Newsletter: Vol. 9. Iss. 2
15 December 2009
Resistance in Bethlehem's
Villages cont'd.
Ellen Cantarow
Maps can tell you a lot about the extent – and design – of Israeli colonizing within the West Bank. (The colonies divide the land, isolating Palestinian urban centers: the wall is a mighty force in this and in de facto annexation of Israel’s colonies to the Jewish state.But nothing ever prepares you for really being there. At some point this past fall, having spent days in group taxis and cars scribbling down the names of colonies and Palestinian villages, trying to get some geographical hold, I finally understood: all my points of reference had vanished. The landscape I had known in the 1980s was gone. The West Bank’s very geography is under assault as surely as historic Palestine’s after 1948 when Israel destroyed over 500 Arab villages. What is here today can be “disappeared” tomorrow – the apricot field is one of thousands of cases.
When Israel announced it intended to build the sewer, Artas villagers protested that the waste project would destroy the region’s livelihood. In desperation they even suggested an alternate location on a nearby hillside. Israeli officials retorted that the hillside was to be “a nature reserve” (to date, the area remains stony and barren of trees); they added that it would be too expensive to build there. “This is not my problem, it’s yours, and you aren’t allowed on my land,” rejoined 36-year-old villager and Stop the Wall activist Awad Abu Swayk, whose family once owned hundreds of dunams in the region.
A protest by Stop the Wall activists, villagers, young Israeli and international sympathizers, began in May, 2007. Everyone camped in the threatened apricot field, sleeping there for eighteen days. They even tied themselves to the trees. “We were never less than 25 persons, sometimes 80,” Abu Swayk told me this past October. “But finally when they came around 3:30 in the morning of May 21, they blocked all the entrances to the area. They said it was a military zone.”
The Israeli military forbade any media. But an Israeli activist sneaked in a video camera, later producing an excellent documentary In the video*** you see two soldiers on the hilltop; then they’re close-up in the camera’s lens. One, a lean, smiling man in his late teens or early twenties, asks Abu Swayk, “How many people are sleeping here?” Abu Swayk: “If you’re civil and you aren’t dressed in uniform you can drink tea with us.” The young soldier grins: “I need to know how much time because it is not regular here.”
Very early the next morning the soldiers came and dragged the young Israelis off -- they went limp as they were hauled away. A gigantic bulldozer gouged out swathes of the grove, tossing aside the lush trees with their fruit like so much trash. On the video all the carefully tilled earth disappears before your eyes; the entire grove lies heaped amidst boulders. An older villager in kuffiyeh and rusty black coat gazes with eyes full of tears. The villagers throw no stones; they utter no angry words. They sit, huddled and forlorn, mourning their fallen trees and ravaged earth.
The soldiers stand grinning and chatting. This is just routine – a joke, even. “Oh God!” screams Awad, “They destroyed our trees! I swear on almighty God we will return to plant the trees!” (Abu Swayk was arrested with other villagers: Youtube footage shows him being thrown to the ground and kicked).
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This past October Abu Swayk took me to see the sewage mounting and the ruined plot of land. The apricot grove was about five of 120 dunams inherited by 53-year-old Mahmoud Yusef Kalawi from his father and grandfather, both full-time farmers. So far, beyond the five dunams destroyed for the sewer housing, Kalawi has lost nothing else, but last February Israel announced it was confiscating another 1771 dunams for the construction of a brand-new settlement. Kalawi’s 115 dunams are included. Stop the Wall has brought another suit in Israel’s Supreme Court and it bucks Kalawi up to continue farming.
During the Jewish holidays we found him in a plot adjacent to the land where the sewer housing rises. One of a small minority of Palestinians with permits to enter Israel, he works there six days a week as a builder, leaving home at 5:30 AM and returning at 8 PM. Sundays and Jewish holidays he works on his farm. In the late afternoon the sun was going down; sheep and goats browsed in the brush. Kalawi and his wife and children were preparing the terrain for planting. He has a deeply lined face that smiles readily and is full of good cheer – remarkable, given his ceaseless labor, the trauma of his loss, and his anxiety about the future.
