March 2015 | By: C. Thaliana
The sun glimmers off the surface of wave after wave of deep green hills, and the wind catches your breath away, carrying it over the trees. This place has a magical kind of beauty, and it’s particularly surreal to see it and know that this tranquility can be punctured at any moment by violence. Occasionally, a shepherd waves to you and directs his sheep out of the road. Given a chance, he’ll invite you in for tea and introduce you to his family, in time recounting the centuries-long history of his village.
On the horizon you see several collections of North European-style red-and-white houses clustered with walls, fences and tall grey watchtowers recalling Orwell’s 1984, all this in stark juxtaposition to the land itself. These are the Israeli settlements gradually encroaching on Palestinian land, attempting to absorb it and gain control over all of it. Settlers drive cars designated with yellow license plates, giving them access to all the roads in the West Bank that are closed or restricted for Palestinians. You watch them speed down the nicely-paved roads with music blaring, seeming not to even see the landscape around them.
A collection of these fortress-like Israeli settlements set in the hills are made contiguous by roads settlers can access without question. But this would not suffice for Israeli colonists. In the few conversations they’ve had with us and many video interviews available around the web, many settlers have made it clear that they want control over all the land. A quick glance over any of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)’s maps in the collection West Bank Access Restrictions verifies the settlers’ claim – settlements and their satellite outposts have been gradually surrounding Palestinian villages, cutting them off from each other, and many agricultural areas are under illegal settler cultivation. Building and cultivation alone may not seem like violent activities, but when Israeli colonists build and cultivate on land they forcibly take from Palestinian families, violence is inherent.
If you loved a fish, you wouldn’t reach into its bowl and grab it out because to do so would deprive it of air – you’d be killing the very thing you loved. Yet these settlers in trying to claim control of the land end up working destruction upon it. In January I traveled to a village in the Aqraba area and observed a dozen dead sheep who had all clearly succumbed within a very short window of time – flies had not even found their corpses yet. One was still frothing at the mouth and nose, and another had green vomit coming from its mouth – a clear case of poisoning. The shepherd and the municipality reported seeing a certain settler spread an unknown substance over the land – it could have been a pure poison or an herbicide at a concentration toxic to sheep. Either way, the settlers who are illegally cultivating the area knew well that Palestinians graze their sheep there, and sacrificed the animals’ lives and the shepherd’s source of livelihood at the altar of colonization.
Israeli settlers are indiscriminate in their willingness to kill and destroy to acquire the land. Four farmers in the village of Yasouf recently found that the settlers had hacked down 36 of their olive trees to the point where they could no longer live. We learned from the mayor that this was not the first time settlers had destroyed trees in the area. These incidents are similar to the torching of Khalil resident Hani Abu Haiqel’s olive grove which I observed in summer 2013, and the thousands of attacks on trees that occur every year. The intention seems clear – taking away Palestinians’ livelihood presents the real danger that they’ll be forced off of the land, leaving it for the settlers to absorb. The tactic is not so different from the American colonizers’ systematic slaughter of buffalo in the “Wild West” which made it impossible for indigenous tribes to live on the land so the Americans could more easily take over.
Unfortunately, there is not a real accountability system in place to check the settlers’ actions. If they were only destroying trees, burning land and killing animals it might be horrifying enough to cause alarm, but in fact they often target people as well. In the short few weeks I spent in Palestine this trip, I reported on a number of settler clashes with Palestinian youth that led to Palestinian youth being shot. A similar well-documented sequence of events gets repeated over and over: settlers enter a Palestinian village area armed with machine guns, and clashes erupt between them and the Palestinian youth going about their lives in the village. Israeli soldiers show up to protect the settlers, and in the process they shoot Palestinian youth. One 18-year-old named Abbas Jamal was shot in the leg in such a clash outside Burin, and it may prove disastrous for him. He is currently studying to be a land surveyor, and was already injured in the other leg from a previous clash before this incident.
I wonder if the Israeli settlers carrying out these attacks realize they’re sucking the life out of the very land they say they love and desperately want to call their own. The trees they cut down are essential to the carbon sequestration process and so they’re seriously damaging the Palestinian climate. The sheep too are part of this ecosystem, which is severely disrupted by settlers’ repeated rounds of torching and poisoning (not to mention some areas being set ablaze every week by tear gas canisters fired to suppress Palestinian demonstrations against the colonization and occupation of their land). And the settlers are at war with the very Palestinian people who cultivate and care for the land – people who largely have no objection to sharing their resources with Jewish immigrants, and who would gladly follow in their ancestors’ footsteps and live alongside their Jewish neighbors in cooperation.
Colonization is a complex and multi-faceted crime with a devastating impact on Palestinian people’s lives. The phrase “existence is resistance” rings true here, since many families resist by choosing to stay on their land and in their homes even when settler violence combined with the military occupation make it nearly impossible to have a life here. When settlers destroy trees, people keep coming back to plant more and going out to harvest olives every fall despite the danger (this is one of many activities for which more ISM volunteers are always welcome – see ISM Northern California to apply for sponsorship). I am very much inspired by the courage and resilience my Palestinian friends show in the face of systematic hateful destruction, and I pray that someday they can walk through their own land without the constant threat of violence and live out their lives there in freedom.
Daniel is an American artist and activist who began working in Jordan with Palestinian refugee in 2012. Since that time he has been involved in ongoing projects in Gaza, and the West Bank of Palestine. The pictures are of the wall action, some kids, and demonstrations.