Archive for March, 2010

January 16, 2010 Mufagara, Bir el-’Id, Tuba

Ziad Muhammad Yusuf Muhamra, from Bir el-’Id: sun-dried face, deep scars, lively eyes. It is hard for me to understand his Arabic, not only because it’s fast, slurred, and in South Hebron dialect. He was shot in the throat by a soldier in 1986 while he, Ziad, was sitting on the ground; the bullet exited near his right nostril. Miraculously, he survived, but his speech was affected, and there was considerable damage to the nerves in his neck. I ask him to tell his story, and out it comes in a rush in the blinding mid-winter sunlight as the sheep chew vigorously on thorns and greens around us.

“I was out with the sheep near Jinba. They [soldiers] chased us away. We fled back up the hills. Then the Green Patrol claimed we had crossed the Green Line into Israel, and they threatened us, and the settlers came down on us from above. They came at us from three sides, hemming us into the wadi with the sheep. I was with my brothers and my uncle. There were soldiers with guns and two men from the Shabak [General Security Services], Marko and Koby; we knew Koby well, he was often in the area. First Marko hit me hard, a fight broke out, an inspector from the Green Patrol was wounded on his ear. They told us we had to leave. I sat down on the ground and covered my head with my arms. The soldier gave me a heavy blow with the butt of his gun. One of the soldiers took out a pistol, I could hear him playing with the clip. They said they’d shoot me if I didn’t get up and go away, but I just sat there, so the soldier shot me here [pointing to the scar on his neck]. Afterwards when I was lying there bleeding I heard Koby and the soldier concocting their story. They said they’d report that I’d tried to grab a weapon, so they shot me. But they were worried. Finally they called a helicopter that took me to Soroka Hospital in Beer Sheva. I was in the hospital for a long time. At first I couldn’t talk and I couldn’t eat; they fed me through a tube directly into my stomach for a whole year. For months I saw the doctors, there was a doctor in Bellinson and another in Shaarei Tzedek who tried hard to help me. The authorities demanded that I pay a fantastic sum for the medical expenses, but anyway we have no money. In the end, the army paid. The day after I was shot the army arrested my two brothers and held them for a month.”

Ezra says: “Here’s a story with a half-happy ending.” “Half?” I say. “Yes, he’s still alive, he can talk, he has a life.” He’s not alone. On the way here we see Khalid, shot in the stomach by settlers at the time of the first Iraq war. He’s alive, so it’s another half-happy story.

Nearly noon. The sun drilling fiercely into the rocks, the pores of your skin. In the distance, wrapped in a blue haze, the mountains of Gilead in Jordan. Beneath us, Bir el-’Id, with its new tents and rebuilt terraces—all of them under sentence of demolition as of last week, courtesy of the Civil Administration. To the south, the well named Lucifer Farm, the illegal outpost of Yaakov Talia. Above and below us and on the ridges far away, herds of beige-brown sheep in the precise shade of the omnipresent stones—like moving, feeling, hungry stones. Ziad, his brother, his nephews, as if carved out of these same hills. It’s a hard life they lead, and a good one. They’re very poor, of course. Who would believe that human beings could survive at all in this fierce wilderness? They have to bring water in tankers every day over the hills from Yata, miles away. Ezra says they are straight and simple people in the best, the most positive sense of the word “simple.” (If only I could be simple like that.) They’re beautiful, too—strong, handsome women who stare you in the eye, who stand firm on the soil; strong, handsome men, good with their hands, their faces folded into deep creases by the wind and the sun. They sleep in caves or, sometimes, in the open air under the stars. They drink freshly fermented yogurt from their goats’ milk and eat the hard, salty cheese they make. It’s a good life and a possible life, however difficult it may be in ways that we, in our softness, can hardly imagine; they seem to me to have a talent for happiness, they would probably be happy were it not for the settlers who torment them, the soldiers who back the settlers up.

The cellphone rings: Zvi calling from Mufagara, where an hour ago we left a small group of volunteers to follow the shepherds, to protect them from the settlers. The army has turned up with the usual signed order declaring the area a Closed Military Zone. The order is illegal, we know it well, but the Mahat—the Battalion Commander—doesn’t care about that, and the officers who have presented the order are in no mood to explain: “We work for the Mahat.” End of conversation. Why has this happened? Most probably settlers from the nearby outpost of Mitzpeh Yair have noticed our presence and ordered the army to drive us out— and the army normally takes its orders from the settlers. Anyway, they don’t want us here. We interfere in the ongoing land-grab. We get in the way. We make it just a little harder for them to terrorize the innocent.
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