David Shulman--Friday, June 24,2011--Smug, slick, superior, the officer stares blithely past the Palestinian farmers who have come to prune their vines. Twelve young soldiers, laden down with black metal shaped for modern war, await his orders. It is 10:30 AM, and the sun is high and merciless, the fields burnt to a powdery, impoverished brown. We have walked down from the village to this field abutting the huge settlement of Karmei Tzur with its barbed-wire fence and watchtowers and red tiled roofs. Because of the proximity of the settlement, the farmers usually have no access to this field unless we come to stand beside them. The soldiers were waiting for us when we arrived.
We expect to be driven away with the standard, illegal order declaring this place a Closed Military Zone. But today there’s a surprise, apparently because of last weekend’s confrontation. Isa described it to me as we were walking. The farmers and activists arrived at the fields, the soldiers swooped down on them—but our people insisted that the army has no right to drive Palestinian peasants off their land, citing the Supreme Court ruling to this effect, and the result was that the soldiers couldn’t make up their minds what to do. Eventually, the commander agreed that the Palestinians could work on condition that the Israeli activists move 100 meters away. Someone, somewhere, in headquarters, may have seen the light. And what did this transporting moment of enlightenment consist of?
You can deduce it from the officer’s exhortations to his men, who have been equipped with small digital cameras in addition to the rest of their gear. “Film them working. I want this to go up on the Internet so people can see that we let them work in their fields.” To this noble end, the soldiers click away, though it’s clearly not so easy for them to maneuver the camera amidst their rifles, helmets, ammunition pouches. “More pictures!” growls the officer. He also wants them to photograph each of the Palestinian farmers and each of us, the activist interlopers, no doubt for the computerized records of the security goons in their air-conditioned offices at the base. “Women too?” asks one of the soldiers. “Yes, women too, we’re into equality here.”
Click click click. I have the strong impression they’d much prefer to be pressing their triggers. Meanwhile, the Palestinians are pruning and spraying the vines, also clearing away some of the rocks and weeds cluttering the field. I guess this counts as a small victory in the endless micro-struggle we’re engaged in. The officer, meanwhile, seems to be relishing his role as the Great Humanist, magnanimous in granting these members of a lower species the right to spend an hour with their vines. “You see,” he says, supercilious, to no one in particular, “we do allow them to work.” He seems to like the phrase—he says it over and over.
It is, of course, an amazing statement. Indeed, it embodies, as anyone can see, a supremely gracious gesture. How kind of the army to give permission for a man to prune his vines. The decision, on this hot morning in the hills, apparently rests in the hands of the Humanist, who could for all the world be a French lieutenant in Algeria in some distant time, or a Dutch colonial bureaucrat in Java, or a British superintendent serving God and Queen in India or Burma or Sri Lanka or Kenya. He is a colonialist, preserved as if in amber—no doubt one of the last exemplars of this species, and the set of attitudes that go with it, anywhere on the planet Earth. Eventually, one of the farmers, Aiman, can’t bear it any longer; he bursts into a barrage of Arabic curses: “This is my land, and you can’t dictate to me what to do on it, or whether to work it or not, or whether to come here or not, you have no right to keep me away and you have no right to be here in the first place. Ruh min hon—Go away!”
“You see,” says the officer to no one in particular, “how violent these people are!”
Self-satisfaction oozes from his tongue. He is in full control. Just last week he told Isa: “Cut your ties to all those Israeli leftists. You can coordinate with us.” Never mind that for years access to these plots has been, at best, sporadic. Once, Isa tells us, he heard that a settler was stealing grapes from his field, so he rushed down there, camera in hand. It was three days before Yom Kippur, and Isa said to the thief, “You have three days to beg forgiveness from God for what you are doing.” As it happens, Ezra had driven into the settlement and could see the settler from that side, and both Isa and Ezra photographed him and his license plate and then called the police. The police duly turned up and stopped the settler as he was driving off; they found cartons of stolen grapes in his car, and they restored them to Isa. They didn’t arrest the settler, however, since, so he said, he had an appointment in Petach Tiqva on the coastal plain, and it was, after all, almost Yom Kippur. Isa was invited to file a complaint in the police station in Kiryat Arba. They kept him waiting there for 4 hours, but at last they registered the complaint, which was entirely specific, with the name and license place number of the thief. Some days later someone called from the station to give Isa a phone number and code for his complaint; he was told to use it when seeking information on the case. That was two years ago, in September, 2009. Every time Isa calls the number, he gets a recorded Hebrew message: “Due to a temporary problem with the system, we cannot provide an answer to your query.”
I look up at the sprawling settlement that has expanded remorselessly, especially since the wide Special Security Zone around it was proclaimed. “It hurts,” Isa says. “It all hurts. I don’t have the power to get rid of the settlement. I don’t have it. But so what? Does this mean I have to stop my struggle? He, the officer, speaks to me as a conqueror, but I am not his slave. I am not against him because he is a Jew, I am against him because he is a conqueror. I talk to him man to man. I protest—without violence. Our way is the way of non-violence.” I’ve known Isa for some years. I think of the endlessness of his pain, the decades of continuous insult, the theft of land and the assault upon dignity; I marvel, as so often in the past, that Isa’s soul is intact. He would want, he says, a single state where people live together with respect, but he knows it cannot be; we must separate, and we have to lock up the extremists on both sides in their respective cages on either side of the border-to-be. He laughs as he says it, his white beard trembling, his face crinkled. There is no end to Isa’s smiles.
One large vine hugs the fence of barbed wire, and one of the farmers approaches it with his pruning scissors. The officer leaps to the occasion. “You have attacked the perimeter fence!” he cries, clearly not fully believing what he is saying. “You can be arrested for this. You see—we want to let you work, but you behave violently. One provocation after another.”
The word “ludicrous” springs to mind, ludicrously inadequate. Here’s the farmer with his pruning scissors, smaller than the palm of his hand; he is standing at the edge of his field, his family’s land. Next to him stands the Humanist with his detachment of soldiers, every one of them carrying a loaded machine-gun, the clip inserted and ready to fire, extra cartridges draped over his chest, along with helmet, combat boots, god knows what other infernal devices; some also have telescopic sights and tear-gas or stun-grenade launchers attached to their weapons. They have intruded into this field, disrupted the cycle of its seasons, its nurturing and ripening and harvesting; and yet it is the farmer who is violent, by definition, and who must therefore deserve his punishment. What is more, the Humanist clearly expects his Palestinian subjects to be grateful for the crumbs he has thrown them, and he is both confirmed in his prejudice and slightly shocked, but also amused, when they fail to play his game. He has managed things well, this morning, demonstrated his lordship, proven to himself, yet again, what he has always known: these Palestinian men are here on his sufferance only and have no claim, perhaps even no true claim to existence, of their own. The land is his. As to their women and children, a fortiori, their claim would be, were it possible, even less than nothing.
And yet later when we ask Isa whether he thinks this morning was successful, he says at once: “Very successful! We sprayed and weeded and pruned. We didn’t go there for a demonstration; that is something we will do elsewhere, with you, at the entrance to the village. We went there to work, and we were able to work. Sometimes, by accident, even a liar may speak the truth.” Here’s the sum. One small moment in the long history of the Occupation. One plot of land. One microscropic gain. Add them together, and one is more than one.
It is, I think, in the nature of truth to emerge from behind the lie. I’d like to juxtapose the words I heard from the Humanist this morning with some others: one consciousness, that is, with another. Perhaps some of you do not know that on June 5, less than three weeks ago, Basim al-Tamimi from Nabi Saleh stood up in an Israeli military courtroom and said:
“Your Honor,
I hold this speech out of belief in peace, justice, freedom, the right to live in dignity, and out of respect for free thought in the absence of Just Laws.
Every time I am called to appear before your courts, I become nervous and afraid. Eighteen years ago, my sister was killed in a courtroom such as this, by a staff member. In my lifetime, I have been nine times imprisoned for an overall of almost 3 years, though I was never charged or convicted. During my imprisonment, I was paralyzed as a result of torture by your investigators. My wife was detained, my children were wounded, my land was stolen by settlers, and now my house is slated for demolition.
I was born at the same time as the Occupation and have been living under its inherent inhumanity, inequality, racism and lack of freedom ever since. Yet, despite all this, my belief in human values and the need for peace in this land have never been shaken. Suffering and oppression did not fill my heart with hatred for anyone, nor did they kindle feelings of revenge. On the contrary, they reinforced my belief in peace and national standing as an adequate response to the inhumanity of Occupation.
International law guarantees the right of occupied people to resist Occupation. In practicing my right, I have called for and organized peaceful popular demonstrations against the Occupation, settler attacks and the theft of more than half of the land of my village, Nabi Saleh, where the graves of my ancestors have lain since time immemorial.
I organized these peaceful demonstrations in order to defend our land and our people. I do not know if my actions violate your Occupation laws. As far as I am concerned, these laws do not apply to me and are devoid of meaning. Having been enacted by Occupation authorities, I reject them and cannot recognize their validity.
Despite claiming to be the only democracy in the Middle East you are trying me under military laws which lack any legitimacy; laws that are enacted by authorities that I have not elected and who do not represent me. I am accused of organizing peaceful civil demonstrations that have no military aspects and are legal under international law.
We have the right to express our rejection of Occupation in all of its forms; to defend our freedom and dignity as a people and to seek justice and peace in our land in order to protect our children and secure their future.
The civil nature of our actions is the light that will overcome the darkness of the Occupation, bringing a dawn of freedom that will warm the cold wrists in chains, sweep despair from the soul and end decades of oppression.
These actions are what will expose the true face of the Occupation, where soldiers point their guns at a woman walking to her fields or at checkpoints; at a child who wants to drink from the sweet water of his ancestors’ fabled spring; against an old man who wants to sit in the shade of an olive tree, once mother to him, now burnt by settlers.
We have exhausted all possible actions to stop attacks by settlers, who refuse to adhere to your courts’ decisions, which time and again have confirmed that we are the owners of the land, ordering the removal of the fence erected by them.
Each time we tried to approach our land, implementing these decisions, we were attacked by settlers, who prevented us from reaching it as if it were their own.
Our demonstrations are in protest of injustice. We work hand in hand with Israeli and international activists who believe, like us, that had it not been for the Occupation, we could all live in peace on this land. I do not know which laws are upheld by generals who are inhibited by fear and insecurity, nor do I know their thoughts on the civil resistance of women, children and old men who carry hope and olive branches. But I know what justice and reason are. Land theft and tree-burning are unjust. Violent repression of our demonstrations and protests and your detention camps are not evidence of the illegality of our actions. It is unfair to be tried under a law forced upon us. I know that I have rights and my actions are just.”
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