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Written by David Shulman David Shulman
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Published: 06 May 2009 06 May 2009
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David Shulman is a long-time Ta’ayushnik and author of the wonderful
book "Dark Hope," which chronicles several years of Israeli involvement
in the Palestinian non-violent resistance movement, from a very
personal perspective.
This beautiful and heartbreaking report from this weekend is a reminder
both of the daily struggles in the West Bank, and the brave Israelis
and Palestinians who are resisting the settlers and the Army together.
--Rebecca Vilkomerson (Jewish Peace News)
Wikipedia Definition:
A pogrom is a form of riot directed against a particular group, whether
ethnic, religious, or other, and characterized by the killing and
destruction of their homes, businesses, and religious centers. The term
was originally used to denote extensive violence against Jews – either
spontaneous or premeditated – but in English it is also applied to
similar incidents against other minority groups.
May 3, 2009
Pogrom at Khirbet Safa
By David Shulman
Pogroms: it's something the Jews know about. I grew up on those
stories—Cossack raids on the shtetl, the torture and killings and
wanton destruction. My grandmother had a brother. They lived in
Mikhalayev, in the Ukraine. One day the Cossacks came, and everyone
panicked, and the seventeen-year-old brother tried to hide in a pond,
and he drowned. She mourned that young death all her life; the dead
don't age, and some wounds never heal.
And now it turns out—who would believe it?—that there are Jews
who also know how to carry out pogroms. For the last ten days or so,
settlers from Bat 'Ayin in the so-called Etzion Bloc have been paying
violent daily visits to their Palestinian neighbors in Khirbet Safa,
perched high on the edge of the western ridge that overlooks the
coastal plain all the way to the sea. A terrorist from Khirbet Safa
entered Bat 'Ayin two weeks ago, murdered a settler boy with an axe,
and wounded another. The police caught him soon thereafter. But that
hasn't stopped the Bat 'Ayin settlers from repeated rampages to wreak
revenge on Khirbet Safa. They've already killed four innocents, and
another eleven or twelve have been wounded by gunfire. As if that
weren't bad enough, the soldiers have apparently been making common
cause with these settlers, opening fire readily at the villagers. Life
in this most beautiful of the mountain villages has become a nightmare;
not that it was easy before.
We get the emergency call around 5:00 after a long day that
started off in Susya, in South Hebron. At first it looked as though
we'd never get through the barriers and the roadblocks; like last week,
we had police and army on our tail from the moment we left Jerusalem.
Two full buses and several private cars headed south by the long route
twisting over the dry hills. A grey, sultry day, summer approaching: in
the endless battle in the wadis and terraces between green and brown,
green seems to be losing ground. Every once in a while the soldiers
would stop one of the cars and threaten to stop the buses. But,
happily, by midday we had rendezvoused at Susya with a van of
Palestinian activists from all over the West Bank. All in all, some 150
Combatants for Peace—former Israeli soldiers and Palestinian members of
the armed resistance organizations who have given up all forms of
violence—had come to meet each other and to see the reality of South
Hebron.
This is what it will look like one day, I was thinking. Like in
Berlin when the Wall fell. Maybe I won't live to see it, but I know it
will be like this. People, ordinary people from both sides, pour out of
the vehicles more or less into one another's arms. The soldiers in
their jeeps with their guns and other deadly toys are helpless to hold
back this flood of dangerous fraternization. Some of them look to me
like they'd like to join us. It all happens fast and very naturally,
without thinking. Walking over the rocks and thistles toward the tents
of Susya, I hear snippets of conversation like many I've heard before.
Awkward, tentative, eager. Strangers introduce themselves: "I'm 'Abed.
I live in the refugee camp at Dahariyya." "We're from Bethlehem." "I'm
from Tel Aviv, I'm a student. I served in the fucking army for three
and a half years." (This with a somewhat sheepish smile). A young
Palestinian man to a dark-haired Israeli woman: "Would you come visit
me in my home someday?" "I don't know. Maybe. I'm afraid." A short
silence. "Yes, I'll be happy to come." I, too, embrace my friends:
Hafez, Isa, Nasir, 'Id, the gentle, irrationally hopeful, anxious 'Id.
We stand among the black tents facing the Israeli settlement of
Susya with its red-tile roofs and the new "illegal outpost" that
settlers have put up on the next hill, just a couple of hundred meters
off. In the distance, at Shuneran, you can see the lonely white whirl
of the new turbine our people have recently set up for our Palestinian
friends. Wind-driven, it's already generating enough power to run a
refrigerator and a newfangled butter-and-cheese churn: the milk goes
into the drum of an old washing machine that shakes it wildly up and
down, and in practically no time there is the unlikely miracle of
butter. Just two weeks ago I watched Bedouin women doing it the old
way, in a goat-skin hung over a fire and rocked back and forth for long
hours. This turbine at Shuneran is like a gift from the gods.
Ofra, wiry, battle-worn, lucid, is speaking to the crowd as
Yusri translates into Arabic: "The occupation has an interest in
preventing us from meeting one another, and an even greater interest in
preventing us from struggling together. But we will never allow them to
separate us. This is our responsibility and our answer to apartheid. We
had to get past the barriers and roadblocks to come here today, and we
also had to break through the metaphorical walls that have divided us."
I wonder how Yusri is going to manage this last sentence. He lives in a
world of very real walls and barriers. But no, he's got it, no problem:
"hawajiz majaziyeh--that is," he explains, "the walls that have been
erected in our minds."
Still, it looks like today is going to be rather bland. There
are the dialogue sessions that take time—many of the Israeli Combatants
have never been in South Hebron or anywhere else in the territories,
and some are meeting living people from the other side for the first
time. The seasoned few of us from Ta'ayush wait, a little bored. The
truth is we're having trouble holding ourselves back from what our
instincts tell us is the thing to do—that is, from marching the whole
crowd up the hill toward the new outpost. It's not every day you get
150 activists here in Susya. But there's been a decision: no
confrontations today. You can't expose the first-timers to the whole
terror and rigor of the occupation. And yet that hill is so enticing.
There's a new settler caravan in place, too. All we have to do is to
start walking…..
And then, surprisingly, a new decision crystallizes. We will
"take" that hill after all. We'll follow Nasir up to the ancient well
that belongs to the Hadari-Hareini families but that is now off limits
to them; the settlers won't let them near it. South Hebron is a hot,
dry land, and a well means the difference between life and death. We
head out over the rocky terraces. Movement, at last, and action: the
relief is sweet and viscous as a heady liquor. My lungs take in the
sharp smell of wild sage, thyme, and the aromatic herb the Palestinians
call Amaslimaniya, said to heal infections and stomach pains. I wonder
if it heals heart-ache, too. The very fragrance seems to be healing
mine.
This was today's second surpassing moment— all 150 of us fanning
out over that hill, advancing toward the settlers' caravan. We reach
the well, and Nasir finds the black leather bucket and lowers it deep
into the bowels of the earth and draws up fresh spring water, the
sweetest water in the world; he pours it into our bottles and canteens
and straight into our mouths, he is smiling as if entranced, drunk on
the water of his own well, soaked to the skin, and for that brief
unforgettable minute or two the world seems almost right again. And
then, of course, the soldiers swoop down on us, with some lunatic
settler barking orders at them, and the officer flashes the inevitable
piece of paper that declares we are in a Closed Military Zone and we
have two minutes to get out before they start hitting us with their
clubs and rifle butts and making arrests. The rightful owner of the
precious well is driven off, again. The thief who has stolen the well
stands beside it together with a small army of soldiers, with their
perfectly legal slip of paper, to make sure he gets to keep it.
We have promised the Combatants that we won't get into any kind
of tussle, so slowly—but still almost triumphant—we begin to withdraw.
Take it as an object lesson, I say to Amit, a new friend from Tel Aviv.
This is how it works. Amit, a doctoral student in philosophy,
specialist in Husserl, is incredulous, not for the last time today.
Don't worry, I say; we will yet turn the tide. As we walk, Joseph, by
now a stalwart of South Hebron weekends, tells us about the
organization called Nefesh be-nefesh, "Soul for Soul", run by two
rabbis in Miami and supported by the Christian Zionist right; they paid
him $4000 to come to live in Israel, and they promised him another
$4000 if he'd make his home in one of the settlements in the
territories."I wonder," he says, "if Palestinian Susya would count."
By now our appetite has been whetted, and Amiel and Ezra decide
that our small Ta'ayush contingent will pay a visit, on our way home,
to the plot of land that settlers near Hebron have recently stolen from
the Ja'abar family; they've put up a small, ugly shack on the land,
with a "porch" canopied by brown camouflage net. Last week the army
chased them off, because of our pressure, but they came back, of
course, within a few hours. It's time to pay them another visit. So we
head north in the Palestinian van with Isa, and at some point along the
highway we get out and make our way through dessicated vineyards and
fallow fields uphill to the Ja'abars and then on to the hilltop and its
hut. Some eight or nine settler teenagers in Sabbath white are sitting
there, looking rather weary. Our arrival jogs them awake, and a
messenger is sent to bring reinforcements; soon some older ones turn
up, including a long-haired, wild-eyed boy-man caressing his M-16, his
finger on the trigger and the clip loaded inside. He's crazy, Amiel
says, be careful. We stare him down. Amit tries to talk to them—I think
he'd like to persuade them by reasoned argument that what they're doing
is immoral—with the usual result. I'm not sure how long the stalemate
would have continued if we hadn't got the call from Isa: settlers are
shooting in the village of Khirbet Safa; come at once.
We rush back to the van and race north, turning west at Beit
Umar. At once we're in the heart of Palestine. The roads are riddled
with pot-holes, we pass donkeys and horses and rather a lot of goats
and olive trees and ragged children. After a while we see that people
are standing on their flat root-tops, apparently watching the battle
going on in the village below them. And the first noises impinge upon
us—the distant drumming of the guns. I am wondering what we're supposed
to do. And what if we get caught between rock-throwing village
teenagers and trigger-happy soldiers? Four people died here in the last
few days. Some nervous thoughts flit through my brain, I think of my
grandchildren, and Eileen, what am I doing here, then I remember my
grand-uncle, drowned at seventeen. If only some decent person had been
there to help. My head clears. Like any battle-field, this one is
confusing; it takes some time, as we proceed into the village, to
figure out who is doing what to whom. But half a kilometer or so away
we see the army jeeps and half-tracks, and there are also soldiers
standing near a wire fence with guns shouldered, as if to provide cover
for the settlers. Two blue jeeps of Border Police turn up beside us on
the road, and more soldiers jump out and take up their positions,
focusing their telescopic sights.
Then it really begins. First the stun grenades, then the
rubber-coated bullets—the Palestinians know each lethal genus and genre
by the sound—then live bullets, lots of them. Crack crack crack—and the
horrible hollow echo each time, as if the shot had turned back on
itself and was reaching out toward any soft, vulnerable surface. We
take shelter on the porch of a new stone house by the roadside. There
are several women draped in black, and a younger one, elegantly
dressed, with a baby cradled in a blanket in her arms. I count seven
young children. One of the older women is trembling and crying; I wish
I could comfort her or calm her. Isa, gallant Isa, with his weak heart,
too full of feeling, smiles calmly. He's another one of God's miracles,
Isa, a man of principle, totally committed to non-violent action, never
afraid, never too tired to notice the fear or pain of those around him.
It's worth coming here just to be with Isa. Then there's our driver,
who says to me—echoing my own words earlier to Amit—"It's a good
lesson. This is how things are, most days. It's a lesson in politics,
or in war, in war as a part of politics." In the midst of it all, the
women, intent on caring for their guests under any circumstances, serve
tiny cups of Turkish coffee. Minutes pass to the accompaniment of
intermittent rifle fire. The white-and-beige goats next door are
furiously chewing away at the thorny shrubs in the yard, heedless of
the vast ruckus just outside the gate. Maybe they're used to it by now.
Slowly we piece together from the villagers the story of this
afternoon. First the settlers from Bat 'Ayin came in, shooting their
guns. Some of the young men from the village tried to fight back, to
protect their homes and families with whatever they had, and all they
had was rocks. Then the soldiers arrived to save the settlers and
started shooting, and the rock-throwing intensified. This is one way to
reconstruct the sequence. By now it hardly matters. The only question
is how to stop it.
I hear wailing and screaming from somewhere to my right, amidst
the olive trees and terraces, and then Amiel is calling me to come
quickly; I was trained as a combat medic, and someone has been hit. I
set off running in the direction of the screams, through the trees
behind the houses, trying at the same time to find in my shoulder-bag
the small set of pads and bandages and the rubber elastic to use as a
tourniquet that I always bring along with me to South Hebron. It's been
almost exactly 27 years, I quickly calculate, since I last ran like
this to a wounded man, in the first Lebanon war; and God only knows if
I'll remember what to do. They always used to tell us that the
knowledge is buried in your fingers and will re-emerge automatically
when you need it. I hope they're right. In any case, there's no time to
think. The wailing intensifies. Suddenly they're waving to me to turn
back; an ambulance has found its way over the hill and driven off with
the victim. Later we hear that he's wounded "moderately." Could have
been worse.
And then we're back on the street standing right under the
soldiers, and stray rocks are crashing down near us, and one of the
young student girls who came with us is hit in the leg. She's a little
shaken. A Palestinian woman needs to get home, perhaps she's worried
about her children, she's afraid to climb the hill alone, so we envelop
her on all sides and walk her uphill past the soldiers, who yell at us
and try to stop us, but we ignore them and keep walking, and maybe
after all we're finally having some effect on them because at last they
hold their fire. Slowly, tentatively, painfully, a certain quiet sinks
in as evening comes on and the hills turn purple and then black. As is
his wont, Ezra materializes suddenly, just where he is needed; how he
got here through all the chaos I will never know, but he is all smiles
and he says to us, "You should know that it's only because we're here
that they've stopped shooting." He's indomitable, another great
innocent, great-hearted and clear; he stops in the street to
remonstrate with the young rock-throwers. If only they would learn not
to do that. He thinks someday they will learn.
It's hard to find a good man or a good woman, but I've been
lucky in this respect. In fact, I've surrounded myself with them. As we
walk back toward the van, Amit, the philosopher, tells me that this
whole business just doesn't make sense. Why doesn't the army demolish
the rickety hut those settlers have put up on the Ja'abar family's
land? For that matter, why does the State of Israel send its soldiers
to protect the settlers in the first place? And what was the point of
shooting live bullets at the village once the settlers had been
scuttled away? What's there to be gained from it? Everything seems to
him surreal. He's right. A Jewish pogrom is surreal. He's learning
Greek, it turns out, and they've just started reading Plato's Apology
in class. I remember that joy. It feels good, and somehow right, to
remember it here in Khirbet Safa, as we prepare to leave. For a passing
second I can hear Socrates speaking to the settlers, who would
undoubtedly have been all too happy to condemn him to die—who would
probably have shot him outright: "Don't think that by killing someone
you can escape being blamed for your own wickedness; that is neither
possible nor honorable….Wherefore, O judges, be of good cheer about
death, and know of a certainty, that no evil can happen to a good man,
either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the
gods."
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Jewish Peace News editors:
Joel Beinin
Racheli Gai
Rela Mazali
Sarah Anne Minkin
Judith Norman
Lincoln Shlensky
Rebecca Vilkomerson
Alistair Welchman
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