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Moments of respite. Seven, maybe eight water tankers manage to fill up at the ‘Auja stream toward sunset. We are there to greet them. For once, no settlers come to ruin things.
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1.
Moments of respite. Seven, maybe eight water tankers manage to fill up at the ‘Auja stream toward sunset. We are there to greet them. For once, no settlers come to ruin things.
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Festive days in Palestine: ‘Id al-Adha, a time for families, feasts, picnics, prayers. The call to prayer, the azan, ends with a solemn, loving formula proper to these days: labbayka allahumma, “We are yours to serve, Lord. There is no other.” At Ras al-‘Ain, toward evening: dozens of cars, young men splashing in the fresh, cold stream, small circles smoking narghilehs in the shade, picnics; and the tankers from the village filling up with water.
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Eighteen families live in Magha’ir ad-Dir, high in the hill country overlooking the Jordan Valley. It’s a rocky, dusty place. One could easily die of thirst. The village survives with water drawn every morning from a pumping station belonging to Mekorot, the Israeli water company; the villagers pay for the water. All that is fine. But there is a problem. Israeli settlers from the illegal outposts nearby often come to attack them at dawn beside the pump. There have been several recent attacks, including shooting live fire. So now every morning we are here beside them as they fill the tankers.
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Before Pesach most years, I revise the Haggadah I began to compile decades ago. I gather material from traditional sources as well as from more recent alternative Haggadot created with various agendas in mind – political, ecological; or from commentary, unrelated literature, and remarks of friends and colleagues relevant to our family or to whomever we might be hosting at our seder table that year. I insert images that I find or create. Some years ago, I placed on the back cover of my Haggadah a photograph of a goat I met in the Jordan Valley, to recall the traditional song Had Gadya, an only kid, sung toward the end of the seder. It begins with the verse “an only ,kid, an only kid, my father bought for two zuzzim, and continues with a litany of woe, as the goat is eaten by a cat, that is then bitten by a dog, and, after a series of beatings and burnings and slaughter by various agents, including objects and living creatures animal and human, the song ends with retribution by the angel of death, who in turn succumbs to the Holy One, blessed be He, thus ending the carnage on a peaceful note, none of the predators left standing, like the end of a bloody Elizabethan play.
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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.
Continue readingToward 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.
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The barbaric attack on Israel by Hamas on October 7th has set off a bloody war whose end no one can foresee and whose main victims are, again, innocent civilians. That attack is also proving to be a huge boon to extremist Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank.



a room and a shop in Susiya, and a break during field work. photographs: Margaret Olin
Continue readingVery hard times. The hardest I have known. Like everyone, I’ve suffered grievous losses in my life. I buried a young, brilliant student, Liat. I’ve been to war. I’ve seen awful things happen to my friends on the West Bank. But worst of all is to watch the moral disintegration of a community, my home.
None of us here will ever recover fully from the horrors perpetrated by Hamas on October 7th. Hamas has given new meaning to the word “inhuman.” You’ve seen the pictures and read the words.
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Two days ago occupation forces demolished the school in ‘Ein Samiya.
The school was the only building left standing in May when the villagers packed up and fled. In one of our posts, David Shulman related how, after months of terrorism by Jewish settlers, the occupation forces dealt the final blow by handing over a whole flock of sheep to settlers. I had not seen `Ein Samiya, so in July, when I came to Jerusalem, I asked activist Arik Ascherman, director of the NGO Torat Tzedek, to take me there. He readily agreed. Now feels like the right moment to post these pictures.
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