Uneasy Reprieves: March 24, Umm al-Amad; March 26 Al-Auja

March 27, 2018March 28, 2018 / Margaret Olin / Leave a comment

March 24, Umm al-Amad

It’s cold. It’s raining. Aziza serves us hot tea.

She shows us the baby goats, some only a few weeks, or days, old.

And then it is time to take the flock to graze . . .

under the huge settlement, Otniel. Ahmad, her son, is with us.

Walla, Ahmad’s sister, who has been seen here before, is everywhere

So is contentment.

Eventually, we see that, up on the hill, four soldiers have apparently been assigned to keep an eye on us.

After they leave, we almost forget them. Ahmad, who is studying at the Polytechnic in Hebron, talks about his exam in electricity tomorrow. He studies Hebrew there, too, and takes the opportunity to discuss with Li those pesky Hebrew nouns that are masculine but have feminine plural forms.

So we don’t notice them again until they are close.

The soldiers tried to make conversation.

But when they try to talk to Elisheva, she starts to sing. Soon others are singing, and after they exhaust their two-song repertoire of protest songs, they fall into a sullen silence.

To Ahmad: “I have your picture; I know where you live. Today you come with these people and you are safe but tomorrow what will you accomplish?”

Ahmad says he does not want the children speaking to people who have guns.

“Perhaps it would be better,” I cannot resist suggesting, “if the gun were not actually pointing at the child.” He ignores me.

In answer to Ahmad he says, with no trace of irony, “What kind of values are you teaching this child?

Tomorrow, you will be alone.”

*****

We are on the other side of Al-Auja from Mevo’ot Yericho where we were Friday. On Saturday in South Hebron, it was cold and wet. Two days later, in the Jordan Valley, it is dry and hot. Today, when our presence seems sufficient to keep settlers from showing up to harass shepherds and scare away the sheep, and no police have come by to investigate . . .

the four of us finally have time to ask the important question:

What can these sheep possibly be finding to eat? This rocky mountainside is nothing like the lush meadow grass we saw Saturday in South Hebron.

Perhaps they are being nourished as I am, simply on texture and light.

The sheep return home,

Kettles are placed on fires, and we make the rounds of compounds, sipping tea and tasting cheeses, fresh vegetables and eggs.

The talk is mostly discouraging and only occasionally hopeful, all of it anxious. Everyone knows that today is just a reprieve. Many of the families are tired of constant harassment by settlers and indifference, or worse, from the police.

At one stop it is a woman who gives us tea. She impresses us with her seriousness about our shared mission and goals. As we leave, she thanks us one by one and looks especially closely at the two oldest among us.

“I fear for your children,” she says. In her experience, when a family member opposes the occupation, the whole family has to pay for it. I wonder if she has that in mind or whether this is her usual way of speculating on the future. It is moving but also surprising. Looking at me, she adds, “I am a mother, too.”

March 23: Along the Road to Bet She’an

March 24, 2018March 28, 2018 / Margaret Olin / 3 Comments

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Gavriel is the one running, the one with the flowing hair. He looks like he might be at home in a coffee shop with a guitar on his knee, passing a joint. I remember Gavriels like him from my adolescence, non-violent activists who sang of peace. As we shall see, I believe even this Gavriel may see himself as a messenger of peace.

Apologies: The remainder of this post is temporarily removed. I hope to republish it soon.

February 10, 2018: Susya, Twaneh, Tuba by David Shulman

February 15, 2018February 20, 2018 / Margaret Olin / 3 Comments

A compound in Susya, 2015. Photograph: Margaret Olin

The hardest part was not the settlers’ attack but sitting in the home of Abu Saddam in Susya. His home—four canvas-roofed tents, an outhouse, a water tank, and a perennial lemon tree—is one of the seven scheduled for immediate demolition, with the blessing of the Supreme Court. The others belong to the Nawaja families. First in line, in the center of the village, is the compound of ‘Azzam Yusuf Jad‘a Nawaja. Almond trees are in full bloom in Susya, intermittent bursts of white amidst thin traces of green and great splashes of brown. They’re waiting for the bulldozers to arrive. It could happen any time.

A kitchen in Susya, 2016. Photograph: Margaret Olin

I suppose by now everyone knows the Susya story of repeated expulsions and continuous harassment and demolitions. For years nearly every structure in the village has had a demolition order hanging over it. The legal excuse for this act of gratuitous and extreme cruelty is that these shacks and tents and latrines and wind turbines were built without a permit. That’s because Palestinians living in Area C on the West Bank cannot get permits. Beneath the thin veneer of legality lies the true reason. The government is now keen on driving out entire Palestinian communities, not simply on making their lives miserable and destroying homes one by one. The pace has accelerated, and the goal is clear.

A compound in Susya, 2016. Photograph: Margaret Olin

One could, perhaps, say that when the Supreme Court allowed the immediate destruction of these seven buildings, this was a minor, if temporary, victory for the Palestinians. Another twelve buildings were in the urgent list presented to the court by the Civil Administration and have not yet been approved. Of course, their turn may come next. And after that, the rest of the village may be wiped out. But for now, for the next days and weeks, there’s plenty to mourn for, and more to dread.

A kitchen in Susya, 2016. Photograph: Margaret Olin

We stand in Abu Saddam’s courtyard and examine the miracle of his lemon tree that never stops giving fruit. You can see the early stages of blossoming and maturing on the lower branches; higher up, there are ripe lemons waiting to be picked. Abu Saddam came back to his home in Susya after years of exile in Yata; he’s not well; it seems he’s returned to live out his last days here.He takes us into the largest of the tents, the sitting room cum kitchen. There’s an iron tabun stove—nights in Susya, in the winter, are very cold. Firewood is stacked on the floor near the stove. It’s not clear if this particular tent is included in the demolition plan, but it’s not unlikely that the bulldozers will punch it out anyway on their way to their next task. Abu Saddam says to me, “Shu biddhum al-yahood? What do the Jews want from me? Do they want to take away my leaking canvas ceiling? Is that what threatens them? Am I, an old man, a danger to the Jews?” Litaj, his granddaughter, maybe four years old, buttoned to the chin into her green and blue striped sweater, is sitting in one of the big armchairs. Her mother sits across from her. This is the home that may soon be murdered by the army.

Photograph: David Shulman

It’s more than I can bear, my throat is burning with tears and rage, and I can’t find words, any words. When we say goodbye, I say to Abu Saddam in Arabic, “We are with you, and if they come and destroy these tents, we will come back and rebuild them together with you.” He holds my hand in his. ‘Azzam Yusuf points to the cement pavement at the entrance to his tent: maybe it’s this floor, he says, that has qualified his home for destruction. They’re also coming to wipe out his sheep-pen, a latrine, a water fountain, and perhaps the kitchen. “How are you?” I ask him, bitter at heart. “Praise to Allah,” he says. “This is something we have to live with.” But I don’t know if I can live with it.

* * *

For the last couple of weeks, Tuba, isolated, lonely, vulnerable, on the edge of the ridge overlooking the desert, has been suffering from settler violence. It’s nothing new, just worse than usual. Some of the attacks have been severe. The settlers come from Havat Ma’on, notorious for its savage ways. We have decided to walk from Twaneh along the path that leads to Tuba via the perimeter of Havat Ma’on. It’s a dangerous route. I think today’s settlers are the grown children of the ones who first attacked me in the fields of Twaneh in 2002. It’s in their genes, or in the neurons that they use not to think with but for hate. We are taking this route in solidarity with Tuba, and in the hope that we can force a stop to the daily assaults.

Tuba, 2017. Photograph: Margaret Olin

It takes an hour to walk the road—three or four kilometers over the packed dirt and stones. The Tuba children take it, both ways, every day when they come to school at Twaneh. Since the settlers of Havat Ma’on have a habit of attacking these children, the army—after long persuasion by Ta‘ayush—agreed to provide a jeep of armed soldiers to accompany them to and from school. Sometimes the jeep shows up, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the settlers attack anyway, and the soldiers sit passively in the jeep, watching. They hit these kids with iron chains and other weapons of destruction. My friend ‘Ali’s daughter was badly wounded in her eye. That was some years ago, and the route is no safer today.

Twaneh, after last year’s attack. photograph: Margaret Olin

Mid-afternoon on a warm winter day. Dark pines and almonds. We are thirteen, maybe enough. With us are Danny and Dudy, both wounded on this path by settlers the last time I reported from Twaneh (for the report, see here). Dudy was hit in the head by a rock, Danny punched and beaten. After ten or fifteen minutes, we see the first settlers: young, more boys then men, long hair, huge skull-caps, white Shabbat clothes. Some are running fast across the hill, coming closer. Not a good sign. Then it gets worse. They are masking their faces, all except for the eyes. I know what this means. They have the high ground; we’re moving east, not far below them, past the wide bend in the road, through thorns and boulders. We’re trying to stick together. I can’t count them: maybe eight or nine. They’re shouting something throaty, a war cry.

photograph: Michal Hai

Then the first stones. Three settlers are some thirty meters away, or less. Heavy rocks, heavy enough to kill. They’re arguably worse than bullets. They come flying through space, very fast, black against the white sky. Soon there’s a veritable rain of rocks; one screams past my ear. We keep moving downward, trying to put some distance between them and us, and we’re filming them as best we can but we also have to keep our eyes on the rocky descent so we don’t stumble or fall; and the only chance you have of avoiding the missiles is if you walk backward, watching them as they come at you. Many times Amiel shouts in warning: “Rock coming!” Somehow, by a miracle, so far no one has been hit. I begin to wonder if this is the end I’ve so often imagined, but in truth there’s not much time to think about this in the exhilarating rush of feeling, and anyway there’s no space to think about me. I’m trying to keep track of my friends, and also trying hard not to fall, and each time I turn my back on the stones there’s the eerie sense that one is heading, unknown, straight for me.

Photograph: Michal Hai

Time stops, as always at such moments. There is no more time in the world. Occasionally there are brief breaks in the rain of stones, even the false thought that we may have left them behind us, but they keep coming down the slope, tailing us, and the stones resume. Now I can see their eyes. I remember that look, the worst that human eyes can show you, the black and icy glare of hatred in action, not human any more.

Photograph: Michal Hai

(for video by Guy Butavia follow this link)

Then it is over. Moving slowly, still looking backwards, we have opened up a gap. I don’t know why they stopped. After a while we are out of range; we climb the steep hill toward Tuba, its tents and pens and wind turbine now in sight. We regroup. Everyone OK.

Later it turns out, Amiel tells me, that we may have saved one of the Tuba shepherds who was being beaten by the settlers until they were distracted by our arrival. Maybe that’s why they were running over the hill. The shepherd was hurt. For us, Tuba offers the entirely illusory sense of safety. The goats and sheep are bleating, the tents warm and sturdy; a baby, forty days old, is wailing as the women rock her in her cradle. Mahmud gives me news of ‘Ali, now in Yata, driving a tractor; he has work. Mahmud is the sixth of ten siblings; one died as a child. Proudly, he introduces me to his daughter. The young boys bring us tea.

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photograph: Michal Hai

How are we going to get back? It seems the police have sent an officer to Twaneh. Maybe that will deter them? Somehow I doubt it. We head back along the path, this time a little farther downhill. But they’re waiting for us. Not masked this time. Cameras in hand. Coming closer: the odd intimacy of enemies in the South Hebron hills. Three of them—are they the three who stoned us an hour before?– merge into our straggly line, shouting curses, the boring, worn-out words. “You are traitors, all of you. You should leave this country. You don’t belong here. You don’t care, do you, that my rabbi was murdered a week ago. His orphans are crying, but you don’t care. You’re not even Jews. You have no idea who you are and where you are going. You don’t know your enemy. You’re in love with your enemy. You deserve to die first of all. You don’t know how to be a man. The Kingdom of David is coming, the Messiah will come, and scum like you will be swept away.” And so on. It goes on for a long time. At least there are no rocks flying. Maybe the dead words are worse. They have circled us on every side.

photograph: Michal Hai

Until finally, in Twaneh, we hear that the policeman came and went away, and there are hot pittas soaked in olive oil straight from the oven, a huge heap of them, far more than we can devour, and it is over for today.

December 2, 2017 Umm al-Amad, Ma‘in David Shulman

December 3, 2017December 4, 2017 / Margaret Olin / 4 Comments

Umm al-Amad, July, 2017. photograph: Margaret Olin

He’s young, the lieutenant; the faint trace of a mustache tells all. Awkward, inexperienced, unsure. More than a boy, hardly a man. He speaks fast, the words clipped, sharp, hurtful. He keeps playing with his rifle, waving it, aiming it, caressing it, turning it upside down, comforting it when it somehow rights itself again. The bullet clip is loaded; I can’t see if the safety catch is released. I don’t like any of this, for two reasons. First, I don’t like guns. I had to carry one, when I was a little older than the lieutenant, and I hated it. Second, I don’t like men who like guns.

GuyB-UmmalAmad1 Photo: Guy Butavia

He’s here to drive the shepherds off their lands. He’s got the Closed Military Zone order, not in its usual hard-copy form, a piece of paper signed by the Brigade Commander, but on his cell phone. Not good enough, we say, show us the order and the signature. There’s no signature on the cell phone. No, he says. We’re more advanced than we used to be.

Umm al-Amad, June, 2014. photograph: margaret olin*

So Guy tells him clearly, and mildly, that the order is illegal, and we have with us the Supreme Court ruling to prove it. After years of struggle in Umm al-Amad, with all the usual travails—repeated expulsions, beatings, arrests, endless threats, routine state terror, as we fought, week by week, literally meter by meter, to extend the area the shepherds could reclaim as theirs– the Supreme Court recognized that the wadi and the hills beneath the settlement of Otniel were Palestinian lands that the people of Umm al-Amad and Karama and the other villages could freely use. It took us some four years on the ground and in the courts to win back the stolen terrain. Guy carries the ruling with him whenever he comes here. The lieutenant takes it, glances at it, and says, “This means nothing to me. I have my orders. Get these shepherds out of here.”

“Why?”

“Kacha—because.”

“What you are doing is illegal.”

“It’s no concern of mine. I’ll be quite happy to arrest them, handcuff them, blindfold them, and leave them lying like that for some hours in the settlement.”

Photograph: Elena Mucciarelli

“You have no right to threaten them like that. This is their land.”

“I can do what I want. I don’t need any papers to prove it. I have my gun.”

But he doesn’t look as cocksure as he sounds. He keeps glancing around at his soldiers. There are five of them, in the usual get-up. Helmets, rifles, boots. Some of them seem to me not too happy. But then, when are soldiers happy? It’s worse, I know from experience, when they have an officer who’s no damned good.

The lieutenant likes to issue threats. “I’m very affable,” he says to us, “but when people don’t obey me I get physical and violent very quickly. I don’t like it.” This is the only language he knows, impoverished beyond belief, and I don’t think he’s recently, or maybe ever, had an original thought. However, as an afterthought, he says to his men, “We’re doing this today for the Motherland, the moledet.” Never has the Hebrew word sounded to me so sinister.

Umm al-Amad, June, 2014 photograph: margaret olin

Then there’s the question of the map that accompanies the digital CMZ order, as it must. The whole business is illegal, but the lieutenant, who’s not so good at reading maps, compounds the crime. Since we’re worried about what will happen to ‘Abed and Ahmad and Hamid if they get arrested, we’re prepared to move farther away from the settlement, up the wadi, to the hillside that is clearly outside the line on the map. But that’s not good enough for our lieutenant. He thinks the shepherds have to go home, get out of there, not be there, not be. He tells them this in pigeon Arabic, horrible to the ear. Guy, who’s good at maps, tells him over and over that the hill we’re retreating to is beyond the arbitrary line of the map. The lieutenant, unable to lose face, insists that his orders are to clear them out altogether, to make them disappear. He says: “Get them off my lands.” I wonder why he thinks they’re his. We demand that he summon the Matak, a senior officer from the Civil Administration, to settle this point. Now.

He calls the Matak—or someone else. Who can say? Now we wait. Every once in a while he points his gun at us and repeats the threat. If the shepherds dare to cross the line even by an inch, he’ll arrest them. He wants them to know this. It should be crystal clear. But the goats, endowed, one supposes, with the less than lucid consciousness of a goat, have a way of spilling over the hills and crossing the invisible line. On second thought, maybe their awareness is more lucid than the lieutenant’s. It’s the shepherds’ kids who are sent to fetch them, and if you say to the lieutenant—“Look, they’re six years old, stop pointing your gun at them, stop threatening them”—he gets riled. ‘Abed, however, who’s already been through whatever hells the army has to offer, is enraged. “Look at this,” he says to me. “Have you ever seen anything like it? A little boy, a bunch of hungry goats, and six soldiers with their big guns aimed at them. It’s crazy.” I couldn’t agree more. I tell him: the court will decide, and it will decide in our favor. We can’t settle it here on the ground.

Ahmad in Umm al-Amad, July, 2017. photograph: Margaret Olin

I think that only the surreal feels really real. Late winter morning, the sun on our skin. There’s an enormous, heavy, black sheep, probably pregnant, lumbering across the wadi floor. The kids are running up and down the rocks in the wake of the incorrigible goats. One of the shepherds has decided that this is the perfect moment to make tea. He lights a fire and puts the old, soot-soiled kettle on the burning twigs. Soon Wala, impish, insouciant, brings each of us of a glass of tea. The soldiers huddle together, making evil plans. The Matak, of course, never turns up. Ahmad, furious, yells at the lieutenant: “You think you’re some big man, but you’re no more than a common criminal.” The lieutenant probably can’t understand.

Photograph: David Shulman

Maybe, it occurs to me, he might be amenable to some suggestion that would allow him to climb down off the tree. “Look,” I say to him, “they’re almost finished with today’s grazing. They’ve already moved outside the ‘forbidden’ ground. Give them another 10 or 15 minutes, they’ll wind up and go home. Stop threatening them, it makes everything worse and it scares the kids.” Something like that. The lieutenant looks at me with scorn. “No.”

Wala gathers up the empty tea glasses, balancing them against her body in a delicious, gravity-defying system that only she could invent. These people are poor; every glass counts. She will bring them home over the high hill. How many times have I climbed this hill? But today is worse. I figure my ancestors must have been driven from their homes—in Spain, in the Rhineland, God knows where else—and here it is again, what they must have known, something black inside me, the blackness of rage, of hate, though hate is rare for me in south Hebron, over the years it’s been displaced by something else that I can’t name, something better than hate. And there is the weariness; do we have to start all over? We’ll go back to the courts, and the courts will reaffirm the earlier ruling, and the wadi will be open again, and for a while the sheep will graze there until we have to do it all once more, and the pitiful lieutenant might even grow up some day and discover he is a person with a mind and a body of his own, I know it can happen, maybe after the Occupation ends. Maybe even before.

Guy in Umm al-Amad, July, 2017. photograph: Margaret Olin

On the way to Umm al-Khair we stop at Ma‘in and climb the hill to where the owners were digging shallow pits for planting baby olive trees, a few days back. The settlers of Avigail, across the highway, must have summoned the soldiers. This time they arrested ten Palestinians, accusing them of digging in an “archaeological site.” There is no square meter in Palestine-Israel that is not an archaeological site. A new and ominous pretext, potentially useful for stealing land. They kept their prisoners all day and released them in the evening. This story, like Umm al-Amad’s, isn’t over yet.

One thing I can say. Things are getting worse.

September 29, 2017, Erev Yom Kippur Al-Auja – David Shulman

September 30, 2017January 16, 2018 / Margaret Olin / 8 Comments

Most photographs here were taken by Margaret Olin in Al-Auja in late July, 2017.

Dotting the slopes on either side of Wadi Auja are the widely scattered houses of Al-Auja. In most cases only three or four Bedouin families live in each such tiny point, some to the west, climbing the steep hill less than halfway up to the ridge that overlooks the Jordan Valley, others, like the homes of our shepherd friends today, further east, near the road to Jericho. The Al-Auja story is a long one; perhaps some day I’ll tell it in full. On April 21^st this year, some fifteen masked settlers from the Baladim outpost on the high ridge attacked with clubs and stones a group of Ta’ayush activists accompanying Palestinian shepherds to their grazing grounds. A moment of extreme violence: one activist with an open head wound, another with a broken arm, others seriously bruised. The police did nothing; but not long after this attack, which was filmed and widely publicized, the settlers were evacuated from the Baladim. We hear they may have come back.

A little to the south sits the ranch-settlement, entirely illegal even under Israeli law but, like all settlements, extraordinarily privileged, of a settler called Omer. He has been there for eleven years or so, and gathered around him is a group of young, reputedly violent toughs. Hundreds of verdant palm trees tower over the land he has stolen. For the last many years, because of this settlement and the arbitrary boundary it has set in place, the Bedouins of Al-Auja East have had no access to their lands.Ta’ayush took them back across the invisible but fateful border. At first they hesitated, knowing full well that we couldn’t be with them every day and every hour, and that they were vulnerable to all the weapons and wounds that the Occupation can easily bring to bear upon them. Still, we told them that if we persist, together, in the end it’s likely that they will regain the lands, or most of them.And indeed the first few times we went with them and the sheep, it was like returning to Eden. Settlers, soldiers, police all turned up, all equally taken aback and bewildered. I saw the shepherds weep tears of joy: they had given up on these rocky, thorny hills.Then the normal business of the Occupation took over. Day after day the soldiers, egged on, perhaps actually given their orders, by the settlers, or maybe the orders came from higher up, would produce the devilish piece of paper with map attached declaring these lands a Closed Military Zone. The boundaries drawn on the map varied from day to day. The Occupation can’t allow a Palestinian shepherd to graze on his lands without a struggle. So we were driven off time after time, and each time we came back. It’s the usual story. We have been through it in many places. Every time they drive us off at gunpoint, it hurts.

Eventually, our promise will fulfill itself. There was a taste of it today. At dawn we set off with the herds, a long walk up and down the rocks, and three or four hours later we came home with them, the sheep full now of the thorns they love. The soldiers watched from a distance, not interfering. We spread out over the hills. The shepherds made tea. Apart from wind and sun and clouds, the white birds, the ravenous sheep chewing furiously, we heard only the silence of desert and stone. There is no sound in the world like the dusty sweetness of that silence. Two gentle donkeys made no sound.Strange, is it not, that what should be simple, natural, obvious, and right has to be fought for inch by inch? The Muslim theologians of the Middle Ages say that time is an infinite series of atomic moments called “nows,” aanaat. Each such temporal atom has to be created by Allah, moment by moment, an act of divine will and mercy. Each one is a miracle; life itself, the world and all that is in it, the mind and all that it holds, is thus entirely miraculous. Such was our morning in Al-Auja. One infinite atomic now.

Al-Auja, September, 2017. photograph: David Shulman

On the way back we stopped for cold drinks and flat pitta spread with za’atar at our favorite café on the outskirts of Jericho. It’s the eve of Yom Kippur. I don’t know how it came up, maybe it had to do with the fact that Arik skipped the morning prayers to come to Al-Auja today. He, too, was wounded when the settlers attacked in April. Now, for whatever reason, he tells the famous story, shaped by I. L. Peretz, hero of my youth, of the rabbi of Nemirov who disappears each day before dawn. The days are the days before Yom Kippur when one says the prayers for forgiveness, slichot. His disciples, a little puzzled, decide he goes up to heaven. A skeptic and rationalist, someone like me, arrives in the village and scoffs at this pious dream; he hides under the rabbi’s bed and, when the rabbi gets up before dawn, the skeptic follows him into the forest. The rabbi carries an axe. He cuts firewood and carries it to the hut of a penniless widow. As he enters the hut, he recites the first prayer for forgiveness. As he puts the logs into the stove and lights the fire, he recites the next one. By the time the stove is fully ablaze, the prayers have been said in full. When the skeptic, who has watched this, next hears the disciples say the rabbi has gone up to heaven, the skeptic says: “If not higher.”Another one of those atomic nows.

I say, “I grew up on that story and others like it. That was when Jews were still Jews.”Arik laughs. All of us laugh. The Palestinian serving hot pitta and za’attar has been listening in, even he laughs, at us or with us. Look what’s happened to the Jews. Except, I think to myself, this story is about Arik.He asks me if I’m fasting tonight and tomorrow. No, I answer. I am going to Not Fast as an act of bearing witness, a moment of fleeting faith that god still exists.

Preemptive Demolition near Hamra, Jordan Valley, 26 July, 2017

August 4, 2017August 6, 2017 / Margaret Olin / Leave a comment

It’s her first time, and it’s an easy start, but it must still be confusing to watch people demolish your home, even if those people are your father, Mahmoud Zouba,

who is taking the house apart one piece at a time with care, unscrewing the fixtures, and laying the pieces to rest one by one,

family friends from the nearby town of Toubas, and Israeli friends from the organization Ta’ayush who work along side him and document everything. Maybe the documentation will convince enough people that such things really happen.

Later, members of another organization committed to non-violent resistance, ISM (the Palestinian-led International Solidarity Movement) come to help as well and the work ends quickly.

Then everyone stays to enjoy your family’s hospitality and listen to grandpa tell his story.

This has to be preferable to the usual way. Normally the Civil Authority sends bulldozers that would probably roll through the main entrance to the compound,

damaging everything in their way and crushing the trees surrounding the family home.

The house and anything inside that there is no time to remove on short notice would be reduced to rubble.

The Civil Authority charges families good money for this service.

It’s my first demolition, too, but I have seen “Area C” dotted with little piles of rubble where homes and community centers once stood.

Demolished structure in Umm al Kheir, South Hebron, January, 2017.

In my few years of sporadic visits I have helped rebuild some of them more than once.

Rebuilding in Umm al Kheir, South Hebron, July, 2017

This is life in “Area C,” the approximately 60% of the West Bank where Israel retained planning rights after the Oslo accords. Uniformly the Civil Authority there rejects master plans for Palestinian towns, and issues barely any building permits to individual Palestinians. Buildings that predate the agreement can stay without additions, and new buildings for growing families are forbidden. The policy might seem to keep the villages frozen in time, but of course life doesn’t work that way, and they are in fact in a constant state of deterioration, as structures crumble into the landscape.

When disheartened villagers eventually decamp for the increasingly crowded cities in “Area A,” under the Palestinian Authority, Israeli settlements expand into their lands.

To avoid becoming discouraged is a challenge that most of Mahmoud’s immediate family has not met.

Over a meal and coffee, we listen to the Mahmoud’s father tell us that of his eight children (and sixty-four grandchildren), only Mahmoud, with his wife and three daughters remain.

They struggle to keep their land and the fragments of their homes so that eventually the community may grow and perhaps come together again.

Once, Mahmoud’s father reminisces, he and his family lived in a ten-room house . . .

Many of the Israeli settlements that absorb the Palestinian lands were themselves built or expanded without permits, but demolitions of these settlements, and expulsions of Israeli settlers are rare, well publicized, and may be compensated with other land. Just visible behind the compound is a settlement that could someday absorb the Zouba family land.

The home we are demolishing today, a little metal structure donated by the European Union, attracted the attention of Israeli civil authorities right after it was built in 2015. These donated structures are often confiscated or bulldozed, as well as supporting infrastructures such as solar panels donated by individual European countries. The Netherlands recently protested the confiscation of and damage to some 40,000 Euros worth of solar equipment it gave to the village of Jubbet Adh-Dhib.

No permit was issued for Mahmoud’s house, but attempts were made to block the demolition order through the courts. The order overcame all these hurdles on July 2 and the final demolition order came two days ago. Ta’ayush members requested and received a delay of ten days so that the family would have a chance to take apart their own home in their own way, to take a measure of control over their lives. But bulldozers tend to be impatient, so the family decided to go ahead and demolish the house today.

They can use the parts; or perhaps the house can be rebuilt.

Mahmoud and his family will move into the older house with the yellow door next to this house. It is not bad, I am told, but it has no roof, and the sides are not strong enough to support one.

The family will plant olive trees where the little house stood.

But aren’t the olive trees also illegal, someone asks and can’t they be destroyed like the house?

At least, it turns out, a five year old olive tree may not be destroyed.

On Ta’ayush: https://www.taayush.org/

On ISM: https://palsolidarity.org/

Anyone who wishes to help provide the family with a light covering for their house may leave a note below or contact me directly.

Waiting: Jinba, January 11, 2017

June 26, 2017June 27, 2017 / Margaret Olin / 2 Comments

texts Margaret Olin, with D.M. and A.O. photographs: Margaret Olin

‘Ah, all things come to those who wait,’
(I say these words to make me glad),
But something answers soft and sad,
‘They come, but often come too late.’

Mary M. Singleton Currie (Violet Fane)

I regarded my understanding of waiting as complex and subtle.

In June, 2016, I participated in an exhibition called “The Waiting Rooms of History,” at the Kunstverein Paderborn and attended a stimulating conference at the university there on “Waiting as a Cultural Practice.” In the exhibition, the people photographed by Stephanie Schultz had been waiting seven years in what was meant to be a temporary refugee camp in Germany. The children I photographed in Dheisheh refugee camp were all born waiting, as were most of their parents.

There is something good about waiting without an end in sight. To wait with a deadline, knowing that the decision will be either up or down and that you can do nothing about it anymore, can be worse, especially when you realize it will probably be down. In November, in Singapore, I gathered to watch the American election returns on television with a group of expats and visitors. I understand that kind of waiting. As the dreaded moment grows near, people instinctively gather, stare apprehensively at screens, the mood increasingly dark as the decision takes shape.

So when David suggested that we go to Jinba on the day that Israel’s High Court would issue an important decision affecting the very life of the village, I thought I understood what I would encounter.

I feel at times that we are all waiting, each situation and place in its own unique way, with its own pace and rhythm. In the South Hebron Hills alone: settlers waiting for the Messiah to vindicate their biblical nationalism; Eid and Naama from the Bedouin village Umm al Khair waiting for horrid Wednesday to pass, the day when many demolitions take place and they go to work in fear they may not see their home again; A.O waiting for the magical transformation of the seasons in the village of Jinba – in winter she listens to the voices of rain and in spring the land fluctuates to green and in summer everything is yellow, yellow, yellow – everything is golden [A.O. “Jinba is Magic”]; the falahin waiting for the change in the seasons so they can plow and harvest; workers waiting for permits to work in Israel and then waiting in long lines to enter; Nasser from Susiya, banned from entering Israel because he works for the human rights group B’tselem, waiting for the day he can visit with me in Yaffa; waiting for the occupation to end. Waiting entails solitude, helplessness, anticipation and sometimes hope. – D.M.

***

It’s early in Umm al Khair, Eid’s village in South Hebron.

We meet Eid here so that he can accompany us to Jinba.

The decision that we expect today has been on hold for nearly two decades. It concerns the inhabitants of some dozen villages in the West Bank area of South Hebron located in Masafer Yatta, or as Israel calls it “firing zone 918.” Firing zones are areas that the Israeli army proclaims military training grounds. Normally the military may confiscate land for this purpose without providing compensation. It created firing zone 918 in the 1970s after conquering the West Bank. Now the zone includes several Palestinian villages in area C, the region left under Israel’s control by the Oslo Accords. A village with the bad fortune to be encompassed by it faces major strains. If your village is in a firing zone, the army may arrive at any time and evacuate you and your family for hours or days so that it can conduct “exercises” on your land. When you add this to the aggravations faced by every village in area C, like getting by without connections to the power grid and living in constant fear of attacks by settlers, it makes living in area C even more stressful than life elsewhere in Palestine under the occupation.

As stressful as is life in a firing zone, the high court ruling could make it far worse. It could allow the army to eliminate permanently any village in the zone and expel its inhabitants. No doubt such villages will eventually be incorporated into the nearest Israeli settlement that craves their land. Perhaps Jinba’s land will fall to nearby Mitzpe Yair, a settlement outpost already connected to the power grid and enjoying a plentiful water supply despite its illegal status even under Israeli law. Evacuation orders were issued for the Palestinian villages in 1999, but Israeli civil rights organizations helped them contest these orders, and the case has dragged its way through the courts, in one or another form, ever since – nearly twenty years by now. Some residents of the area were to travel to Jerusalem for the court session, and Israeli activists went to support them. David and I were both urged to attend, but instead we have come to offer our support to Jinba itself. The plan was to arrive early in the morning and assess the mood, to be there when the verdict was announced, and to share the experience.

We three visitors do indeed wait, talking to one another and to whichever of our hosts has time for us.

But they don’t have much time. There are chores.

and tea to serve to guests who want to learn how to make flat bread.

All the places in Palestine are beautiful. I love all of my country very much, but every human has a special place where he/she finds safety, quietness, and freedom. For me, this special place is my village, located in al-masafer.

The most beautiful thing in al-masafer is the golden sunrise, when the women wake up to bake the bread in their taboon [wood-fired bread ovens], a fantastic smell blankets the whole place. The women make fresh bread and tea on fire for a breakfast that all family members sit and eat together. – A. O.

There are many other topics and problems to talk over: marriage, education, opportunities for employment, few of them directly related to Israel or the occupation.

We have arrived in time to see the preparations for the weekly clinic, when Dr. Nibal comes from Biet Omar to offer medical help.

Today it is mostly children: among them a little boy who won’t grow. Dr. Nibal has been concerned about him, and details some of the treatments that he might receive.

A mother allows me to photograph her family’s appointment.

Sometime during the day, I forget when, the news arrives.

I always ask myself about the meaning of al-masafer. l can think of so many meanings: maybe al-masafer refers to the people moving from one place to another, or maybe it simply means “the traveler”. I don’t really care about the name itself, what I truly care about is the history, the land, the people, and the life there.

Al-masafer is not only one village, it’s a group of very small villages, each one of these villages has its own strategic location, perfect for its farmers, their sheep and other animals.

Day in and day out we are facing the Israeli wall, the wall that stands between us and our goals and dreams, by God’s will this wall will soon be demolished, and every centimeter in Palestine, will be free. – A. O.

Unsurprisingly, the decision is postponed. The state is given time to prepare a new proposal for the firing zone. It is probably the best news we can expect, since at least it means a reprieve. The process will continue to drag along and who knows, maybe when the occupation ends, as it must, Jinba will still be in place, either here or at least nearby.

***

Eventually, we leave with Eid and drive through the South Hebron Hills where we visit Ibrahim from Susiya, who works on the Living Archive Project, and meet the new baby that Ibrahim is showing off to a gathering of friends. Night finds us back in Eid’s home in Umm al Khair. I have never seen his sculptures, so he shows me several that have returned from his recent exhibition in Berlin, curated by Ai Weiwei.

Afterward our rented car inches its way down the rocky slope from Umm al Khair in darkness.

The people of Jinba have been threatened with expulsion over and over for decades. These are not empty threats, and when they are carried out – the last, terrible, time was in 1999 – they leave scars. This history determines the climate of waiting in a firing zone. In the United States one might wait on a specified day for the unimaginable to happen. Here, except for brief intervals when the unimaginable is actually happening, or, in the aftermath of the unimaginable, while engaged in finding another place to construct yet another forbidden home, one is always waiting. At any time, whether backed by supreme court orders or not, settlers or army can and do attack, expelling everyone and making them homeless with their elderly parents and their young children, with their animals and goods confiscated and their homes demolished. To many the unimaginable has happened often enough to make it seem like a way of life. What difference does yet one more deadline make when there are immediate chores to do, when the goats must be fed, when children have a chance to see a doctor, and when visitors have come? Why spend one’s time waiting for a message of doom when today a child might have the opportunity to grow?

Postscript: Margaret, you bring to mind the question: What is the difference between waiting and patience? Some kinds of waiting seem to lack a form of agency while patience seems to be an act of waiting as means to an end, a calculated form of waiting that knows when to retort, when to strike back and when to let things pass. I wonder if in the South Hebron Hills the simple everyday life tasks of staying on one’s land, which may seem mundane and banal, are acts of waiting – or of patience – for the right moment to reclaim dignity and freedom. D.M.

photographs © margaret olin 2017 texts © margaret olin 2017 except as otherwise noted. Very special thanks to David Massey for all sorts of things at every stage.

Two scenes from January 2017, for D.M.:

Demolition in Umm al-Khair

A lesson in bread-baking in Jinba. Photograph: David Massey

The Hugging Game, Um al ‘Arais, 14 January 2017

May 18, 2017 / Margaret Olin / Leave a comment

Non violent resistance can take many forms. What they have in common is that they need to be visible and they need to be seen.

The tenacious Sa’id ‘Awad has been mentioned in these pages before. This link will acquaint you with the combination of legal subterfuge and open seizure that have wrested his land in the South Hebron Hills away from him. To hang on, Said’s family has an outing each week. The picnic and the boy’s soccer reinforce his continued presence. Otherwise, the civil authorities can consider the land abandoned and make it available to Israelis whose settlements watch comfortably above on land already taken from Sa’id. They may do that anyway.Volunteers from the NGO Ta’ayush try to keep settlers from disrupting the games, but today is peaceful. The settlers remain hidden somewhere behind their eruv poles.*Volunteers pass the time with Sa’id and his family while the boys play soccerand the Civil Administration plays its role. Today, fortunately, this means that the soldiers, very young and very bored, mostly stay put in military vehicles.

or near them. It could be and has been, worse.The girls, sidelined,take matters into their own hands and invent a new game.

Finally the boys get interested

For just a moment the grazing area turned soccer field turns hugging field.

*On the eruv, see here and here. On Ta’ayush https://www.taayush.org/

January 7, 2017 Asael, Susya, Twaneh, Umm al-Khair

January 8, 2017January 8, 2017 / Margaret Olin / 5 Comments

text David Shulman; photographs Margaret Olin

Asael, possibly the ugliest of all the illegal outposts in the southern West Bank—and the competition is fierce—is rapidly expanding. Yellow bulldozers, parked at the perimeter fence of the settlement, have carved out a huge swathe of intermeshed, criss-crossing gashes in the hill and valley just below. This wide, deep wound in the soil has been sliced, needless to say, through privately owned Palestinian land. We know the families. We’ve plowed here, on the edge of the outpost. There have been many bad moments with the Asael settlers, the ones we can see this Shabbat morning walking their dogs over the hill or praying to their rapacious god or swinging their children on the swings in the painted park just under their pre-fab caravans.

Winter morning, sunny, ice-cold. Guy is photographing the earthen gashes meter by meter. The families who own the land will submit a complaint to the police, not that it will do much good. The Civil Administration stopped the bulldozers earlier this week, but the fact that they’re still parked here bodes ill. Each one of them costs a few thousands of shekels per day, and they’re still here. Actually, everything bodes ill here at Asael on this sun-drenched day.

The soldiers appear on cue. Three of them clamber down the hill to put a stop to our intrusion. They’re in winter uniforms, black on top, with ski-masks and heavy weapons. Their officer, affable enough, asks for my identity card. I hand it over. He studies it. “You live near my grandmother’s house. What are you doing here, and why are you photographing me? You’re old enough to be my grandfather, aren’t you ashamed?”

“Why should I be ashamed?”

“I don’t like it when you photograph me. It’s impolite.”

I can see what’s coming. Harmless chatter, nothing worse. I turn off the camera. Peg is still photographing, despite the officer’s repeated demands that she stop. It seems this business of the cameras is all we have to talk about today. Over and over again he tells us that we’re not being nice.

He consults his superiors on the phone. “There are four Israeli citizens here,” he reports, “they have the right to come here and photograph the bulldozers and the digging, they haven’t invaded the settlement, and they won’t stop photographing me.” By now this is becoming an obsession. I’m tired of it. Moreover, the cognitive dissonance is eating away at me, so wearily I say to him, “Look, forget this stupid thing about the cameras, I’m not photographing you now, just look around you at what is happening here. You know as well as I do that this outpost is illegal, and you can see that they’re now stealing more Palestinian land.”

“That’s none of my business. If you have a problem with the settlers, work it out in the courts. I have my job to do.”

Later, thinking back on it, I find the conversation insane, and I’m sorry I got into it. A monumental crime is taking place, here and everywhere in the occupied territories. It’s picking up speed. The soldiers are complicit in it, though it’s coming from far above them, from the prime minister’s office on down. And on this bright winter morning, the officer on the spot thinks we’re being impolite.

II.

Volleyball in Susiya, 7 January 2017

Last week something unusual happened at Susya. A group of fanatical settlers had produced an inscription made of stones on what we call Flag Hill—Palestinian land, of course (newly plowed). The stones were stacked up to read, in Hebrew: “Revenge.” There was also a big stone-piled star of David. Our people came upon these rocks, and the settlers came at them, and the soldiers turned up, and the settlers attacked them, too. This was too much even for the soldiers, who wrestled them to the ground and arrested three of them. They let them go in the evening, but for a brief moment the tables were turned.

III.

These are violent days in South Hebron, also in the Jordan Valley. We reach Twaneh around 2:00 and find a Ta’ayush detachment still shaken after being attacked by masked settlers from Chavat Maon. The Ta’ayush volunteers were there to protect Palestinian farmers who had come to plow. The plowing was successfully completed, and the volunteers were on their way back to Twaneh when fifteen settler thugs attacked, hurling big rocks, lots of them, and assaulting our people with their fists. Dudy was hit in the head by a rock. Danny was beaten. One of the Italian volunteers living in Twaneh was hit, and her (expensive) camera stolen. By sheer good fortune, no one was badly wounded or worse.

Guy calls the police, who eventually respond. We head uphill toward the site of the attack. The settlers are still flitting through the trees at the end of the path. We have good video footage, but it rapidly becomes apparent that there’s little point in submitting a complaint. The police will do nothing, the settlers were masked, to fill out the police forms is hardly more than a ritual gesture. We move on. Fifteen years ago, almost to the day, I was attacked, beaten, stoned, and shot at by the settlers of Chavat Maon at this same point. I know what it feels like. I know for sure that they are celebrating their splendid raid and reveling in their spoils. Maybe I shouldn’t care.

IV.

Eid is waiting to welcome us to Umm al-Khair. He’s become almost famous, with exhibitions of his sculptures and installations in Tel Aviv and most recently Berlin. It’s been many months since I’ve seen him. We embrace. We run through the dismal litany of house demolitions from the past few months. For the moment—always only for the moment—the courts have put a freeze on further demolitions at Umm al-Khair. Eid says: “No matter what we do, the Israelis will never let us live here; sooner or later, they will take these lands too.”

Post-Resettlement, exhibition by Ai Weiwei and Eid Hthaleen. Installation photographs courtesy of Ades Architectural Forum, Berlin.

The settlement of Carmel abuts the shanties of Umm al-Khair, and recently the settlers have invented a new form of torment for their neighbors. Their sewage now flows through pipes that open onto the fertile fields in the wadi and the Palestinian grazing grounds. We pick our way over the rocks to study the large open pipe.

It’s one of those crystal winter afternoons. Every thorn stands out on the hills. Sheep cluster around the well on the next ridge. Ruins from the last four demolition raids are neatly stacked beside what used to be tents and homes. We’ve rebuilt a little, for the umpteenth time. The hills across the Jordan River turn to limpid mauve. It’s cold; one of the young girls, maybe four years old, in ponytail and a blue sweater, stands barefoot at the entrance to her home. Goats bleat; toward sunset, they get hungry. Tea appears. A wild parabola of pigeons swirls over the golden slope. Beauty is made from pain, great beauty from greater pain.

On Ta’ayush: http://www.taayush.org/

a lucid essay; an absurd topic; a real place

October 4, 2016October 13, 2016 / Margaret Olin / 1 Comment

The essay, “Kafka in Area C,” tells the story of the place in these photographs: here where the ‘Awad family sheep are grazing, is a spare wadi where members of Ta’ayush, the all volunteer group whose work in South Hebron I am following, is stopping briefly at the beginning of our day.

In the photographs it is early June, 2015. We watch the patterns that the sheep make as they process down the wadi or gather in groups.

We look across the wadi at a few makeshift houses on what had been the ‘Awad family’s hilltop. Maybe Israeli settlers, in their Shabbat morning peace, are looking back.

I am told “we’ve been here hundreds of times,” but the visit is quiet. We leave within an hour to visit Susiya, a village of tents and caves where rough conditions are a constant, infuriating reminder of injustice.

Today, a year and a half later, Susiya still stands, at least most of it, at least for now. But the ‘Awad family, its livestock and its livelihood, have been denied rights to their land. The article, by a Ta’ayush volunteer, explains the absurd circular process of dispossession that has become business as usual. If the comparison to Kafka fails to appeal to you, think “Catch-22.” But after you glance at the photographs, read it. here.

Touching Photographs

Thinking with and about Photographs

photography

Uneasy Reprieves: March 24, Umm al-Amad; March 26 Al-Auja

March 23: Along the Road to Bet She’an

February 10, 2018: Susya, Twaneh, Tuba by David Shulman

December 2, 2017 Umm al-Amad, Ma‘in David Shulman

September 29, 2017, Erev Yom Kippur Al-Auja – David Shulman

Preemptive Demolition near Hamra, Jordan Valley, 26 July, 2017

Waiting: Jinba, January 11, 2017

The Hugging Game, Um al ‘Arais, 14 January 2017

January 7, 2017 Asael, Susya, Twaneh, Umm al-Khair

a lucid essay; an absurd topic; a real place