Sheikh Jarrah by David Shulman

Sheikh Jarrah by David Shulman

January 8, 2010 Walaja and Sheikh Jarrah
by David Shulman

I should know better by now, but still I’m often surprised. Or perhaps naked malevolence always comes as something of a surprise (here’s an optimistic thought about human beings). We had a few moments like that this week. The Jerusalem municipality has announced that it is planting another hornet’s nest in yet another Palestinian neighborhood of East Jerusalem. This time it is Et-Tur, on the top of the Mount of Olives; twenty-four housing units are scheduled to be built there for fanatical settlers, in addition to the several hundred recently announced for Shu’afat, the creeping annexations in Silwan and Ras al-’Amud, the plans for a huge housing complex at Jabal Mukabbar, and the wave of evictions we have been witnessing in Sheikh Jarrah. At this rate we’ll be marching from protest to protest around the clock (to what effect?). Then there’s Bir al-’Id in south Hebron, where the Palestinian shepherds were recently allowed to return home after ten years of exile (supposedly because the army wanted their territory as a firing range; in fact because of the continuous work of dispossession and Israeli settlement). We’ve worked happily beside the returning families in recent weeks, rebuilding the shattered stone terraces and goat-pens, cleaning out the wells. The original cave-homes are no longer livable, so the shepherds put up some simple tents; and then, inevitably, around the middle of the week they received demolition orders from the Civil Administration (the Occupation authority) for all of the above, tents, goat-pens, terraces, everything that comprises the simple foundation for renewing life in this tiny spot on a rocky hill overlooking the desert.

Perhaps it’s “only” bureaucratic evil, thus banal in Hannah Arendt’s sense—that is, proceeding from the astonishing superficiality of the perpetrator’s personality and a kind of terminal moral dullness. But actually I don’t believe this, and anyway the analogy is false; in my limited experience in the field, neither evil itself nor the evildoer is ever really banal. I think people mostly know, at some level, what they’re doing, whatever the verb “know” might mean, despite the prevalent forms of dissociation and abject failure of the imagination. On the other hand, it’s quite possible that we’re lucky in this respect and that some real person, not a faceless bureaucrat, high up in the Civil Administration or, for that matter, in the government or the army (both now infested by settlers) has taken a deliberate decision to harass these people and make their lives impossible. In any case, as always, no matter who issued the order, we still have to try to understand how the dozens of people who execute it—soldiers, policemen, and lower-level civil servants—are capable of going along with something so patently cruel. I can’t help it: I’m still surprised.

As if all this were not enough, we had the routine kinds of state terror to deal with, for example in Twaneh, where on Thursday one of our friends, Mus’ad, out grazing his goats on the hills, was assaulted by a Jewish settler. When the soldiers eventually turned up, they did what they always do, that is, they arrested Mus’ad and hijacked him in their jeep. He disappeared for many hours; all attempts to locate him failed completely. Finally, around midnight, Assaf got a call reporting that he’d been “found”; the soldiers had kept him captive all day, handcuffed in the jeep, and finally dumped him somewhere in the desert after nightfall. He made his way home safely. There’s nothing very unusual about this story; I hesitated even to record it.

Here’s something more substantial. Consider the case of Walaja, where some 150 activists joined the villagers this morning to protest the government’s new plans for this most beautiful of Palestinian villages. Before 1948 the people of Walaja lived on what is today the site of the Jerusalem zoo: you can see it from the present location of the village, some two or three kilometers to the east, across the Green Line, where the villagers fled during that war. After the 1967 war Israel annexed the village to greater Jerusalem without annexing its Palestinian inhabitants. For some years this slight omission made no practical difference to anyone. But with the building of the Separation Barrier in the last five years, the inhabitants of Walaja suddenly found themselves classed as illegal aliens while living in their own homes; their lands were now part of Israel, while they retained their West Bank identity cards. This means that they can, in theory, be deported at any moment. Meanwhile, the Barrier, though not yet completed here, has separated them from their fields and groves. The coup de grace was recently delivered by the government’s announcement that it is building a huge suburb, to be called Givat Yael, on the Walaja lands. The new suburb will link up with Gilo on the southern edge of greater Jerusalem, thus creating a continuous urban space; it will completely destroy the exquisite wadi and the surrounding hills where we marched today, and it will also envelop whatever is left of the village on all sides, turning it into a tiny, fenced-in enclave denuded of its lands and all other sources of livelihood. Finally, there is an ecological angle to the story. For the last years, Walaja has been denied building permits because it abuts on a national park, Nahal Refaim; demolition orders have also been issued to several houses in the village, supposedly in order to protect the park. Such noble concerns haven’t prevented the municipality from approving the new suburb with its planned many-storied apartment blocks.

In short, as the organizers of today’s action—the Combatants for Peace, the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions, and the Rabbis for Human Rights– all stressed in their briefings on the buses, there are many good reasons to protest in Walaja. You can take your pick: human rights, the horror of the occupation, the Kafkaesque nightmare that now defines life in the village, the ravaging of the environment, and the blatant attack on the very idea of territorial compromise and a reasonable solution in Jerusalem or, for that matter, on the hope of making peace at all. Let’s put the matter more simply. Whoever is planning on building in Walaja has no interest in peace.

Not all the villagers joined us this morning; the settlers apparently threatened them with reprisals if they supported the demonstration, and some were frightened and deterred. Still, we clambered down the steep hill, over the rocks and the goat-paths, to carry our banners along the ridge overlooking the army’s roadblock on the road to Beit Jalla. The soldiers clustered in their command-cars just below us didn’t seem to want a confrontation, so the speeches unrolled in their natural rhythm, in Arabic and Hebrew; the foreign press came to take pictures and do a few interviews, the Rabbi and the preacher who were supposed to lead a joint prayer in the mosque somehow melted into the hills, so the prayer didn’t happen—maybe it would have helped– and by noon we dispersed. I hate demonstrations.

Anyway, it’s a beginning. Maybe the protest will take off, as it has in Sheikh Jarrah. By 3:00 I was there along with what is now a dependable crowd of some 250 or more demonstrators, including the fearless drummers. A modus vivendi has emerged: the police seem to have realized, belatedly, that their policy of breaking up the demonstration violently and making large-scale arrests has only doubled our numbers, so now they merely stand, glumly glowering at us, at the entrance to the street of the stolen homes. We’re not supposed to enter the street, and they have the forces in place to prevent this. But each week there’s something new: today it was a set of gaily painted miniature cardboard houses, including one somewhat larger model inscribed with a well-known poem by Mahmoud Darwish: “Get out of our houses and our dreams/ out of our summer and our winter, our feasts and our sorrows….” [See attached photos]. The idea was to set these little houses down at the upper end of the street, close to the homes in question. Young Palestinian children carried them with us across the street and placed them defiantly at the cops’ feet. It won’t bring peace, but the joy of defiance is, believe me, its own reward; and you would have enjoyed the look of panic on the officers’ faces. What were they going to do? Arrest these seven-year-old kids? Evidently perplexed, muttering threats, they drew back for earnest consultations. Every week the police look more foolish in Sheikh Jarrah. If we can keep it up and even expand the protest, we may yet produce a few surprises of our own.