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The rains have come in force, the hills are muddy, and there is food for the goats and sheep. Over morning tea in Makhul we get the weekly litany of hurts. Walid—still a boy—was out alone with the herd, and settlers came and beat him. It’s really dangerous to be alone on the hills. A large posse of settlers attacked Qadri and several others; there were two broken legs. A few days earlier, settlers killed Qadri’s uncle’s cow.
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Wednesday seems to be the day the settler has set aside for harassing Palestinian shepherds. That’s what Ahmad says, and he should know. Last Wednesday, October 14, it ended in murder.
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Fields were burning in the fall of 2017, but in late July the story was different.
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The count is stark and simple. Last week the ‘Auja shepherds went out to graze their flocks six times. Five of those times our activists were there to accompany them and protect them, and the grazing went well, more or less. On Monday we couldn’t be there, so they didn’t go out at all. It’s a scary business. Settlers and soldiers lie in wait. On Saturday, they took the sheep out, and soldiers drove them away.
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Four months in quarantine; the virus now raging again in Israel-Palestine; and I’m back where I belong. The hardest part of the lock-down was not seeing our grandchildren face to face; second hardest, not coming to be with the shepherds.
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We are three—Guy, Nina, and me. We reach Rashshash with the dawn. Tea is served. How are things? “Settlers at our throat every day.”
Photograph: David Shulman, 2019
Continue readingAl-‘Auja Jordan Valley, April 20, 2018. In the back of the police car, a newly arrested Palestinian shepherd was about to be driven to the police station, blindfolded.
“Not long ago the settlers came and shot two of my sheep,” Ahmad says. “If you hadn’t been here today, they might have shot two more. And for sure they would have beaten us as hard as they could.”
Continue readingחיילים תמיד מתאמנים לאחת המלחמות״
“Soldiers are always training for one war or another,” says Yehuda Amichai in one of his poems. For the Bedouins of the Abu al-Kibash clans in the northern Jordan Valley, several times each year, the Army’s training exercises on their lands means forced evacuation. The arbitrary declaration of military “firing zones” in the Valley is an instrument for mass expulsion of Palestinian Bedouins. A large percentage of all the lands of the Jordan Valley belong to this category. There is no attempt to hide the final goal.
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