestine; it turns into an aqueduct after some miles, adjacent to Ras al-‘Ain. The settlers have now painted the walls of the aqueduct with the colors of the Israeli flag. It’s like stabbing the Palestinians in the eye. We may paint over it; anyway, there’s already a newly superimposed painting by some brilliant person with Palestinian colors and the inscription “Peace.”

One tanker connected to a tractor is filling up with water. Settlers armed with knives and cell-phones, some masked, are circling around it, making trouble. The Palestinians continue their work, the water is moving through a rubber pipe, but soon, when the tanker is full, the settlers escalate their harassment. They shove their phones in our faces, they push and shove, they threaten, they curse us, they mock us, they block the tractor’s way out. A bizarre choreography takes over as we circle the tractor with them, trying to protect it and the tanker with its precious burden. Eventually the driver manages to move forward. But by now the whole area is chock full of settlers (some of them unarmed and not part of this foolish game, though they do nothing to stop it), and the Palestinians have had enough of it. No more tankers today. Usually they need to fill up five or six of them to get through the next 24 hours. A hardy few Palestinian families, with children, persist in bathing in the stream. Oded and Benzion soon discover the critical rubber pipe, torn or knifed by the settlers.

All this is the old-new norm at the watering place. It happens on and off throughout every day (or maybe every hour, as Muhammad says). That’s why we are here. Sometimes the settlers get truly violent, and they may call in the police or army to join them; if the police come, they will usually arrest the activists or some Palestinians, since clearly it’s all our fault. Do Palestinians need to drink water? Are they human? Nope, they’re not. But even animals need to drink, don’t they? Yes, but Palestinians are far below that category. They exist only in order to be tormented, dispossessed, humiliated, and robbed. Or killed. It’s God’s will. But the main thing that still takes my breath away is to witness, to hear, to feel on my skin the settlers’ infinite hatred, their true raison d’être, the meaning of their life.

By the way, this pattern of surrounding a vehicle and threatening whoever is inside it has been enacted at least twice in the last two weeks. In one case, three activists were trapped in their car here, near Ras al-‘Ain, for half an hour while armed settlers blocked their way and pounded on the doors and windows, trying to get inside to do what settlers do to people they hate. In the end, the settlers rammed into the activists’ car. And higher up in the central West Bank, at Muchmas, there was an even worse case that went on for two hours, with three activists locked in their vehicle while menacing settlers surrounded them; and when the police finally arrived, they of course arrested one of the activists. We were briefed before coming here today: if the settlers try this, stay in the car, lock all the doors and windows, and sit tight. That is all you can do..

The situation has deteriorated over the last three to four weeks. As many of you already know, on June 22^nd, a Saturday morning, the notorious settler Zohar from the illegal outpost close to Ras al-‘Ain brought his herd of goats uphill toward a Palestinian herd and its shepherd. Fortunately, two of our activists were with him. The two herds did not intersect—although the usual settler trick is deliberately to mix the herds and then claim that Palestinians have stolen some of their sheep—but that didn’t stop Zohar from calling the police and the army and claiming that 1) he had just been beaten by Palestinians and 2) that the latter had stolen 22 of his sheep (though he has no sheep, only goats; he later reduced the number to 8). All of it, of course, a blatant lie concocted in cahoots with the army and the police, probably the night before. So the soldiers and police arrived within minutes. They refused to talk with the activists. They quickly entered the village and imposed an (illegal) Closed Military Zone order; they arrested the two activists and three Palestinians, no doubt randomly chosen. And then—the worst of it—soldiers, police, and settlers, including several very eminent settler thugs from the southern Valley, went from sheepfold to sheepfold throughout the entire area and kidnapped sheep in broad daylight from each of the pens on the transparent excuse that they had been stolen. As if that weren’t enough, they came back the next day, Sunday, to continue this brazen theft. The newly stolen sheep were handed over to the settler outposts.

Stealing Palestinian sheep is now a favorite hobby of the settlers. They took an entire herd, 150 head, from the villagers of Ein Samiya; and at Halat al-Sadra, an outlying and therefore vulnerable neighborhood of the large village of Muchmas, they stole 20 sheep with the full support of soldiers and police. A single sheep is worth anywhere between 600 to 2000 shekels (roughly $150 to $500) in the territories—a vast sum for any shepherd family.

When they are not actively stealing, the outpost settlers bring their herds into the Palestinian villages, to show who’s boss; they also raid homes, wreak destruction, shoot live ammunition, beat whoever they find. Just yesterday they savaged activists and Palestinians in Sha’ab al Butum, in the south Hebron hills. We won’t show you the awful pictures. But you can see why Muhammad looks so haggard.

We spend the early morning watching over Musa’s lonely home at the north-west periphery of Ras al-‘Ain; every day now a young settler, covered in black, brings his sheep to graze there, though there is almost no stubble left. If there were no activists around, who knows what else he would do? Some mornings Musa telephones us in a panic when the settler appears.

In general, the shepherds of Ras al-‘Ein are by now too terrified even to leave the confines of the village, where there is nothing for the herds to eat. Their extensive grazing grounds, still rich in edible thorns and grasses, are drying up: a wasteland.

Zvi devotes some minutes by the water talking to two middle-aged right-wing settlers. He’s an observant Jew and he has the language one needs to talk to them.  He tells them what is happening here. They say to him: “What? You mean there’s violence?” A big surprise. On our way home, roasted by the sun, Zvi, shaken by their denial, recites Bob Dylan’s canonical lines:

“How many times can a man turn his head/ and pretend that he just doesn’t see?” 

I grew up on those lines. I thought the whole song was the essence of Judaism. I suppose the key word is “just.”

Speaking of “just,” there is good news today, at last. Let us drink—yes, drink, after this parched report—to the landmark decision of the International Court of Justice in the Hague, which has uttered the truth. No “ifs” and “buts,” no ambiguity, no holding back. Just truth. It doesn’t quench that other thirst, but tonight champagne—or strong Bedouin tea, for our friends–must be flowing in the aqueduct of Ras al-‘Ain.

text and photographs David Shulman © 2024