Top Quotes: “The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine” — Ben Ehrenreich
The Spring
“”During my life, I was arrested ten times,” Bassem continued. In most of those arrests, he said, he was not charged or tried, but confined under what is blandly referred to as “administrative detention,” a legal leftover from British colonial rule that permits Israeli authoritiés to jail an individual considered a threat to Israel’s security without charge and without presenting evidence to the accused. Altogether, Bassem had spent three years of his life in Israeli prisons without ever being convicted of a crime. “My wife,” he added, “was arrested in 2010 at the second and third demonstrations. My son, thirteen years, was wounded, my wife was wounded by rubber-coated bullets, and my small child, seven years, was wounded with rubber bullets and tear gas.”
Nabi Saleh’s troubles began in 1976, when Israelis belonging to the messianic nationalist group Gush Emunim (“Bloc of the Faithful”) established themselves on the hilltop opposite the village in an old stone fort erected by the British as a police station. The settlers, Bassem said, soon began clearing trees and building homes. Residents of Nabi Saleh and the neighboring village of Deir Nidham took the settlers to court, accusing the settlers of stealing their land. The court ruled in the villagers’ favor — the land immediately around the police station belonged to the state, but the fields around it were private. The settlers left, but in May 1977, the right-wing Likud Party won Israel’s legislative elections, ending three decades of center-left rule by the predecessors of today’s Labor Party. Menachem Begin replaced Yitzhak Rabin as prime minister. The settlers returned. The following year, the state seized nearly 150 acres of the village’s land for “military needs” and gave them to the settlers, whose community would ultimately become known as Halamish. It now has a population of about 1,200, almost twice that of Nabi Saleh.
The problem became worse, Bassem said, during the Second Intifada, the bad, hard years of the early 2000s. The Israeli army declared the land directly downhill from the settlement a closed military zone. Soldiers, he said, “attacked anyone they saw on the land.” Palestinian farmers could no longer work their fields. Settlers began to farm them. More land was lost, and more after that. Forty percent of the village’s land, Bassem said, “is under the control of the settlers. We can’t use it. We can’t farm it. They keep it empty for the settlement to expand.”
Just south of the village and down the hill from the settlement, a spring bubbles from a low, stone cliff. The people of Nabi Saleh called it ‘Ein al Qoos,’ or the Bow Spring. The farmers who worked the fields beside it relied on its waters for longer than anyone could remember. In the summer of 2008, the youth of Halamish dug a hole and poured cement to construct a pool that would collect the waters of the spring. The settlers seeded the pool with fish and built a bench, a swing, more pools, an arbor for shade. They gave the spring a Hebrew name — Ma’ayan Meier, or Meier’s Spring, after one of the settlement’s founders. When Palestinians came to tend their crops in the fields beside it, Bassem said, the settlers chased them off — “hitting them, beating them, threatening them, scaring them.” The army, which had long since established a base in the old British police station, was always a few steps behind them.
One Friday in December 2009, the people of Nabi Saleh marched to the spring, “to tell the world,” Bassem said, “that we have the right to work our land.” A group of armed settlers came down from Halamish. (“They are always with guns. They don’t walk without their guns.”) They began shooting, Bassem said, and throwing stones. Soon the soldiers joined them, firing tear gas and rubber-coated bullets. Twenty-five people, Bassem said, were injured. The villagers — men, women, and children-came back the next Friday, and every Friday after that, joined by increasing numbers of foreign and Israeli activists and by the press. The soldiers hadn’t let them near the spring since, but taking it back, Bassem insisted, had never been the goal. The idea was to challenge the entirety of the occupation, the almost infinitely complex system of control that Israel exercised over Palestinians throughout the West Bank: not just the settlements and the soldiers in their hilltop bases, but the checkpoints, the travel restrictions, the permits, the walls and fences, the courts and the prisons, the stranglehold on the economy, the home demolitions, land appropriations, expropriation of natural resources, the entire vast mechanism of uncertainty, dispossession, and humiliation that for four decades has sustained Israeli rule by curtailing the possibilities, and frequently the duration, of Palestinian lives. “The spring is the face of the occupation.””
“The army, in the meantime, had begun to bring the fight inside the village, throwing tear gas grenades into people’s homes, returning at night to search houses and make arrests. Bassem rattled off the numbers: in the fourteen months since the protests began, 155 residents of Nabi Saleh had been injured, 40 of them children. A thirteen-year-old boy from a neighboring village had spent three weeks in a coma after being shot in the head with a rubber-coated bullet. Nearly every home in Nabi Saleh had been damaged. Gas grenades had sparked fires in seven houses, igniting curtains, rugs, and furniture. Seventy villagers had been arrested, 29 of them children. The youngest was eleven years old. Another 40 or so foreign and Israeli activists had been arrested as well. Fifteen villagers were still in prison. Six, Bassem included, were in hiding.”
“Most of the activists were in their early twenties: pale, pierced, straight-edge kids in faded black jeans, black boots, black backpacks. The majority were anarchists, as opposed in principle to militarism and the state as they were to any specific actions of the Israeli army in Nabi Saleh or anywhere else. A few had been participating in protests against the construction of the separation barrier (Israelis call it the “security fence”: Palestinians prefer “Apartheid wall”) through West Bank villages since the early 2000s, and were among the founders of a loose confederation of activists called Anarchists Against the Wall. They were an earnest and sometimes dour lot, quick to lecture, slow to laugh. Their commitment, though, was impressive: their politics had made most of them outcasts in Israeli society, some of them in their own families. Nearly all of them had been arrested — some of them dozens of times — and beaten and gassed and shot at, and Friday after Friday, they kept going back. With a few notable exceptions, the anarchists were — and remain — the only Israelis who regularly cross the Green Line into the West Bank to stand in solidarity with Palestinians protesting the occupation. Gathered together, they could all fit in a single city bus. Two buses tops.”
“The bulk of the evidence against him was drawn from the testimony of two teenage boys arrested in Nabi Saleh and questioned for hours under duress without the presence of a lawyer or their parents, as is required by Israeli law.”
“In 2010, the last year for which records were made public, 99.74 percent of Palestinians tried in the military court system were convicted.”
“Jonathan Pollak and a few of the anarchists I had met the year before were there as well. Tall, gruff, invariably wearing all black and a skeptical half smile, Jonathan would be in Nabi Saleh nearly every Friday. So would about half a dozen others. However small their numbers and however politically marginal they were inside Israel, they too fulfilled a vital function. They knew how to navigate the Israeli system and could coordinate publicity and legal help if people were injured or arrested. And they were witnesses. Even if the soldiers scorned them as traitors, the Israeli activists’ presence meant that each soldier knew that there were people watching him who might sit next to him one day on the bus or in a café or a park, people whose cousins or siblings might work with or even marry his cousins or siblings. Israel is a small country. So long as the activists were there, the soldiers knew that what the army did in the West Bank might find its way back across the Green Line, to their families, and their homes. Perhaps this sometimes gave them pause.”
“The uprising that broke out on December 8, 1987, when an Israeli tank transporter crashed into a string of cars and killed four Palestinians waiting at the main checkpoint between Israel and Gaza, began as an entirely local affair. The following day, Israeli soldiers opened fire on demonstrators in Gaza’s Jabalya refugee camp, killing seventeen-year-old Hatem al-Sisi and wounding two others. The camps exploded, first in Gaza, then in the West Bank. The protests leaped to the villages, cities, and towns. The First Intifada — the Intifada of the Stone, it would be called, after the primary weapon used by the Palestinian side — had begun.
In the beginning, participation was almost universal. Organizing committees sprang up village by village and neighborhood by neighborhood. Women played a leading role.
Many of the combatants, if that is the right word, were children, the “children of the stones” celebrated in Nizar Qabbani’s poetry, who brought “rain after centuries of thirst . .. the sun after centuries of darkness hope after centuries of defeat.” After a month of purely local coordination, an anonymous Unified National Leadership began issuing communiqués, calling on merchants to close their shops, landlords to cease collecting rents, taxi and bus drivers to block the roads, consumers to boycott Israeli goods, employees of Israel’s occupation government to resign from their posts, Palestinians who worked in Israel to stay home, everyone to stop paying taxes. Only pharmacies, clinics, and hospitals were to stay open on strike days — someone had to care for the wounded. In the first year of the Intifada, 390 Palestinians were killed — nearly half of them children and teens and not a single Israeli soldier.
The idea was unarmed civil disobedience on a massive scale. The occupation, like any effective system of control, functioned through complicity — Palestinians worked in Israel, paid taxes to Israel, ate food and wore clothing imported from Israel, paid court fees, licensing fees, and fees for permits to the Israeli authorities. The Intifada — literally, shaking off — represented a refusal on the part of Palestinians living under occupation to participate in their own oppression. It was, for those who lived through it an experience of radical solidarity. The foundations had already been laid: Fatah and the three main left-wing Palestinian political parties had been quietly building grassroots networks of youth organizations, trade unions, and women’s committees since the mid-1970s. Once the uprising began, those networks adapted themselves into a web of autonomous institutions, providing services that the occupation authorities would not. Bassem, who had headed a Fatah youth group while in high school and formed a youth committee in Nabi Saleh before the Intifada, became one of the main regional coordinators for the area around Ramallah, moving from village to village and working with local popular committees, often sleeping in the hills to avoid arrest.
The motivations were strategic as much as they were ideological — if the boycott forbade the purchase of Israeli produce, agricultural committees could make up the difference; when the military closed the schools, villages and refugee camps were ready with educational committees to teach their own children; if the curfews and closures imposed by the army prevented the sick and injured from reaching the hospital, health committees could provide treatment; if the Israelis arrested all identifiable leaders, the leadership would remain collective, anonymous, and decentralized. The result was revolutionary. For the first two years of the Intifada, Gaza and the West Bank governed themselves along de facto anarchist lines. Power was communal, democratic, diffuse. Not only Israeli institutions but the traditional power relations of Palestinian society were overturned. The patriarchs of the elite landowning families were no longer relevant. Authority based on courage, capability, and commitment — could be held by women, the young, the poor, and the unpropertied.
It didn’t last. After 1990, power shifted from the grassroots leadership that had arisen within Palestine to the centralized command of the PLO’s government in exile in Tunisia.”
“Experience had proven that there was no safe place to hide the children, and by participating in the demos, the kids would learn to overcome their fear and to see themselves as something other than passive victims. In private, though, as parents, they were keenly aware of the costs: the nightmares and the bed-wetting, the tantrums and defiance. What child who has learned not to fear gunfire will go to bed when told? The boys especially had a hard time focusing in school. What was the point of studying? They knew what future awaited them. “They are not interested in normal things,” Bassem complained. Even on Facebook, they didn’t post about pop stars and sports, only clashes, prisoners, the latest martyr.”
“Boys throwing stones were not armed. Soldiers were. That was the distinction that mattered. The larger issue was tactical, not moral. Palestinians had a right to armed resistance, Bassem insisted, like any people under occupation, whether it be the Czechs under the Germans or the Algerians under the French. Nabi Saleh had rejected that path because it hadn’t worked, not because it lacked legitimacy. No one hoped to defeat the IDF by force of stones alone. For all the millions of stones Palestinians had hurled at Israeli troops over the years, not one had killed a single soldier. If they were a weapon, they were a symbolic one. The demonstrations were theater, a ritual performance repeated week after week. “We see our stones as a message,” Bassem said. The message they bore was simple: “We do not accept you.”
I talked to some of the guys about it. I asked them why they bothered playing such an elaborate and dangerous game, knowing that they couldn’t hope to do more than annoy the soldiers. They had no illusions. “I want to help my country and my village,” one of the guys said, “and I can’t. I can just throw stones.”
“After dinner one evening, Nariman put on a DVD of outtakes from Bilal’s footage, a sort-of Worst of Nabi Saleh compilation. We watched a night raid at Bilal’s house shot early in 2011, when soldiers were entering every house, waking all the male children and photographing them. “They were mapping the village,” Bassem explained. On the television, Bilal’s son Osama, then fifteen, sat up and rubbed his eyes, perplexed at the sight of four armed and helmeted soldiers at the foot of his bed. We watched another clip shot in the room in which we sat. Nariman had filmed this one just a few months earlier, while Bassem was in prison. Soldiers rifled through the boys’ bedroom while Salam and Abu Yazan hid beneath the covers. They took two computers, various books and official documents, Wad’s camera, his schoolbooks — not all of them, just geography and Palestinian history — even his old report cards. Nariman yelled while they ransacked the children’s rooms: “What manliness this is! What a proud army you’re part of!” We watched footage of her and Bill’s wife Manal being arrested during one of the early demonstrations. Soldiers had fired tear gas into Manal’s house, Nariman explained. Manal ran in to fetch the children. When she came out, a soldier ordered her back in. She refused, so they arrested her. Nariman tried to intervene. They arrested her too. We watched another clip of crying children being passed one by one from a gas-filled room out a second-story window, down a human ladder to the street. We watched footage of a soldier dragging a nine-year-old boy in the street, of another soldier striking Manal’s seventy-year-old mother, of the skunk truck spraying the water tanks on Bill’s roof and on the roof of the house across the street. Finally, Nariman shook her head and turned off the disc player. Glee was on, so we watched that instead.”
“Janna had always been easily frightened, Nawal said. She would wake every time the soldiers entered the village and would hide beneath a table. Once, in the very beginning, the adults had gathered all the children into one second-story room, thinking they would be safe there. Soldiers fired gas grenades into the house. The room filled with tear gas, I had seen the video: this was the day they had to pass the children through the window to the street below. Janna had cried and begged her mother not to throw her out the window.”
The Walled-Off House
“The Civil Administration, the Israel military bureaucracy charged with governing much of the West Bank said, ‘We’re going to build a wall and your house is on the route of the wall,’ They said. ‘You have two choices, either we can demolish your house and you can live on the other side, or you can stay in your house and we will build the wall around you.’ Mas’ha is several kilometers from the Green Line, but the wall here dives far from Israel’s internationally recognized boundaries, carving out a finger that juts deep inside the West Bank to enclose the settlement city of Ariel, the settlement industrial zones and smaller settlements to its west, and all the Palestinian land that falls in between.
Two more little boys joined Amer on the swing. They were his grandchildren. “I don’t like adults,” Amer said. “I like kids.” He told the Israelis that there was a third option: they could build their wall in the space between his house and the settlement so that he would not be caged in and cut off from the rest of the village. They said they would think about it. A few days later they came back. An electric line would have to be moved, but they had talked to the engineer and it wouldn’t be a problem. “We can move the pole and build the wall between you and the settlement,” they said “Congratulations.” But when they returned a month or so later, the deal was off. “The bulldozers came and they bulldozed everything around the house, the greenhouses, the garden, everything.”
Amer lost two thirds of the land around his house, plus another twenty dunams (about five acres) on the other side of the wall, which he could no longer reach.
Amer’s home was soon surrounded: the wall on one side, the fence on the other. They built a gate and told him to choose a time and they would come and open it for fifteen minutes every twenty-four hours. He demanded a gate of his own with a key of his own, so that he could let himself in and out when he wished. so that his home would not become for him a prison. They refused. He told them he would destroy their wall. They said they’d shoot him. “I said, ‘So shoot me. If you’re going to sentence me to death, do it quickly.’” He brought in activists, human rights groups, the United Nations, the press. Soldiers raided the house at night and several times arrested Amer. In the end they relented. They gave him his own gate, his own lock, his own key.
At first the soldiers told him that only his immediate family could pass through the gate. Amer ignored them and invited whomever he wished. They locked the gate to punish him. The longest confinement lasted two weeks, Amer said. “Eventually we learned to be in touch with the Red Cross and the Red Crescent and they wouldn’t close it for so long, just a day. But if they locked us up for six months, we would be fine.” The shelves in his kitchen were lined with jars of pickled vegetables. “We have everything,” Amer said. “The basics: oil, za’atar, preserved tomatoes, flour, bulgur, beans.” Again the army relented. Anyone could come, they said, just no press, no cameras. Amer smiled and nodded at me, the proof of his defiance.
Eventually, he said, “We started creating a life here.” He began fixing up the house, building a garden with raised beds just beside it. “There are different types of victories,” he said. “There are military victories, where people destroy and conquer, but there is also the sweeter victory, where people try to create death and you create life out of that.” We walked through the garden. He listed the trees he had planted: olive, fig, pomegranate, clementine, lemon, apple, peach, almond, cherry, mulberry, apricot, carob, grapefruit, plum. Most were still too young to bear fruit.”
“I asked Amer what he thought each morning when he woke up, left his house, and saw the wall. He chuckled. Maybe the wall looked like something to people who hadn’t suffered everything that he had, he said, but to him the wall was nothing. That’s what he said at least. “Instead of seeing the wall,” he said, “I try to see the garden.””
Activism
“The experience had clearly traumatized Nariman, but it also encouraged her. “They beat me and they arrested me — that meant they wanted to silence me, which meant that what I was doing was important.”
She was sentenced to a month’s house arrest. After that, some of the men in the village wanted to forbid women from taking part in the demonstrations because, Nariman said, “no one would be able to take care of the children.” It didn’t work out that way. She stayed home until her sentence was over and then returned to the demonstrations. She took first aid classes so that she could help treat injured protesters. She forced herself to become more comfortable talking to the press. When Bassem and his cousin Naji were arrested, she, Manal, and Naji’s wife Boshra stepped into the roles the men had left vacant. “All the relationships that Bassem had with foreigners and with Palestinians,” she said, “we kept those up and built on them.” She was no longer just cooking and making coffee for the activists and journalists who visited Nabi Saleh. She was the one they called, the one they interviewed.
Nariman grinned. Prison’s sole virtue, she said, was the water pressure. “You could take a good shower.”
The Oslo Accords had given Israel full control of the West Bank’s water supply. Nabi Saleh, like most Palestinian villages connected to the Israeli water grid, got a few hours of running water a week, long enough to fill, or partially fill, the black plastic storage tanks that sit on the roofs of the houses. By the end of each week in Nab Saleh, turning the tap produced barely a trickle. The dishes sat unwashed, the toilets went unflushed. Showers were out of the question.
When he was little, Nariman told me, Abu Yazan once asked her what the sea was. Before the Second Intifada, the Mediterranean was less than an hour’s drive away, but now, with the checkpoints, it might as well have been on another planet. Nariman decided to walk him to the spring so that she could explain, she said, that “the spring is like the sea, but the sea is much bigger.” The soldiers wouldn’t let them pass, so she settled on filling the sink with water. “It’s like this,” she planned to tell him, “only bigger.” She turned the tap. Nothing came out.
“This,” she said, laughing, “is the problem.”
Oslo
“From the beginning, that authority was highly limited. Oslo carved the West Bank into three distinct geographic zones: Area A, where the PA was in charge of both security and governance, and which, in its earliest incarnation, comprised only 3 percent of the West Bank, on which about 20 percent of the Palestinian population resided; Area B, where the IDF and the PA would share responsibility for security and the PA would otherwise govern, and which included 24 percent of land on which 70 percent of the population lived; and Area C, which covered nearly 70 percent of the West Bank, and where the Israeli military would be the sole potentate over the remaining 10 percent of the Palestinian populace. The idea was to give Israel control over as much of the land as possible and at the same time, in the words of scholar Adam Hanieh, “to transfer frontline responsibility for Israeli security to a Palestinian face, in this case the PA, while all strategic levers remained in Israeli hands.” In Area C, nothing could happen without Israeli approval. A well could not be dug, a pipe laid, a road paved, a home or an outhouse built without a permit issued by the Civil Administration, Israel’s governing body in the West Bank, which despite its name is a subunit of the Ministry of Defense and forms part of the IDF General Staff. Such permits are almost never granted, and structures built without them are subject to demolition by Israeli troops. Between 2000 and 2012, less than 6 percent of all requests submitted by Palestinians for building permits in Area C were approved by the Israeli Civil Administration. From 2006 to 2013, the IDF demolished more than 1,600 unpermitted structures in Area C, displacing nearly 3,000 Palestinians. The military has subtler weapons at its disposal than firearms and tanks.
“The fact is,” Said wrote, “that Israel has conceded nothing.” After Oslo, Israel still controlled almost all of the land, access to the vast reservoirs of water beneath it, the airspace above it, the borders that defined it. Arafat won no real sovereignty, only the responsibility for administering to his own population’s needs. The PA would, in other words, assume the obligations international law assigns to occupying powers: providing for the safety, health and hygiene, education, and religious freedom of the occupied. Israel was, to use Israeli political scientist Neve Gordon’s phrase, “outsourcing the occupation, subcontracting out the unpleasant — and expensive — duties of the occupier. Outsourcing, Gordon writes, “should be considered a technique employed by power to conceal its own mechanisms. It is not motivated by power’s decision to retreat, but, on the contrary, by its unwavering effort to endure and remain in control.” For Israel, Oslo represented neither compromise nor sacrifice, just a change of clothes.
Arafat would be allowed to return to Palestine, but he effectively gave up nearly all of the West Bank in exchange for a phantom state, the trappings of sovereignty without the thing itself.”
“Israel reserved for itself the right to collect customs duties on goods destined for Palestinian markets and to deliver those funds to the PA each month. The newly created PA would depend on Israeli goodwill for about two thirds of its revenues, which Israel could, and did, withhold in order to enforce its will politically. All currency controls were also left to Israel, as was the power to determine what the PA was permitted to import (mainly Israeli goods) and what it was allowed to export (not very much), turning the West Bank into a captive market for its own products. Much of the international aid that poured into PA coffers — and there was a lot of it: one third of the PA’s budget was supplied by foreign donors — thus flowed smoothly back across the Green Line into Israeli bank accounts.”
“There is a Palestinian answer to Serge’s Russian question: Arafat was weaker than he had ever been. His revolution, which was never identical with the one fought on Palestinian soil, was withering in exile, and almost friendless. He had lost the backing of the Gulf states for throwing his support behind Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. The networks of solidarity that had once united anticolonial movements across the planet crumbled well before the Berlin Wall did. And the growth during the Intifada of an indigenous Palestinian leadership unmoored from the exiled PLO hierarchy had seemed a sure sign that Arafat’s relevance was on the verge of expiring. Oslo was his only chance. He took it. If it was a bad deal, it was a start. It was, after all, an “interim agreement.” The real issues would be negotiated later.”
The Gate
“The leader or the settlers’ council, a woman named Rachel, approached Sabri’s father and asked to buy his land. She brought a suitcase filled with money, Sabri said. At first she asked for one dunam — about a quarter of an acre — but when he refused and continued to refuse she said she would settle for less, “even if it’s just a meter,” so long as he delivered his signature on a document ceding his rights to the land. His answer, he said, would always be the same.
Sabri laughed. “After that,” he said, “our problems started.”
The settlers, Sabri said, seized 40 of the family’s 110 dunams. In the daytime, they put up fences and electric lines. At night, Sabri’s father and brothers tore them down. The soldiers came and arrested them. The settlers took their own retaliation, targeting the house with rocks and Molotovs. This went on for fifteen years: “From 1979 to 1994, not one stone was laid on this land. There wasn’t a year when one of us wasn’t in prison.” When the settlers brought in workers — it is a little-mentioned truth that Israeli settlements are built by Palestinian laborers — the Sabris would figure out where they were from. They would visit their families and dissuade them from returning to work. Sabri didn’t specify how. His father had deeds to the land going back to the Ottoman Empire, so they tried the courts. It didn’t help: sometimes the High Court would issue a stop-work order, but the settlers would ignore it and the soldiers would defend them. When Arafat returned from exile in 1994, Sabri’s father sought an audience with him. “There’s nothing I can do,” Arafat told him. “Just keep resisting.
Resist they did. Their tenacity would not go unpunished. About a year after Oslo, the settlers brought in so many workers that the Sabris could not hope to persuade or scare them all away. The settlement grew. The Intifada broke out. By 2005, the wall around the village had gone up. Sabri, his father, and one of his brothers were all arrested. When he got out, the fence around the house had already been built. His home had been transformed into a single-family jail. One morning not long thereafter, Sabri woke up to find the gate locked. There was no soldier to complain to — just the intercom and a camera wired to communicate with a Border Police station several miles distant. Sabri went out to the gate at seven a.m. and rang the intercom. He waited beside the gate, he said, for eight hours. Finally, an officer arrived. He had orders. No one would be allowed in the house, he said, other than those family members who already lived there. The gate would be opened at certain times each day. Whoever wished to enter would have to hold their documents up to the camera so that their identification could be verified.
Sabri smiled. “I’m just taking this as a conversation,” he told the officer. “I’m not taking what you say seriously.” Hypothetically, he wanted to know: what about his sisters who had married and moved out of the house? What if they wanted to drop by to see their parents?
They would have to submit a request for a permit a week in advance, the officer answered.
“I told him no way,” Sabri said. “We refuse completely.”
The gate stayed locked for the next three months. The Sabris appealed again to the Israeli courts. When they needed to leave the house — which they often did, as Sabri’s father was by this time quite ill — they would contact the Red Crescent, the UN, and the DCO, and wait for others to intercede on their behalf. Sometimes it would take five minutes, Sabri said, but sometimes it took hours. Either way, you had to stand outside and wait for the gate to click open. If you missed it, the whole process started over. Finally, at the end of 2006, the courts decided in the Sabris’ favor. The gate stayed open.”
Hebron
“The wheel kept turning. Bassem came home. It was late June 2013. More than ten million people marched in Cairo to demand that Mohammad Morsi step down from the presidency. The Egyptian revolution appeared to have reawoken. Bassem was in awe at the scope of the protests.
If it could happen there, why not here? A good question. It didn’t last. A popular uprising became cover for an old-fashioned coup: the Egyptian military deposed Morsi and suspended the constitution. Five days later, soldiers mowed down 51 Muslim Brotherhood members as they knelt in prayer in Cairo. At the end of the month, they slaughtered another 120 Morsi supporters, and two weeks later killed more than 800 in a single day. With its revolutionary energies exhausted, Egypt was stuck with a more brutal regime than the one it had originally risen against.”
“We made our way to Bab al-Zawiya, the neighborhood at the edge of the old city, and passed through the dingy beige shipping container that serves as a checkpoint at the blockaded end of Shuhada Street, taking off our belts and removing our keys and phones from our pockets, walking under the metal detector and handing our IDs to the soldiers on the other side. Hebron is nothing but other sides, like a single page you can keep flipping and flipping without ever finding the same text. If all of Palestine is marked by furrows and folds, realities that overlap but almost never intermingle, Hebron is a cartographic collapse, a mapmaker’s breakdown. It is the only city in the West Bank in which Israeli settlers have established a permanent presence — hence the checkpoints, and the hundreds of soldiers stationed within the city. Hence the near-kaleidoscopic fragmentation, the cities inside the city and the cities inside them.”
“They came for the first time at around nine-fifteen, he said. He had been lying down and his brother Ahmad and a few of the other regulars were sitting on plastic chairs on the patio, smoking arghile and drinking tea. “Suddenly there were five soldiers here” — Issa pointed right — “and five soldiers there” — he pointed left — “and five soldiers from up there and another five from up over there, all pointing their guns at us. Oh my God!” He laughed. He noticed something strange: there were no magazines in their rifles. “It was a training, an exercise.”
But training for what? The sole point was intimidation, Issa said, “to scare us.” They broke an arghile, and left a mess. “Ahmad was very angry,” Issa laughed again, “but only about the arghile. The soldiers returned to repeat the exercise about twenty minutes later, and then once more at around midnight. “It is hard.” Issa said. “to be a training object.” He bit off the last word and spat it out.”
“Planet Hebron is far, far away. The fact that you can drive there, or take a bus, only makes things more confusing. If Hebron were hidden away on a mountaintop or deep in a canyon at the bottom of the sea, if getting there meant descending through dim, crumbling shafts to the center of the earth, or undergoing cryogenic treatment in preparation for a multi-light-year journey, it wouldn’t feel so odd. But it’s right there on the crust of this same globe, just like Tel Aviv or Amman or any other terrestrial metropolis. Maybe it’s more useful to think interdimensionally and to understand Hebron as a warp in the mold, a weird crease in the weave of things that through its distortions and deformations and awful echoing feedback somehow manages to tell us exactly who we are.
Let’s start with a list. People in Hebron used the word “normal” a lot. Here are a few of the things that people there told me were “normal”.
Screaming. “If you hear someone screaming because soldiers are beating him, or settlers are beating him, it’s normal.” Mufid Sharabati said that. He was my upstairs neighbor in the weeks I spent in Hebron. We were sitting on his rooftop and heard screams from Shuhada Street below. Mufid didn’t seem concerned. He couldn’t get up to check anyway — he had been beaten by soldiers so badly that he couldn’t stand without assistance.
Being shot at and having rocks and Molotov cocktails thrown at your house. Jamal Abu Seifan lived on the edge of Hebron just downhill from the settlement of Kiryat Arba. His neighbors weren’t always very neighborly. The Molotovs took some getting used to. “Now it’s normal.” he said.
Soldiers firing tear gas at schoolchildren to mark the beginning and end of each day of classes. This is in fact perfectly normal. You could set your watch by the blasts. “It’s like this every day,” said a shopkeeper across the street from the UN boys’ school, a block or so past Checkpoint 29. Soldiers had taken positions on the roof of the apartment building next door. In the street just down from the school they were shooting tear gas grenades at children. Usually the kids threw stones, but if they had that day I didn’t see them. The shopkeeper didn’t bother to close up. He stood outside his shop, watching as the teachers linked arms outside the gate to the school and formed a chain to shepherd the smaller children away from the clash.
Being arrested, questioned for hours, and released without charges or apology. “That’s a normal thing,” said Zleikha Muhtaseb, a woman in her fifties whose door was welded shut by the army and whose balcony is caged with heavy, steel mesh to protect her from objects thrown by her neighbors. Soldiers had come for her the previous spring after settlers complained that she had somehow thrown stones at them from inside her cage. The arrest was just a warning, she said, issued because she talked to too many activists, and to foreigners like me.
Having your ID taken at a checkpoint by a soldier who slips it in his pocket and keeps it there until the whim strikes him that you’ve waited long enough. This happened to me too. “Don’t fuck around,” the soldier told me as he handed my passport back. He had earlier snarled a few commands in Hebrew, and I had just finished suggesting that perhaps he had slept in on media-sensitivity training day. It turned out that his English was better than his sense of humor. But it was Jawad Abu Aisha, one of the Youth Against Settlements volunteers, who assured me that this was normal. We were walking not far from the Ibrahimi mosque and a Border Police officer had just taken his ID. Sometimes this happened two or three times a day, Jawad told me, sometimes not for a week. “It’s okay,” he said. “This is our lives.”
Having a soldier with an automatic rifle stationed at all times just behind or in front of your house. I’m thinking of the Youth Against Settlements house, but it’s far from the only one. Everywhere that a Palestinian home abutted a property inhabited by settlers, a soldier guarded the boundary between them. Boundaries are everything in Hebron. Would the city collapse without them? There was always a soldier outside the Sharabati house too, close enough that I could hear him chatting on the phone when I lay awake inside at night. One day Imad and Zidan disagreed over the Hebrew word for cigarette lighter. We were sitting on the patio of the YAS center. Imad winked at me and yelled behind the house to ask the soldier stationed there to resolve their dispute. The soldier played along and shouted an answer back. Zidan frowned. He was sure it was another word so mad, with another wink, asked again. “That too,” the soldier yelled.
Everything. “It’s very normal,” said David Wilder, the spokesman for Hebron’s settlers. “There’s nothing here in terms of everyday life that’s different from anywhere else.” He was suffering a bad case of shingles and was stuck in his small apartment in Beit Hadassah, just across from the Sharabati house. He got up only to show me the bullet hole in his children’s closet, and the one in the thick book of Jewish law that he pulled from the shelf in his living room. That was normal too. Everyone seemed to have a few bullet holes somewhere, and whether it was Jews or Arabs that I was visiting, there came a point in almost every interview when they wanted to show them off. In Hebron, nothing was more normal than holes.”
“Overall I spent about a month on Planet Hebron. Not very long really. Long enough. I studied up on the political developments that had shaped the city: its religious history, the 1929 massacre of the city’s Jews, the rise of the messianic Zionist hard right, the 1994 massacre of worshippers at the Ibrahimi mosque, the subsequent closing of Shuhada Street, the division of the city in 1997 into Israeli- and Palestinian-controlled zones, the multiplication of checkpoints and the endless closures of the Second Intifada. It all made sense, kind of, but none of it added up. None of it seemed sufficient to explain the reality of the place.”
“The citizens of each city are trained from infancy to unsee the other city and its residents, to not acknowledge even to themselves the existence of half the people and half the buildings that they walk past in the street. Any failure to do so, however brief — a gaze that lingers on the façade of a building that belongs to the other city, a moment’s acknowledgment of the wrong human being — is the gravest crime that any resident of either polity can commit. So it was in Hebron.”
“The color coding was almost dizzying. H1–the part of the city governed by the PA in which 80 percent of Hebron’s Palestinian population lives — was one tone of beige. H2–the zone shared, if that is the right word, by about 850 settlers and 40,000 Palestinians, and in which nearly all aspects of life fall under the control of the Israeli security forces — was another. H2 was further subdivided: the buildings and neighborhoods that had been taken over by settlers were shaded blue; a wide U-shaped expanse of violet covered the areas in which Palestinians could walk but were not permitted to drive; and the streets that Palestinians could not even cross on foot were marked in a dark, orangey red. The Israeli military refers to such thoroughfares as “sterile,” as if the presence of Palestinians were a form of infection.”
“It was Ramadan and a Friday. The Ibrahimi mosque was full. Baruch Goldstein, another ex-Brooklynite and a physician residing in the Kiryat Arba settlement, put on his army reservist’s uniform and walked past the soldiers outside the mosque carrying an Uzi submachine gun. He entered the mosque and began firing at the men and boys praying within. None of the soldiers stationed outside attempted to intervene. Goldstein fired at leisure, emptying four magazines, killing 29 people and wounding another 125 before the surviving worshippers were able to disarm him and beat him to death. Hebron’s settlers would venerate Goldstein as a martyred hero. The killer’s grave, in Kahane Park at the edge of Kiryat Arba, became a pilgrimage site. “Here lies the saintly Baruch Goldstein,” his monument reads, “who gave his life for the people of Israel. His hands are clean…”
In the days of outrage that followed the massacre, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin considered uprooting the settlement and evicting Hebron’s Jews. The experiment, clearly, had failed. But Rabin vacillated, and did nothing. A year later he would be assassinated by another of Kahane’s followers. In the meantime, Ehud Barak, then the IDF’s chief of staff, imposed a curfew — not on the settlers, but on Palestinian Hebronites, who would be confined to their homes for weeks. Schools were shuttered. Shuhada Street was closed to Palestinian cars and sixty shops were ordered closed. “The victim was punished,” said Mufid. The settlers were still free to drive where they wished. The curfews and closures did not apply to them.”
“A notorious interrogation center used by the Shabak, where, Mufid said, he was beaten so severely on his genitals and thighs that his skin went black from his knees to his waist. “Like your jacket,” he said. “They put me in a place called the cupboard.” It was a tiny cell containing nothing but one very small chair, its seat slanted down and tilted forward. His arms were cuffed behind him, his legs shackled. A bag, dirty and foul-smelling, was pulled over his head. They kept him like that for twenty-nine days. When they let him out, he couldn’t stand, or move his legs at all. They held him for another month and a half, until he could walk again, and then released him. He had never seen a judge, or spoken to a lawyer. The specifics of Mufid’s story are impossible to confirm, but the use of torture at the Russian Compound has been extensively documented by journalists and Israeli and international human rights groups from the 1970s to the present. Other prisoners have described similar treatment in the small cells known as “cupboards.” The position Munid described is so commonly employed in interrogation that it has a name: the shabach position, from a Hebrew word meaning “praise.” All of these practices have been legal under Israeli law since 1987, and are considered forms of “moderate physical pressure.”*
Not long after Mufid underwent surgery to repair the damage done to his back, the Second Intifada erupted. A new era of curfews and closures began. Most of Shuhada Street — all but the short block between Bab al-Zawiya and Beit Hadassah — was closed to pedestrians. Palestinian pedestrians, that is. The army closed every shop along the length of the street, soldering shut the doors. More than 1,800 businesses closed. Most of the residents of what had been the busiest and most vibrant street in the city were evicted or moved out. By the end of 2006, more than 1,000 homes had been abandoned. “You could never imagine that this would happen,” Mufid said. He swiped at the air with his cigarette. “If they could take the air from us, they would.”
His most recent troubles had begun a few months earlier, when he drew up plans to expand his home by building out onto the roof. “As you can see,” he said, gesturing at the door behind him, “my apartment is very small.” Seven people shared it: Mufid, his wife, and their five children. We were sitting in what he had hoped would be the new kitchen. He applied for construction permits from both the Palestinian municipal authorities and the Israeli Civil Administration. Both, he said, were granted. He showed me the documents in Hebrew and Arabic. In September, he had begun to purchase cement blocks and bags of concrete. One morning, he began carrying them in. A settler saw him working and phoned the police, the army, and the Civil Administration. Representatives of all three bodies came to the house. “A lot of them,” Mufid said. Palestinians are supposed to abandon their homes, not expand them, but Mufid had the necessary permits. The officials left. He went back to work and kept at it until evening.
At six o’clock, the soldiers returned. Their commander told him he would be arrested if he didn’t immediately get rid of the construction materials. Mufid argued: the work was legal. “Arrest me if you want,” he told the soldiers. They did. They brought him to the military base on Shuhada Street, which had once been the city’s main bus station. “They began to beat me,” he said. “I fell unconscious. I remember waking in a very dark room, waking and vomiting and passing out again.” He spent ten days in the hospital. Two months had passed since, but he had to go back to the doctor almost every day for more tests and consultations. The blocks and the bags of concrete still lay in piles on the edge of the roof.”
“He had found work doing construction in the settlement of Beitar Illit, a few miles south of Jerusalem. He didn’t like it, he said, but “You worked there or you didn’t work.”* A tool went missing, a long knifelike blade used for cutting concrete blocks. The boss sent Zidan out to buy a new one. Soldiers stopped him on his way back to work. They found the blade, arrested him for possessing a weapon, and beat him severely. He spent eighteen days in prison.”
“Hebron’s wealthiest families had lived nearby. “Now it’s the rubbish market,” he joked. He wasn’t laughing.
Farther down, the road narrowed even more. Most of the shops were closed. Official closures hadn’t been necessary here: the curfew had done the trick. During the first three years of the Intifada, central Hebron was under curfew for a total of 377 days, including one order that lasted for 182 straight days, during which no one was allowed to leave their homes, not to work or go to school or to the doctor. (“No one” applied only to Palestinians.) The army would lift the curfew for a couple of hours every few days so that people could buy supplies to get them through the next period of what amounted to house arrest for an entire population. Few shop owners could afford to stay in business. Most left.
We walked through a stone archway into the alleys of the old city. Some of the buildings around us, Jawad said, were as much as eight hundred years old. The devastation here was more complete. Perhaps one out of every eight or ten shops was open. Their offerings were sparse: a few milk crates piled with drooping parsley, mint, and spinach; a sad display of sponges and dustpans; a single bin of raisins and another of dried figs. “It used to be very crowded,” Jawad said. “My father would have to hold my hand.”
“In January 2003, the army closed the two main universities in Hebron. Their campuses, according to the IDF, were “a hothouse for terrorists and suicide bombers.” Issa went to class one morning and found the gates to the university welded shut. The administrators, he said, were unwilling to confront the Israeli authorities. They simply rescheduled classes in public schools with inadequate facilities and tiny, child-sized desks. Being a good student suddenly required that Issa learn an entirely different set of skills. He didn’t know where to start, he said, so he read about Mandela, Gandhi, Martin Luther King. He began talking to other students, organizing. Then, as now, the Palestinian authorities were the first obstacle. The students demonstrated in front of the district governor’s office and the mayor’s office. They would blockade city hall, they threatened, “unless you join us and pressure the Israelis
Issa emerged as a leader in the movement. When the students decided they could no longer wait for help from the local authorities, it was Issa who opened the campus gates. “I was the one with the hammers,” he said. The dean and the administrators showed up. Afraid the soldiers would follow the students in and destroy the university, they tried to stop him. “I told them, ‘Today the university will be open.’ But the campus was a mess, and it took the students weeks of labor to get it in shape. The administration still refused to help. “We said, Okay, you don’t want to teach us, we’ll teach ourselves.” The students set up their own curriculum and worked with the few professors who were unafraid to teach.
“It was an amazing experience,”Issa said. “Because we won.”
He graduated. The Intifada ended. Not much else changed. The gates to the entire West Bank have been sealed and, with the PA’s complicity, all the Palestinians therein sit at tiny desks, studying their own humiliation.”
“YAS focused on building resistance through concrete and even banal tasks that were nonetheless perceived by the settlers and army alike as a threat: cleaning the streets, rehabbing houses, distributing food, offering Hebrew classes so that residents would not be helpless in front of the Israeli military bureaucracy, doing whatever they could to fight off fear and despair, and keep the community intact.”
“A family of settlers — two men, a woman, a gaggle of kids behind them — ambled by on their way home from prayers at the Tomb. They were laughing and chatting, and in no hurry. They were unarmed, or at least not obviously armed, in the middle of Palestinian neighborhood in a Palestinian city in which their presence was regarded as hostile, and yet they seemed at ease. But then they had an escort. Where there are settlers, soldiers are never far: an IDF jeep, lights flashing yellow on its roof, inched along a few yards behind them, its presence laying the foundation for their good cheer.”
“The guys threw stones at the soldiers, or toward them anyway. They laughed as they darted and dodged and kept laughing until a rubber-coated bullet took one of them down and they all gathered around and scooped him off the pavement and ran off carrying him and shouting until they finally heard him protesting that he was fine and they put him down and hugged and punched him as he limped off and they all went back to laughing and throwing stones again.”
“The bloodshed was hardly timeless. Jews and Arabs lived in relative harmony throughout Ottoman-era Palestine. Overall, Jews enjoyed greater security and freedom in the Muslim Levant than they did among Christians elsewhere, particularly in Eastern Europe, but also in the West.”
“At his first briefing, he recalled an officer asking the troops what they would do if they saw a Palestinian running at a settler with a knife.
“Of course the answer was you shoot him in the center of his body,” Eran said. The officer posed the question in reverse: What if it was the settler with a knife? “And the answer was you cannot do anything. The best you can do is call the police, but you’re not allowed to touch them. From day one the command was, ‘You cannot touch the settlers.’ This made sense to him, Eran said. Palestinians were the enemy. The settlers seemed a little crazy, but they were Jews.
A few days later, thousands of settlers arrived from all over the West Bank to celebrate a religious holiday. The army imposed a curfew to keep Palestinians off the streets. Eran’s first task as a soldier in Hebron was to throw stun grenades into an elementary school to announce the beginning of the curfew. “I just did it, like everyone else,” he said, “and within seconds, hundreds of kids ran outside. I was standing at the entrance and a lot of them looked at me in the eyes — that was the first time that it hit me. All of a sudden I understood what I was doing. I understood what I looked like.”
That weekend, Eran recalled, settlers filled the central city. He was assigned to escort a group of them into the Patriarchs’ Tomb. They were allowed into the Palestinian side too, into the mosque. What he saw there shocked him: children were peeing on the floors and burning the carpets. Their parents were there — the mosque was packed with settlers — but no one was stopping them. He and another soldier grabbed one of the children and took a cigarette lighter from his hand. “He started screaming at us,” Eran said. “We laughed at him.” Five minutes later, “one of our very, very high-ranking officers came inside the mosque and said, “Did you steal something from the kid?’” They tried to explain, but the officer only repeated the question. “We said yes.” The officer ordered them to give it back and apologize. They found the child, apologized, and returned the lighter. The boy ran right into the next room, Eran said, and resumed setting fire to the carpets.
Things got weirder. Eran was put in charge of a checkpoint. He described it as grueling, mind-numbing work, standing in the cold for as long as sixteen hours, usually hungry and always sleep-deprived. Inflicting humiliation was part of the assignment. Schoolteachers would cross dressed in suits and ties. The soldiers would make them strip in front of their students. “Sometimes we would make them wait for hours in their underwear,” Eran said.”
“His job was to draft maps of each house, charting the rooms, the doors, and the windows. “If at some point there was a terror attack from that specific house,” the army would be ready.
That night, they searched, trashed, and mapped two houses in Abu Sneineh. It was snowy and cold. When they were done, the sun had not yet risen, so their officer chose one more house, apparently at random. They forced the family outside and into the snow and went in and started searching. Eran opened the door to a child’s room — he remembered seeing a painting of Winnie-thePooh on one wall-and had begu sketching when he realized that there was someone in the bed. A young boy leaped out from under the covers. He was naked. Startled, Eran raised his gun, aiming at the child. It was the kid from the checkpoint that afternoon. “He started peeing himself,” Eran said, “and we were just shaking, both of us, we were just standing there shaking and we didn’t say a word.” The boy’s father, coming down the stairs with an officer, saw Eran pointing a rifle at his son and raced into the room. “But instead of pushing me back,” Eran said, “he starts slapping his kid on the floor. He’s slapping him in front of me and he’s looking at me saying, “Please, please don’t take my child. Whatever he did, we’ll punish him.”
In the end, the officer decided that the man’s behavior was suspicious, that “he was hiding something.” He ordered Eran to arrest him. “So we took the father, blindfolded him, cuffed his hands behind his back and put him in a military jeep.” They dumped him like that at the entrance to the base. “He stayed there for three days in a very torn-up shirt and boxer shorts. He just sat there in the snow.” Eventually, Eran summoned the courage to ask his officer what would happen to the boy’s father. “He didn’t even know what I was talking about,” Eran said. “He was like, Which father?” Eran reminded him. “You can release him,” the officer said. “He learned his lesson.”
After cutting the plastic ties that bound the man’s, wrists, untying the blindfold and watching him run off barefoot underwear through the streets, Eran realized that he had never given his commander the maps he had drawn. He hurried back to the officer’s room. “I really fucked up,” he told him, apologizing for his negligence.
The officer wasn’t angry. “It’s okav, he said. “You can throw them away.”
Eran was confused. He protested: wasn’t mapping a vital task that might save other soldiers’ lives?
The officer got annoyed. “He says, “Come on, Efrati. Stop bitching. Go away.”
But Eran kept arguing. He didn’t understand. When it became apparent that he wasn’t going anywhere, the officer told him: “We’ve been doing mappings every night, three or four houses a night, for forty years.” He personally had searched and mapped the house in question twice before with other units.
Eran was even more confused.
The officer took pity, and explained: “If we go into their houses all the time, if you arrest people all the time, if they feel terrified all the time, they will never attack us. They will only feel chased after.”
That, Eran said, “was the first time I understood that everything I was told was complete bullshit.” From then on, he said, “I didn’t stop doing the things I did, I just stopped thinking.””
“Bars and cells hide beneath all visible reality, and not just as a potential fate. Forty percent of Palestinian males have been confined in Israeli jails. Nearly everyone had someone in prison.”
“Abbas had been willing to make the return of refugees dependent on Israeli consent, to give Israel sovereignty over the parts of East Jerusalem already taken over by settlers, to allow an Israeli military presence in the Jordan Valley for years to come, to accept an entirely demilitarized state, and to consent to borders that would cede to Israel areas of the West Bank on which 80 percent of the settler population lived. Despite these concessions, which were deeper than those offered by any previous Palestinian leader and would almost certainly have been unpalatable to the Palestinian public, the Israeli team, the officials said, “demanded complete control over the [occupied] territories…its control of the West Bank would continue forever.””
“Israeli snipers had been using .22 caliber ammunition (English had infiltrated the Palestinian vernacular: tutu, the bullets were locally called) and shooting Jalazoun’s young men and boys in the knee. Lots of them. Rajai Abu Khalil, a doctor friend who worked in the ER of Ramallah’s hospital, confirmed it. He had seen dozens of cases with nearly identical injuries, all from Jalazoun. The shots were almost surgically precise, he said, and aimed for maximum damage. A couple of inches higher or lower and the wounds would heal fairly easily, but not the knee: a generation of young men was being systematically hobbled.”
The Sheepherders
“After the 1948 war, tens of thousands of Negev Bedouin fled or were forcibly expelled from the new state of Israel. Eid’s grandfather, who died in the early 2000s, brought his family and his flocks to the rocky hilltop called Umm al-Kheir, which translates roughly as “Mother of Goodness.” He purchased the land for the price of one hundred camels from farmers who lived in Yatta, the nearest city of any size. But when the Israelis occupied the West Bank in 1967, they began to selectively apply certain Jordanian laws based in the Ottoman Land Code of 1858, which ruled that any acreage left uncultivated for three consecutive years — hilltops were rarely farmed — would revert to the state, which could transfer the land to private owners. Meaning settlers. In this way, Israel had confiscated nearly 40 percent of the West Bank’s landmass by the early 1990s.
“‘Jordanian rules,” Khaire scoffed. “Do we live in Jordan?”
“It comes from the Ottomans,” Eid clarified. “The sultan can do what he wants.”
“Fuck the sultan,” said Khaire, and laughed.
The result, though, was far from funny: the entire village could be classified as state land. Thus, under cover of law, the Israeli authorities had already confiscated a large portion of the plot that Suleiman’s father purchased and turned the land over to Carmel. Eid’s younger brother Mo’atassim took a sheaf of folded papers from the back pocket of his jeans. He showed me a color photocopy of Carmel’s master plan, which the settlers had recently filed with the Civil Administration. “This is the situation now,” Mo’atassim said, “and this is the future.” The map showed the existing settlement in yellow and beige, a single Y-shaped stalk of houses. Two proposed extensions in yellow and pink jutted to the south and to the west along the ridgeline where the tent had been. Surrounding them sprawled a huge, green-shaded blob several times the size of the existing settlement: that land, the hillsides and valleys, would remain undeveloped but would nonetheless become a de facto part of Carmel. Umm al-Kheir would lose what little farmland it had, and its shepherds would be forced to trek so far around the expanded settlement that their sheep and goats would expend more calories walking to and fro than they would be able to consume in the sparse and spiky foliage of the hills. It didn’t say so anywhere in the map’s legend, but the document was a death sentence. Umm al-Kheir appeared on it only as an absence.”
Conclusion
“Shaar’s parents confirmed it was their son’s voice on the tape. “They’ve kidnapped me,” he said. Then a voice in Arabic-accented Hebrew could be heard shouting, “Heads down!” Then a long volley of shots from an automatic weapon. Then a voice in Arabic, “Take the phone from him.” Then silence. There were eight bullet holes in the burned-out Hyundai, and bloodstains. DNA samples taken from the car matched the teens’ parents. The politicians knew all this. The higher echelons of the military and the police and the Shabak knew. Some journalists knew, but they honored the gag order and didn’t say a word. Nonetheless, two days after the abduction, Defense Minister Ya’alon had told the press, “Our working assumption is that the missing boys are alive.” No one challenged him. The massive propaganda effort — on TV and in the papers, on the Internet, on the sides of buses — had gone ahead. “Bring back our boys,” they all said. The West Bank was on lockdown — Israeli troops had shut down the Container checkpoint and the two main checkpoints south of Nablus, cleaving the West Bank into three discrete and isolated stumps. The “search” would go on.”
“So many soldiers had flooded the city that they didn’t fit in the bases, so they would push families out of their homes and bunk down for a night or two or three, leaving the places trashed when they finally left.”
“Before it was over, 2,220 Palestinians would die, 551 of them children, two thirds of them civilians. More than 11,000 others would be injured, and half a million — more than a quarter of the population — would flee their homes. Much of Gaza’s water and sewage infrastructure would be decimated. The one functioning electrical plant would be destroyed. Half of the Strip’s hospitals would be damaged in the bombing, and six forced to close; 148 schools would be partially or entirely leveled, as would 278 mosques, including one that had been standing for 1,365 years. In the West Bank, another 25 people were killed from the beginning of the June incursions until the end of the war in late August. Israel would kill more Palestinians in the summer of 2014 than in any conflict since 1967. The war remained overwhelmingly popular with the Israeli public. According to one poll published at the end of July, 95 percent of Jewish Israelis considered the assault justified, and less than 4 percent thought excessive firepower had been used. In the end, 6 civilians would be killed by Palestinian rocket fire, and 66 Israeli soldiers would die.”
“Something new was happening. Fully half of the alleged attackers killed in October were under twenty years old. All but one were under thirty. Some of the attacks might have been imagined or fabricated, but many were not. Knowing that it would almost certainly mean their deaths, young Palestinians were acting alone or in pairs, striking out at Israeli soldiers, police, and civilians with the limited means available to them: kitchen knives, scissors, screwdrivers. Sometimes they tried to hit them with cars. The attacks were hardly strategic, but they were not irrational. There existed no movement for them to join, armed or unarmed, no viable collective response to a situation that they were no longer able to endure. Twenty-four-year-old Rasha Mohammad Oweisi, who was killed at a checkpoint near Qalgilya after soldiers spotted a knife in her hand, left a note in her bag apologizing to her family and insisting: “I’m doing this with a clear head. I can’t bear what I see and I can’t suffer anymore.
This was the uprising of the Oslo generation, born into the humiliation machine, determined to eject themselves from it on terms of their own choosing. Most of them had been children during the Second Intifada and grew up in its aftermath. They had no memory of the previous revolt and no experience of a unified resistance, or of any resistance at all that had not been immediately sold out or repressed by their leaders.” Netanyahu cried “incitement,” but even Israeli intelligence services admitted that the attacks were spontaneous and uncoordinated, and that the traditional parties, factions, and armed groups were not involved. Shortly before boarding a Jerusalem bus and taking part in an attack that left two Israelis dead, Bahaa Allyan, twenty-two, posted on Facebook, “I ask that the political parties do not claim responsibility for my attack. My death was for my nation and not for you.””
