1.

By 5 PM we’ re at the water. Long-Hair, the all-too-familiar settler adolescent, is there with his herd, as usual, on Musa’s land.  Usually he’s dour, sour, and obnoxious; this time he seems a little curious about Amir and me. Amir—he’s a psychotherapist– wants to talk to him. The conversation, if you can call it that, goes like this:

Amir: Hello, where are you from?

Long-Hair: Around here.

Amir: Does your place have a name?

Long-Hair: Maybe not.

Me: How come you bring your sheep here? There’s nothing but stones, no food for them.

Long-Hair: It’s not about food.

An interval. A woman from one of the veteran settlements up in the hills comes to offer us rogelach, chocolate rolls. Long-Hair grabs 3 or 4 of them:  suddenly he reverts to being just an awkward hungry teenager. After a few minutes, he turns to me.

Long-Hair:  You’re a leftist anarchist, aren’t you?

Me: You know me, and I know you. I’m a leftist, that’s true, but definitely not an anarchist. Do you even know what an anarchist is?

Silence. Frown.

Amir:  So have you served in the army?

Silence.

Amir: Do you speak Arabic?

Long-Hair:  Yes. I’m a Palestinian.(i.e., a true Palestinian, not the fake Arab Palestinians who have to be driven out of Palestine. Long-Hair’s Arabic is, by the way, very primitive.).

Then, as if a decision had been reached, after a minor inner struggle:
Long-Hair:  I don’t talk with leftists and anarchists.

So Amir and I sit down by the water to read some Arabic. Suddenly Long-Hair is there—maybe still curious. Or maybe he just wants to intrude and harass. He brings his sheep across the road, near to us, near the aqueduct. This, for us, is a small victory. He’s left Musa’s land.

Like many of these brain-washed teenagers, Long-Hair looks lost, confused, maybe conflicted. Amir has meanwhile found a pair of good sunglasses that someone forgot by the water. He offers them to Long-Hair as a gift, but Long-Hair won’t touch them. They’re contaminated by the touch of the anarchist.

2.

We return to the Madafe, our home in Ras al-‘Ain. Muhammad is waiting for us. An urgent message has just now come from Aliyah in Mu‘arrajat: a settler has invaded the village and is now parked next to the “electricity store-room”, where the villagers keep batteries and other critical electrical equipment. We rush over to Mu‘arrajat, we call Aliyah, but by the time we get there the settler is gone. Still, that was an ominous sign, as if the intruder were signaling, or scouting out, a potential target for a raid, for destruction—the settlers’ raison d’être. I ask Aliyah if she wants us to sleep there tonight, to be close by if something happens. No need, she says, things are under control.

Settler invasions of Mu‘arrajat are a daily occurrence. It’s all part of the project of violent expulsion.

3.

Muhammad wants to talk; Amir gently draws him out, and soon we hear the whole story of his life. He’s 53 years old. The first thing he says is, “I’m tired of living.” His family comes from a village in the desert east of Bethlehem. They still have land and buildings there. They belong to the Rashaida tribe. They moved in stages to Ras al-‘Ain in 1967, to get away from the war in the central West Bank. Ras al-‘Ain is, or was, good for shepherding; there are luxurious grasses and thorns except at the height of summer.

Muhammad’s father died when he was a boy, leaving two wives and 17 siblings. Muhammad was the fourth, and it fell to his lot to bring up all the rest of them. It was tough. Even in good times, the shepherds eke out a bare living. But he succeeded, also seeing to the marriages of his sisters. To each sibling he gave a wedding gift of 30 head of sheep—just to start them off. Many of the brothers and sisters live not far away, in Auja; others farther north. Muhammad never married, and he always seems to me lonely, sad, and on the edge of despair—though Amir makes him a laugh a few times this evening.

He is an excellent Arabic teacher, very meticulous about our pronunciation of the deep gutturals and the heavy ḍād. He wants us to get it right.

The last five months have been hell. The settlers have closed them in. They do whatever they can to prevent Palestinians from reaching the water they need to survive, and they’ve made the grazing grounds inaccessible, forbidden. And they terrorize the villagers continually, threatening them with death. Expenses have sky-rocketed: now, before the rains come, the shepherds have to buy dry food for the flocks. Tens of thousands of Israeli shekels go on this, not to speak of all the other manifold expenses just to keep life going. Everything is scary, and everyone is constantly afraid. I say to him: “Before, your life was hard but still livable; now, it’s barely sustainable.” Amir asks him how they survive, with such meager resources, no income. Muhammad says: “There’s no alternative” (ma fish badil). Sometimes he sells off a sheep or a kid.

And there’s the war. He says: “The Jews and the Palestinians, they’re all crazy, majanin. All they know is death and destruction. And for what? We could be living in peace.”

Despite the gloom and the hardship, Muhammad has a bizarre incident to tell us. Some days ago an ultra-orthodox (Haredi) Jew, complete with the earlocks, long black uniform, tzitzit tassels and all the rest, turned up in Ras al-‘Ain. Naturally, everyone, including Muhammad, assumed he was a settler or some sort of settler sympathizer. But no—he was a peacemaker, entirely committed to peace. Given his external appearance, he was able to restrain the settlers from their quotidian depredations, for a while. He slept in the Madafeh. A mysterious, eccentric, saintly person, a walī or a tzaddik. Such people exist.

4.

All night long, a strong wind blows through the Madafeh, scattering clothes, shoes, half-empty bottles of water, pillows, sheets, papers, toying with the heavy flaps of the tents, as if trying to speak to us of sorrow, hope, and healing. Autumn is coming.

5.

These days there’s a problem early in the morning. Around 6:30, at sunrise, a school bus picks up children from the villages and brings them to the school in Mu‘arrajat. Predictably, the settlers sometimes block the roads with their herds. The bus can’t get in to Ras al-‘Ain to gather the children, or it can’t get out again. The same cruel trick is perpetrated at Mu‘arrajat. So we’re there this time to keep the road open. Happily, today, for once, there was no problem. The older kids, all girls, have to get from Mu‘arrajat to Auja, another few miles away. I know of no other community in the world so profoundly committed to educating their children as the Palestinians of the Jordan Valley and the South Hebron hills. Settlers, soldiers, police, though they revel in burning down the schools—many of them built with funds from all over the world—can’t stop these kids from studying.

Text: David Shulman © 2024. Photographs: David Shulman © 2024. If not otherwise identified, the photographs are all from Ras al-‘Ain, October 15-16, 2024.

Margaret Olin and David Shulman, The Bitter Landscapes of Palestine 2024. Order from Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press or from an online or local bookseller.