Posts tagged David Shulman
David Shulman Reports from South Mt. Hebron
Jun 27th
The following is a report from Professor David Shulman about Ta’ayush in the South Mt. Hebron Hills on the 26th of June 2010.
June 26, 2010 Bi’r el-’Id
There’s a strange beauty in the viscous black mud that comes up from the depths of the earth, from the bottom, or somewhere near the bottom, of the well we are cleaning in Bi’r al-’Id. Bucket after bucket of it, lifted by pulley from down below, straggles to the surface, where we unload it and pour it out on the rocky escarpment. Its texture changes remarkably over the long morning hours from a watery top layer to heavy, shiny dark loam to a granular, sticky brown. It has a strong smell, like the sulphurous mud from the Dead Sea (not very far away) that people smear over their bodies for healing. Yehuda says the Palestinians of Bi’r al-’Id should bottle it and sell it at the airport: “Sacred Mud from the Sacred Desert.” There’s no end to it. The buckets go down and up, down and up, heavier each time; the rope attached to the pulley is now caked solid with mud, and the escarpment has turned into a mire. Amiel, Dolev, and Danny are down in the dark recesses, filling the buckets alongside Haj Isma’il. Suddenly Ezra arrives—he was released from jail only a few days ago—and immediately lowers himself, like Spider Man, down the shaft. You can’t stop him. When they emerge hours later, they are black troglodytes, covered with mud from head to toe; and we, too, working the buckets above ground, are splattered, encrusted, soaked.
When I said goodbye to Amiel almost five months ago, he said, “We will meet in the spring, and when you get back, things will be the same here, just a little worse.” But actually in some ways they’re a lot worse. The continuing struggles against the occupation, on the ground in the territories, take their usual grim course, but inside Israel hardly a day passes without some new and sickening jolt. The country is in the grip of violent nationalist paranoia spiked with inventive forms of wickedness and active hatred for Palestinians, of an intensity I’ve never seen before. Here, for example, is what Yulia Shalamov Berkovitch, a member of the Knesset (from the Kadima “centrist” party), has to say: “”Israeli academia apparently suffers from ‘Palestinomania,’ a mild psychological illness whose symptoms include self-hatred, an affinity for Israel’s enemies, Jewish anti-Semitism and/or anti-Zionism. The spread of ‘Palestinomania’ demands the immediate and painful treatment for all of our sake, and the sooner the better” (Haaretz, June 21). I wonder what treatment she has in mind: Lobotomies? Re-education camps? Firing squads? In the same report, we learned that the Minister of Education, Gideon Sa’ar, thinks that it is “important to examine the issues” raised by a rabidly right-wing group called Im Tirtzu in a report on “anti-Zionist trends” in Israeli universities. According to Im Tirtzu, 80% of the reading materials assigned in the departments of Political Science in Israel are anti-Zionist and anti-nationalist and should, one must assume, be banned. They seem to have a black list, which no doubt includes the works of Rousseau, Plato, and John Rawls. The minister, whom some once saw as relatively enlightened, apparently goes along with this. The next step, I suppose, is censorship in the classroom, followed by book burnings in the public square.
Milder signs of the times are everywhere; the mayor of Ramat Hasharon in the coastal plain has decreed that in all schools that require a uniform, the pupils, from next year on, will have to tie Israeli flags to their wrists. He must feel, perversely, that a lack of patriotism is eating away at the foundations of our national existence. Add to this the decision by Jerusalem’s mayor Barkat to demolish 22 Palestinian houses in Silwan—the same homes we saved by an international campaign in 2005—and the ongoing, indeed escalating evictions of Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah. Barkat seems intent on setting the city on fire.
But here we are in Bi’r el-’Id, where our Palestinian hosts are, miraculously, rebuilding the homes from which they were cruelly evicted over a decade ago. The sun is dancing, the wind fierce for a summer day, the sky endlessly open like the human heart at its best, like the desert stretching toward the horizon just below us. I ask my friend Muhammad how things have been during my absence. “Fine,” he says; “no problems.” Afterwards I hear that his father was recently assaulted by Yaakov Talya, the notorious settler-owner of the ranch aptly named Lucifer’s Farm, hardly half a mile away; when the soldiers turned up, they of course arrested Muhammad’s father. He is now awaiting trial. (Perhaps the military judges will send him to jail for the crime of having been attacked, as they have so many others we know.) And the road to Jinba, which we can see from our perch on the high ridge, has again been closed by the army after we punched it open with a water convoy last fall. Not long ago a boy from Jinba was seriously injured and had to be carried all the way up the mountain to the road near Bi’r el-’Id. Two weeks ago settlers from Chavat Maon entered Palestinian Twaneh, threw rocks at the villagers, and tried to set a Palestinian house on fire. In short: Plus ça change….
Yet mud-stained, back aching, thirsty, I surprise myself today. I am borne along on a wave of irrational, happy hope. I have missed these weekends in South Hebron—missed the people, the Arabic, the desert landscapes, maybe even the danger. Each moment we spend here has its own irreducible value. Each act of defiant friendship is self-fulfilling, self-delighting. There it is again, that odd, unpredictable happiness, the heady wine of inner freedom. Yesterday we marched in protest in Silwan—some 500 ordinary Israelis doing the simple, the decent thing—and at first I was wondering where the Palestinians were (most were standing at their windows and doors and watching us), and my colleague Yossi Zeira said to me: “This is our task. No one will do it for us. Every good action counts and adds to the pressure. Slowly they will add up and bring change.” Alan, walking beside me, said he had felt tired after a day at work and almost didn’t come, and then he remembered a phrase from the end of Stephen Poliakoff’s film “1939″: “It is when the good people, or even those who are only half-good, remain silent that evil flourishes.” And there are moments of still deeper insight. When Eileen heard the rhymed slogan we’ve been chanting—”Ein kedusha be’ir kvushah, There is No Sanctity in an Occupied City”—she said: “Maybe there is sanctity only in an occupied city.” I think she’s right. Nothing in my experience comes as close to the meaning of a word like “holy” as the act of protest against what the municipality and the police are doing in Palestinian East Jerusalem.
That’s also what Istvan tells me as we work the buckets by the well. He’s a religious man, and to him these Ta’ayush hours in South Hebron are what religion is all about: truth, for example, and loving-kindness. “The settlers think that they represent the true Judaism,” I say to him, “and sometimes I’m afraid they may be right.” “No,” he says, “they are certainly wrong.” At moments a great simplicity emerges in the mind, like cleaning a muddy well, and you taste a giddy seriousness, a sudden lightening of the heart. Sitting beside us is Ziad Muhamra, shot point-blank in the face by a soldier some years ago when Ziad refused to take his goats off his ancestral grazing grounds. He told me his story last time I was here. Ziad survived, thanks to a devoted Israeli surgeon. He was in hospital for a year, fed by tubes. Today he remembers happily the moment he ate solid food again for the first time—a banana. It took him half an hour to eat it, and the whole ward, the nurses and the doctors and the other patients, all gathered round to watch this astonishing event. Now he has come back to Bi’r el-’Id. When he mentions his doctor, searching for the foreign Hebrew name, it seems to me, for a second, as if this tough shepherd from the desert, a true survivor, is close to tears.
But some things are simpler than others. ‘Id has joined us today; we embrace like brothers when I see him. But his life in the village is perhaps no longer viable. People envy him—he is educated, articulate, self-possessed—and some don’t like the fact that he has Israeli friends. A few days ago Palestinians came to Umm al-Khair and tried to kill him; he managed to get away. He has a wife and a baby daughter, and it’s not clear where he can go; he’d like to study somewhere in Europe. He’s good with his hands, artistic by nature. Maybe we’ll be able to help him. Then there is Haj Isma’il, with his 33 children from four wives. How will he manage to support this huge tribe from his tent in the tiny, precarious khirbeh of Bi’r el-’Id? He wanted to take a fifth wife, but the Qadi wouldn’t allow it, not even when Haj Isma’il tried to persuade him he’d already divorced the first wife. “I still have my strength,” he says, “and I don’t want to waste it or take it with me to the grave.”
“So how was jail?” I ask Ezra when he emerges from the well. “Akhla—great,” he says; “highly recommended.” He was imprisoned for a month after Judge Eilata Ziskind found him guilty of attacking a police officer during house demolitions at Umm al-Khair, where ‘Id lives. I have no doubt that the charge was cooked up by the police in order to punish a central figure in the non-violent resistance to the occupation. The first week in jail, in Jerusalem, was hard; they refused to allow him to receive books, so he went on hunger strife—for four days he ate nothing, until the prison authorities relented. Afterwards he was transferred to Dekel Prison in Beer-Sheva, where things improved. The cell was filthy, he says, and infested with cockroaches who paid no heed to human attempts to drive them away; they slept with him in his bed, emerged from his towel when he showered. One day he asked the commanding officer: “Are these part of the menu or part of the punishment?” He found a 50-meter stretch of corridor where he was allowed to walk, and every day he would pace it up and down, for hours. He lost a lot of weight. But there’s no trace of bitterness in him—quite the contrary, today he seems to me at peace, and full of hope. At lunch I say to him, “I hear you’re feeling optimistic.” He laughs. “Yes. Just look around. Two years ago we didn’t even know the name of this place. These people had been driven off their land, the houses and terraces were destroyed, the wells stopped up. Now we’ve brought them back and stood by them, and we’ve helped them to stand up to the settlers and the soldiers and not to be afraid. They are here to stay. They are home. You can train people so they become able to resist. Even a few people like that make a huge difference. In the end we will win. So of course I’m optimistic. You must be optimistic, too, otherwise why would you be here?”
Report from the South Hebron Hills by David Shulman
Mar 17th
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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Al-Tal’a, Um Zaituna
Jan 31st
A report from David Shulman about the South Hebron Hills:
January 30, 2010 Al-Tal’a, Um Zaituna
“The most desperate fights are often the most hopeful,” Istvan says to me as we stand on the hill looking down at the shepherds and their sheep. You can always rely on Istvan for the surprising Hungarian perspective on things—not usually an optimistic one, but humane and morally acute in a dark, perhaps ironic way. This is his fourth trip with us to South Hebron. He likes the Ta’ayush mode, which he thinks exemplifies the central Gandhian principle: what is inside shapes what is outside; if you can overcome your own weaknesses and fear, you will have an incalculable effect on the most recalcitrant situation. Besides, there’s another consideration of a totally non-instrumental nature. He cites an extreme example. Those Germans and Poles and others who saved the lives of Jews during the Nazi period didn’t do it to defeat Nazism; they did it because it was right, a moral act in need of no justification or corroboration outside itself.
This comes as a timely reminder, because yesterday afternoon I was harangued at some length by a former colleague, a Russian humanist of the old school, by now thoroughly disillusioned: in a struggle, he said, between those with principles, driven by moral concerns, and what he calls the “Hottentot” rule—”If I take your wife, that is good; if you take my wife, that is bad”—in such a struggle, the Hottentots will always win. [I hope my Hottentot readers will forgive him, and me.] Moral scruples, in short, always weaken you; it’s the thugs who come out on top. So here we are in the living laboratory of South Hebron, where we can perform an experiment, in real time, to test these two opposed hypotheses.
We’ve come to accompany the Palestinian shepherds, who have been harassed in recent days even more than usual by Israeli settlers. The settlers, backed up by the army and the police, are constantly driving the shepherds at gunpoint off their historic grazing grounds; sometimes they beat them or throw rocks at them or even shoot at them for good measure. We divide up into three groups, each one responsible for one large herd; I am entrusted with the Al-Tal’a/ Um Zaituna contingent. I find Jamil, together with some 80 or 90 sheep and four of his young sons and other boys, on the rocky slope just under the cow-barn of the Maon settlement. He gives me a radiant welcome, his face alight with pleasure; Jamil is a true bon vivant, odd as the term might sound in the harsh desert setting of South Hebron. (You can see him in the attached picture.) He’s also monolingual in Arabic, a great advantage for me. He tells me that this morning settlers have already pointed their guns at him and his sons and told him to go away—or they would shoot. I think the sheep and the children are still a little too close to the settlement, and together we decide they’ll move some ways down the hill.
So far so good. The sheep are also happy—these slopes, normally inaccessible to Palestinian shepherds, are thick with fresh green undergrowth and the delicious thorny leaves the sheep adore. It’s rained a bit this winter; the soil is reviving under wind and winter cloud, a ravishing pastiche of green and grey. Here the name of the game, as we know well, is somehow to gain time—an hour, two, three, long enough for the herd to graze to its fill before the soldiers and the settlers turn up, as they always do. I have instructions from Amiel to avoid confrontation this time: if we see them approaching, we are to get the shepherds out of danger as quickly as we can. No arrests, if possible, today.
We talk, we laugh, we play. Jamil wants me to mount his donkey, Humara. How is it? he asks after I’ve clambered up on top. Much better than driving a car, I say. The children, as always, want their picture taken; they solemnly introduce themselves and, one by one, come to shake our hands. “Are you afraid of the soldiers?” little Ibrahim asks me, and I say, “No, not afraid, but I don’t want any trouble for you.” An hour goes by, wind whipping at our faces. I dismount from Humara. There is dust in the air, a sign of coming storm.
First we see the police cars driving up to Maon, blue lights flashing. They sit there, waiting. I’m hoping they just came by to have a look and won’t come at us, especially since we’ve now opened up a substantial gap between the herd and the outer perimeter of the settlement. But of course the hope is quickly dashed. A large posse of soldiers and cops is soon marching toward us over the rocks [see attached photo]. They reach Zvi and the other Um Zaituna flock first. Even at a distance, I can see them performing the remorseless stages of their beloved ritual: there is a piece of paper being waved at Zvi and the shepherds, clearly the signed order declaring this little patch of desert a Closed Military Zone; the order is examined, photographed, there are the always Quixotic protests, followed by threats from the soldiers and, after a few minutes, a gradual withdrawal of our people eastwards, deeper into the desert. Maybe, I say to myself, the soldiers won’t bother Jamil and his Ta’ayush protectors. No such luck. Having heroically driven the Um Zaituna flock down toward the wadi, the soldiers and policemen pick their way over the rocks toward us.
David Shulman Reports from Yesterday’s Sheikh Jarrah Protest March in Jerusalem
Dec 5th
Ta’ayush member and prolific writer David Shulman has provided a report from yesterday’s Sheikh Jarrah protest march in Jerusalem. His words, as always, are moving and profound:
December 4, 2009 Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem
Exhibit A. Kindly examine the attached photograph. Let’s make an inventory. Three stuffed animals, two face up, one face down. The yellow-and-red one, half animal half cushion, has an inscription: “I love you.” One school bag. Two unidentified red toys. Five pieces of yellow lego. One armless, legless doll. One yellow brush with blue bristles. An Arabic newspaper. A broken pole wrapped in red cloth. A broken flower, perhaps freshly cut, probably thrown out with the vase it sat in.
I don’t want to overload your inbox, so I won’t add more pictures of this patch of ground in front of the al-Kurd family’s house in Sheikh Jarrah. I can tell you what’s there. A kitchen stove, its glass top shattered, green splinters everywhere. Broken microwave lying on its face. Pieces of bicycle and a children’s tractor. Shoes, mostly children’s. Many more pieces of lego. A few pots and pans. Some sheets. Boxes of odds and ends—cellphone, cords, electric wire. Plastic shovel for playing in the sand.
Exhibit B. See attached photograph. Immediately adjacent to the above: Border Policemen outside the door of the house, now inhabited by Israeli settlers. The police are there, needless to say, to protect them. Note the Israeli flags strung over the windows, just to rub it in. The people taking photographs and milling around are Israeli peace activists who came for today’s protest march: ordinary people, shocked by what is happening in Sheikh Jarrah and angry enough to spend this Friday afternoon on the long walk through downtown Jerusalem, then along Road Number One which divides east from west—the future border between the Israeli and the Palestinian cities– past the American Colony Hotel and the neighborhood mosque to this street where, as of Sunday, a third Palestinian family has been violently expelled from its home.
We’re riding a wave of such expulsions. Last Friday we were here, Eileen and I, in this very courtyard, before the court ruling; we spoke at some length with the eloquent, moderate father of the al-Kurd family, who told us the story in gentle Arabic. He had told it many times that day. “We were refugees from Haifa in 1948. Everyone in this neighborhood is a refugee, some from Lydda and Ramla, some from Jaffa. After the 1948 war, the Jordanian government gave us these plots of land to build on, in exchange for our UNRWA cards. The cards were worth a lot of money, but we wanted to live normal lives in our own houses, so we gave up our status as refugees. We have lived in this home since the 1950′s. The Israeli settlers claim the land belongs to the Jews and they went to court, for years we were in the courts. But this is my house, it is our home, I built the annex in the front and planted the fruit trees. Now the court has ordered the annex to be sealed off and they forced us out. Settlers came with the soldiers in the night and started throwing our possessions outside, just like that, and they hit us, one of them grabbed my daughter by the throat and tried to strangle her. They are very violent. We cannot live with them. They hurt us and they insult us and they are thieves and the soldiers help them. The court has left us, for now, with the back part of the house; the front is locked and sealed. On Sunday the court will decide finally. I don’t believe they will force us to leave. I don’t believe they can be so unjust. Come meet my mother, she will tell you.” We peeked through the window: his mother was sleeping, the afternoon receding into night. We sat with him for a few moments in the tent he has put up in the courtyard across from what used to be his front door. His wife, a handsome, modern woman, rushed into the back of the house and emerged with a box of baklava to offer us; it was ‘Id al-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice, when guests are especially welcome.
Then on Sunday the court ruled in favor of the settlers, and they moved in immediately with the soldiers to back them up, as is normal in East Jerusalem these days. That’s how the lego and the stuffed animals landed up in the courtyard.
This is the third recent eviction in Sheikh Jarrah—after the al-Hanun and al-Ghawi families lost their homes to settlers– and six more families have already received court orders preparing them for this same fate. We’ve tried our best to stop it, we’ve run an international campaign, we’ve kept volunteers in the houses and protestors outside, we’ve done what we could in the courts and the press, and we’ve failed and will no doubt fail again unless some of you who read this report find a way to bring effective pressure to bear. Let me say at once: the legal situation in Sheikh Jarrah is complicated, but it’s also largely irrelevant. The settlers, through what is called the Sephardic Community Committee, have produced documents to support their claim that these plots of land belonged to Jews during the Ottoman period, over a century ago. Ergo, they must be restored to Jewish hands (like all the rest of Palestine? And what about the hundreds of Palestinian houses in West Jerusalem now inhabited by Jews? No Israeli court is about to return them to their original owners.). All the Palestinian families who live here received the land from the Jordanian government, as Mr. al-Kurd said. They are large families; two generations have been born and grown up in these houses. The whole question has been in the courts for decades, and the rulings have sometimes favored the Palestinians, at other times the settlers. I’m not about to make any judgment relating to the legal niceties.
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Amiel and Eli
Sep 26th
From David Shulman comes another powerful testament to Ta’ayush. During this period of religious reflection, I am proud and thankful that we have people like David and Amiel among us.
September 22, 2009. Jerusalem District Court. Amiel and Eli
It’s become a little too familiar, the Jerusalem Magistrates Court. I’ve been here several times in recent months because of Ezra Nawi’s ongoing trial; and today I’m here because Amiel and Eli have been charged with disorderly behavior and (in Eli’s case) hindering a policeman in carrying out his duty. Originally, the police wanted to charge them with “endangering human life on a public road”—a serious offense carrying a penalty of up to twenty years in jail, put on the books in order to punish Palestinian stone-throwers during the first Intifada—but the prosecution eventually decided on less severe charges. Here’s what happened. On October 8, 2006 Ta’ayush organized a demonstration march near the Al-Khadr check-point, south of Jerusalem, to protest against the slow starvation of the Palestinian population caught between the Security Barrier and Highway 60, the main north-south highway in the southern West Bank. Since the Security Barrier has been built deep inside Palestinian territory, far to the east of the highway, and since the whole of the territory between the Barrier and the highway is clearly slated for Israeli annexation, the Palestinian farmers, shepherds, and viniculturists still living there, a population of perhaps 20,000, are trapped: they no longer have access to medical clinics, offices, schools, and, above all, to their traditional markets. Lots of grapes are grown in this enclave; once they were marketed in Gaza, Jerusalem, Israel, Jordan, and the northern West Bank; now, because of the Barrier and the army roadblocks, and because grapes have a very short shelf-life after picking, they mostly rot on the vine or in storage. Al-Khadr itself is east of the Barrier, cut off from its own vineyards to the west of it which produce 11,000 tons of grapes each year. Amiel’s idea was to march along the highway with large cartons of grapes, to distribute them (together with an explanatory flyer) to passing drivers and, when the police arrived and tried to put an end to this subversive effort, to dump the grapes on the ground in protest—also to make sure that the media, local and international, captured this moment on film. A similar tactic has been used quite effectively in public protests by French farmers and just might work, whatever “working” means, in Palestine as well.









David Shulman on Walaja and Sheikh Jarrah
Jan 10th
Posted by Joseph Dana in Unarmed Resistance
1 comment
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.
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