The Green Rain of Yassouf
By Israel Shamir
Most soothing, tender and sensual to the touch, picking olives
is akin to telling beads. Oriental
men wear ‘mesbaha’ beads of wood or stone on their wrist, reminding
of prayer and calming
down frayed nerves, but olives are much better: they are alive.
Olives are tender but not fragile,
like peasant girls, and picking them has a touch of comfort:
nothing can go wrong. Olives detach
themselves from the branch without fear and remorse, smoothly
enter the palm and roll down
into the safety of the ground sheets stretched to catch them.
It is harvest time, and every tree on the terraced slope is attended.
Whole families are out, under
the trees and up on ladders, forming a vast pane suitable for
Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s brush.
We pick olives together with Hafez’s family, five or six
of us; we stand below the thick branches
of the broad stretched-out craggy old tree, fingering this live
rosary of our lady, the sweet land of
Palestine. Hair of ripe Minnesota corn, sky-blue eyes, - unexpected
for a stranger, but not
unusual features in these places, - laughing lips, seven-and-a-half-year
old Rowan, young
daughter of the sturdy shrewd Hafez, climbed to the treetop,
and the olives she picks fell down
on our hands, shoulders and heads like green rain. Before going
to the next tree, we lift the edges
of the sheets and the dense stream of olives fills the bag. A
light grey foal grazes nearby,
gathering strength for his turn: he will carry the bags into
the village above the valley.
We pick olives in Yassouf, a blissfully obscure village in the
highlands. Its spacious and tall
houses, made of soft and light stone, witness its old prosperity,
created by the relentless toil;
broad staircases lead to the flat roofs, where they lounge warm
summer evenings and enjoy the
breeze from the distant Med. There are plenty of pomegranate
trees, and in a thousand years old
description of Palestine, by a contemporary of William the Conqueror,
the village of Yassouf is
mentioned for abundance of pomegranate and for wisdom of a learned
sheikh al-Yassoufi who
made himself a name in remote Damascus.
It is paradise, or not too far from it. We arrived yesterday to
the village, built on the ridge
between two valleys. Above the village, a hilltop retains the
old sanctuary, bema, one of the high
places where ancestors of Hafez and Rowan witnessed the miraculous
communion of celestial
and earthly forces. The villagers often go there, to seek spiritual
comfort, as did their forefathers,
the people of the small principality of Israel: we are in the
Holy Land, and for its people, a daily
miracle of faith goes hand in hand with the daily portion of
toil. The kings of the Bible tried to ban
these local bema places and monopolise the faith in the centralised,
easy-to-tax-and-control
temple, but ordinary people preferred their local sanctuaries
for daily worship. The peasants
preserved the two-tier structure of local and universal faith,
similar to Shinto-Buddhism link in
Japan. They are religious but not fanatic. They do not wear the
Islamic garb; women do not
cover their pretty faces. These two aspects, local and universal,
survived millennia and blended
together. The temple became the gorgeous Umayyad Mosque of al
Aqsa, and on the high place
of Yassouf, people pray to its God.
These are venerable old trees; they have heard many an oath and
seen many a secret in their
long lives. A miraculous shallow well that never runs dry even
in the hottest July, but rests in rainy
winter; a holy tomb which probably changed name many times since
the days immemorial, and
now is called Sheikh Abu Zarad. There are ruins from the first
days of Yassouf, well over four
thousand years ago, and since then the village has not been deserted.
In the Bible heyday, it
belonged to Joseph, the strongest of the tribes of Israel. When
Jerusalem fell under sway of the
Jews, these lands and these people retained their own Israelite
identity, and eventually accepted
Christ. The domed shrine at the top still calls for prayer. In
February, the hilltop turns white with
almond blossoms, now it is fresh and green, and affords a superb
view of the rolling hills of
Samaria.
But we came too late for the view from the hilltop, as sun sets
early in the autumn. Instead, in the
dusk we went down to the village spring, the throbbing heart
of the village. Water was quietly
gushing from the opening in the rock, flew in the covered tunnel
and poured out to give life to the
gardens. We sat under the fig trees, and they spread their broad
trefoil leaves like Japanese Noh
dancers raise their fans, in one incessant gracious movement.
In the moonlight, between the
leaves, giant black butterflies took wing: it is bats, dwellers
of the nearby caves, emerging in the
dark to drink water and feast on the fruits.
Usually, a talk at the spring flows freely and joyously like its
water. There is no better place to sit
and chat with the villagers about the harvest, the good old days,
the children, and the last essay
of Edward Said reprinted in the local paper. The farmers are
not boors: some of them travelled
the big world, from Basra to San Francisco; others attended a
small university branch in the
vicinity. Their political education was completed in Israeli
jail, an almost unavoidable stage in the
upbringing of a young man in our land. Their Hebrew, acquired
there, or through long work in
the Israeli building industry, is fluent and idiomatic, and they
are keen to practice it with a friendly
Israeli.
But now our hosts were gloomy, and worries did not move away from
their sad eyes. Even at
the dinner, as we feasted on rice with nuts and yogurt, they
were rather pensive. We knew the
reason: a new dread had nested on the bare hilltop and spread
its webbed wings over the village.
The army had confiscated the lands of Yassouf for military purposes,
and passed the site to the
settlers. They built a concrete prefab monster entwined by barbed
wire, interspaced with guard
towers, and appropriated the name of the nearby Apple spring.
The settlement was not willing to
stay put on the land stolen a decade ago from the people of Yassouf,
but kept encroaching on
the entire countryside, throwing out its metastases onto surrounding
hills, eating up the olive
groves and vineyards.
The farmers did not dare to go to their own fields, for the settlers
were harsh men with guns,
quick to draw. They shot at villagers, often kidnapped and tortured
them, set fire to their fields.
They had to keep the farmers away for five years, and after that,
according to the Ottoman law
they found in the old books, the fallow land would revert to
the state. To the Jewish state. The
state would then give the land to the Jewish settlers. Meanwhile,
they tried to starve the farmers.
The village was cut off from the world by trenches and mounds
of earth six feet high. Even small
unpaved roads, barely suitable for a four-wheel drive, were truncated
by the army. The village
became an island.
The British ambassador to Tel Aviv recently said that Israel had turned
Palestine into one huge detention camp. He was wrong: instead
of one camp, they created a
New Gulag Archipelago of Palestine. The Nobel-winning author
of Gulag, Alexander
Solzhenitsyn claimed that the original Russian Gulag was designed
and managed by Jews; his
claim was questioned and denied by Jewish organisations. But
there is no doubt who designed
the Gulag of Palestine. Cars cannot leave or enter the island
of Yassouf, and visitors are forced
to leave their cars before crossing on foot. The nearest city,
Nablous, or Neapolis of old, is eight
miles distant, but four hours’ drive and many humiliating
checkpoints away. It took us ages to
reach Yassouf, as we drove through numerous checkpoints and roadblocks,
and we had to
abandon our car half a mile away from the village, stopped by
an insurmountable siege dam.
On the way, devastation was everywhere: olives on both sides were
torched or uprooted, as if
this venerable tree was the foremost enemy of the Jews. And in
a way it was: olive is the chief
provider and intercessor for the Palestinians. Their main meal
consists of flat oven-baked bread
and olive oil, spiced by thyme and enlivened by a bunch of grapes.
Their kings and priests of old
were anointed with oil. The sacraments of the church, a precious
gift of Palestine to mankind, are
but consecration of olive. In baptism, the Palestinians are anointed
before the full immersion, and
their skins retain the soft suppleness of olive oil. Oil is used
for the rites of wedlock, and for the
last rites, confirming the inseparable bond of the people and
their land. The famed explorer of
Qumran scrolls, John Allegro, ruined his reputation by penning
a heretical book identifying Jesus
Christ with the hallucinogenic mushroom. If and when I shall
decide to follow him, I shall
compare the Olive Tree of Virgin Oil and Our Lady the Virgin,
the supreme mediatrix of
Palestine.
As long as there are olives, the peasants of Palestine are invincible,
and that is why their
adversaries turned their rage towards the trees. They cut them
whenever they could. In the last
years, eighteen thousand beautiful olives, old giants and young
saplings, were uprooted. The
settlers stopped the farmers from harvesting, ambushed them on
the way home and robbed
them. We, the International and Israeli friends of Palestine,
came, like Seven Samurai in the old
Kurosawa film, to help the peasants pick their olives and protect
them from the robbers.
Of the many good things one can do on our good Earth, helping
Palestinians is the best and most
pleasant one I know of. Kibbutz can’t compete with it. Young
kibbutzniks are usually boring and
aloof, while old kibbutzniks are, well, old. In kibbutz, you
have the company of other foreigners,
or none. Palestinians are so friendly, so open, so ready to talk
to you. The Internationals bask in
their friendliness, live in enchanted villages, see the warm
blue sky over the incomparable
landscape of Palestinian hills, and enjoy the fabulous hospitality
of the peasants. And if
occasionally they are shot at by the settlers or the army, it
is just a small cost for all the fun, an
additional divertissement courtesy of the IDF. That is, after
all, why the Samurai are needed.
The people who help Palestinians are quite different from kibbutz
volunteers. They are more
heterogeneous, from a 19-year-old student from Uppsala to a housewife
from Brighton, from a
Reverend from Georgia to a teacher from Boston, from a French
farmer to an Italian MP. They
are united by their feelings of compassion, of natural justice,
and, yes, by their daring. They work
in the shadow of Israeli tanks, and protect the olives and men
with their own bodies. The harvest
in the Samarian mountains is a joy but not for timid souls. We
were to experience its rough side
without further delay.
We were picking olives, filling the bags with the green gold,
when suddenly a Jeep drove down
the stony ruddy road, and screeched to a halt near us, raising
a cloud of dust; behind it was a
bigger vehicle, an army troop carrier full of soldiers. A single
man jumped out of the jeep, aiming
an automatic rifle M-16 straight at the child on the tree.
“Go away, you bloody Arabs,” he yelled in Brooklynese. He lifted
a rock and hurled it into the
nearest group of workers. A farmer, who could not turn away,
was hit and nursed his hand.
“Come one step closer and I’ll shoot!” he shouted when Laurie
tried to talk to him. He was
large, unkempt, ferocious, intentionally working himself into
a high degree of hysteria.
“Don’t even touch the olives!” he screamed at the peasants.
From around the road bend, three men appeared running. They looked
like nothing you ever
saw. To their shaven foreheads, black boxes were strapped by
narrow black belts; black belts
crisscrossed their bare arms. The Jews put on the phylacteries,
as this setup is called, for a
morning prayer, but on these young men they looked like the amulets
of a warlike tribe. They
wore dark trousers and dark tee-shorts, while white shawls with
black stripes flew behind their
backs. Their rifles were pointed at us. They looked possessed
by some strange demon, these
young men in Jewish ritual dress and with their ideas from the
Book of Joshua. I was not
astonished when one of them pulled out a long curved blade. The
scene reminded me of the
recent movie, “The Time Machine,” with the sudden appearance
of ferocious Morlocks and their
onslaught on bucolic Eloi.
They pushed the women and cursed the men, their eyes burning with
hate. Timid peasants, the
Palestinians recoiled. A Samurai unarmed, I tried to reason with
the attackers.
“Let the farmers harvest their olives,” I beseeched, “it is their
trees, it is their life. Be good
neighbours to them!”
“Go away, you Arab-lover,” hissed one of them. “You support
our enemies. It is our land. It is
the land of the Jews; the Goyim do not belong here.”
In more peaceful circumstances, I would laugh: these disturbed
young men from New York
wished to expel the proper and rightful descendents of the people
of Israel from their ancestral
land. Never mind the incredible silliness of two-thousand-year-old
claim in the country where
five years of absence voids all claims. Never mind that their
‘Jewish’ ancestors probably hiked
from the Eurasian steppe and never saw Palestine. Never mind
that even the Jews of old never
lived and hardly visited the land of Israel, between Bethel,
Carmel and Jezreel. Soon the
Romanian guest workers from Bucharest may expel the people of
Florence, claiming direct
descent from ancient Rome. But their rifles were no laughing
stock.
“Why do you burn olives, are the olives your enemies, too?”
“Yes, the olives of our enemy are our enemies. And you are our
enemies, too!” he shrieked.
“Anti-Semites!”
This word works magic with the Americans. Whenever an American
is called an ‘anti-Semite’,
he is supposed to prostrate on the ground, and swear eternal
love and fealty to the Jewish
people. I know it because daily I receive letters from people
who were called ‘anti-Semites’ for
their support of Palestine and they could not cope with it. I
provide them with first psychological
aid: after being punished for anti-Soviet activity, and condemned
for anti-American opinions, an
anti-Nomian lover of anti-Quity, I take the anti-Semitic label
in my stride. Nowadays, if one is
not called an anti-S, it means one is clearly in the wrong, sandwiched
between Sharon and
Soros.
Like ‘Arab-lover’, or ‘Nigger-lover’, an ‘anti-Semite’ is a label
that smears its user by
association. It is often used by the settlers, by Foxman the
spymaster, Kahane the racist, Mort
Zuckermann the USA Today owner, Conrad Black the husband of Barbara
Amiel, Sharon the
mass murderer, Richard Perle the warmonger, Tom Friedman the
shyster, Shylock the
loan-shark and Elie Wiesel the pay-as-you-cry holocaust weepy.
It was used against TS Elliot
and Dostoyevsky, Genet and Hamsun, St John and Yeats, Marx and
Woody Allen, and it is a
much better company to be in. Still, our Americans hesitated
for a moment, our good Israelis
began to explain their position, but it was a good English girl
from Manchester, Jennifer, who
proved the superiority of Brits and saved the day by a brusque
‘fuck you’.
The barrel of M-16 rifle made a curve and pointed at her. The
soldiers looked at the goings on
with interest. I turned to them.
“Stop them! They’re aiming their guns at us!”
“They haven’t shot you, yet”, answered the sergeant.
The soldiers would not intervene as long as the Morlocks had
their way, but the moment we
engaged them, the awesome armed might of the Jewish state will
be visited upon us. The
Morlocks knew it too: they smashed a camera of Dave’s, pushed
Angie, poured insults at the
girls, and threw stones.
“Won’t you stop them?” I appealed to the soldiers.
“Sorry, pal. Only police may deal with
them,” replied the officer. “But we can arrest
YOU, if you insist.”
The army takes care of the Palestinians, and the police attends
to the settlers - this simple ruse is
one of the better inventions of the Jewish genius. Probably they
borrowed it from the European
settlements in China, where they had different police forces
and different sets of law for
Europeans and for Chinese. That is why the Morlocks may do what
they want. The Palestinians
were visibly upset: they are not fighters, but farmers with women
and children harvesting their
olives; they did not come there to die. Not yet, anyway. The
settlers kill the villagers for sport or
for fun, with and without provocation. For the last week, they
murdered a few men who dared
to harvest their own olives. If the villagers would defend themselves,
would just dare to raise
their hands at a Jew, they would be all slaughtered and their
village wiped out. But the olives had
to be harvested, and the stand-off continued.
“All the troubles are caused by the bloody settlers,” called out
Uri, a good Israeli, who kept off
the settler thugs to the right of me. “Without them, we would
live peacefully. We would visit
Yassouf with passports, like tourists. It is them, the settlers.”
Indeed, it was easy, almost obligatory to hate the vicious young
men, who destroyed crops and
starved villages. This particular settlement is known as a bulwark
of the Kahanist or Judeo-Nazi
creed, as the late Professor Leibovich called it. They celebrated
the assassination of Prime
Minister Rabin; they worshipped Baruch Goldstein, the mass murderer
from Brooklyn; they
published the banned book of Rabbi Alba that openly proclaims
the religious duty of the Jew to
exterminate Gentiles. They were so evil it required no effort
to hate them and to agree with Uri.
But as I looked at the blank faces of the soldiers, a memory
came back from the days of my
childhood. The hoodlums do not go around robbing strangers: they
would send forth a small kid
to relieve you of the burden of your wallet. If you’d push the
kid away, they would fall on you
like a ton of bricks for molesting the youth. It was quite pointless
to hate the small kid since he
was sent by the bigger hoods.
These young crackpots were sent by the bigger hoods, too. That
is why the soldiers did not bat
an eyelid when the settlers attacked the farmers. It was the
division of labour: the thugs starved
the peasants, the army protected the thugs, and the government
endorsed it. While the army guns
kept down the Palestinians, the US army kept down Iraq, the only
state in the region that might
be able to provide the balance of power, and the US diplomats
wielded their veto in the Security
Council. And beyond them, one could see the biggest hoods that
did not care for olives,
peasants or soldiers. On one end of the chain of command, there
was a crazy Brooklyn settler
with M-16; on the other end, Bronfman and Zuckerman, Sulzberger
and Wolfowitz, Foxman
and Friedman.
And somewhere between, were we, the Israelis and the American
Jews, who duly voted and
paid taxes and supported the scheme, because without our support,
Wolfowitz would have to
conquer Baghdad single-handedly and Bronfman would have to burn
the olives himself.
Still, each man and beast has its pest, and we had to deal with
our own. The farmers of Yassouf
and their international supporters, that’s us, stood our ground
and did not flinch. Police arrived
and consorted with the settlers. In a while, a smiley tall hair-cropped
liaison officer came down
to us.
“You may pick your olives, but work in
the bottom of the valley, where the settlers
won’t see you and get annoyed.”
It was a minor victory, a compromise, but it didn’t matter. We
would harvest olives, that was the
bottom line. We rolled down the valley, its slopes reinforced
by numerous terraces, and the
harvest continued. Down here, the olives were smaller and fewer.
For three years, the peasants
were prohibited from working their fields, although the olive
needs a lot of care. Normally,
peasants plough around the trees every year by an old-fashioned
plough pulled by a donkey: the
terraces are too small for tractor. Without it, winter rains
run off the land and fail to reach the
roots. The terraces also need a lot of maintenance. But it couldn’t
be done now, for the farmers
prudently avoided taking up their hoes and spades, dangerous
weapons in the eyes of their
well-armed tormentors.
Again the small streams of green and black olives ran down our
hands to the ground sheets.
They grow on the same tree, as God made them different, some
green and some black, Hussein
told us, but they give the same oil. It was a God’s sign to us
humans: we are made different, and
it is a good thing, making the world more beautiful and various,
if we remember our common
humanity.
We laid out our lunch under a big olive tree. Umm Tarik, the only
woman in many-coloured
national dress, brought big round bread straight from the oven.
It was liberally sprinkled with
olive oil, as were the balls of white goat cheese. Hassan passed
around a zir, a Palestinian
amphora full of cool water from the Apple spring. The zir was
cold and wet outside, covered
with minuscule drops of dew. It is made of porous clay, and it
sweats profusely cooling the drink
inside. With years, the pores clog up, and then it can be used
to store wine or oil.
“I miss Ramat Gan” (a suburb of Tel Aviv), said Hassan. “Before
the trouble, I used to work
there, painting houses. It was good work, and my Yemenite employer
was a decent man, he
treated me as a member of his family. Sometimes I would overnight
there, and have an evening
stroll in Tel Aviv by the sea. Now for two years I have not left
the village.”
Everybody had good memories from the days they worked in the big
cities in the West of
Palestine, and brought some cash back home. It was a mutually
convenient arrangement for the
newcomers and the peasants, profoundly unequal but bearable.
All over the world, farmers and
peasants work for a while in the cities when their land does
not call them for harvest or planting.
For local people, “the Jewish” Tel Aviv and Ramat Gan were no
more foreign than “the Arab”
Nablus or Jerusalem, as the country is but one unit. Palestine
is a small country, and Yassouf is in
the very middle of it, thirty miles to the sea, and thirty miles
to the Jordan border. The industrial
cities of the seaboard were built well before the state of Israel
came into being; they were built
by the labour of Yassouf’s peasants, and they were rightly theirs.
Not exclusively theirs, but
theirs as well. The arrangement was undone, when the Jews began
their land snatch.
“Do you see the settlement”, - Hussein asked us. “My father sowed
his wheat on that hillside. At
first, they took the land, and later, they locked us up in the
village. Now we have but little land,
and no work”.
“The story of the Holy land repeats the story of God’s promise,”
said the Reverend.
“Christ said: everybody is chosen. The Jews replied: sorry, only
we are. Now, Palestinians say:
let us live together in this land. And the Jews reply: sorry,
it is for us only.”
“There should be an independent Palestinian state,” said Uri,
“with its own flag, and a real
border. Barak cheated everybody, as he offered to split your
lands into few entities. We should
go back to ’67 borders, and then things will be fine.”
- Do you know how the Talmud rules on partition, - I asked. –
Two men found a shawl, and
each one said, ‘it is mine’. They came to a judge, and the judge
asked them, “How should I
divide the shawl?” The first one said, ‘divide it 50-50, equally’.
The second one said, ‘no, it is all
mine’. The judge said, ‘there is no disagreement about one half
of the shawl, both agree it should
belong to the second man. I shall divide the remaining half of
the shawl equally, so the first man,
the seeker of justice, will have one fourth, while the second
man, the egoist, will have three
quarters”. That is the Jewish approach. Maybe Palestinians should
learn it, too.
Kamal added some broken twigs into the small fire to make coffee.
He was an elder man,
respected by the village, an important man in the local politics
and beyond. In 1967, a young
man of 20, he parted with his newborn daughter for he was sentenced
by the Jews to forty years
of prison for his belonging to the Resistance. He emerged from
the eternal shade of Ramleh Gaol
when his daughter was twenty one.
- We also have a story of dividing a find, - said Kamal. – It
is the story of a woman who found a
child and brought him up. Then another woman came in, the natural
mother of the child, and
demanded him back. They came to be judged by Sheikh Abu Zarad,
and the sheikh said: I shall
cut the kid into two parts, and give each one half. One woman
said, ‘good, let us split the child’.
But another woman said, no way, my child won’t be carved up.
And the sheikh awarded the
child to the second woman, as she was the real mother.
My cheeks were burning with shame. Kamal did not tell me anything
new, but, trying to
wisecrack, I forgot the true wisdom of Solomon’s judgement, and
he, a real descendent of Bible
heroes, reminded me of it. The Palestinians, like the true mother,
did not agree to partition.
History proved they were right: Palestine can’t be divided. The
peasants need the industrial cities
to work between the seasons and to sell their oil; they need
the seashore of the Med, splashing a
few miles away from their home, they need the wholeness of the
land as one needs two hands
and two eyes.
The settlers were not monsters, but thoroughly misled men. Like
me, they read too much of the
Babylonian Talmud, too little of the Palestinian Bible. They
felt the incredibly strong pull of the
land, and it attracted them to the hills of Samaria. They were
looking for union with the
enchanted land of Palestine, and they loved it with the weird
love of necrophiliacs. They were
ready to kill the land just to get it. They did not understand
the local ways, and earned their living
by collecting money in America. Instead of hatred, I felt sorry
for the settlers. They had a unique
chance to make peace with their neighbours, and with the land,
and they blew it. By ruining the
land, they prepare their new exile with their own hands. The
true mother will have the child, and
therefore the Palestinian victory is inevitable, for the judgement
of Solomon is but a parable of
Divine judgement.
- But where are the good Jews, - the reader hastens to enquire.
- For the balance, for the
political correctness, for our comfort, please show us some good
Jews! There are not only
settlers, but Peace Now and other movements friendly to Palestinians.
Yes, there is a difference between the brutal settlers and their
supporters, on one side, and the
liberal Israelis, traditional Labour voters, on another side.
The Jewish chauvinists want Palestine
without Palestinians. They would import Chinese to work the fields
and Russians to guard the
Chinese. They were an obviously repelling lot.
The liberal Israelis could envisage a sort of common future, where
Palestinians could leave their
watched-over Bantustans and come to work in Tel Aviv equipped
with a working permit, to be
harassed by police, to work without social security, below minimal
wage, underpaid by their
employers. The idea of brotherly equality, not of some heavenly
sort, but of ordinary fair play
towards the native son of the land was as foreign to them as
to the settlers. They would give
them a flag and an anthem, but take away their land and their
way of life.
Both sorts of Israelis were united in their rejection of Palestine.
They sang of a ‘new dress of
concrete and asphalt for the old Land of Israel’. The liberals
dreamed of creating a high-tech
sliver of America, and did not need the hills of Samaria. The
chauvinists wanted to erase the very
memory of Palestine, and re-create the kingdom of hate and vengeance.
And few, very few of us understood that we have been given a rare
chance to learn from the
Palestinians. With our East European arrogance, we came to teach
and change them, but we
should learn and change ourselves. It was not enough to help
them; we, the conquerors, have to
adjust to the supreme civilisation of the conquered. It was done
before us: the victorious Vikings
adjusted to the ways of England and France, Russia and Sicily;
the triumphant Greeks of
Alexander became Egyptians and Syrians, Imperial Manchu became
Chinese. It has to be done
for our sakes as well, since otherwise we are doomed to re-create
a ghetto for us and a ghetto
for them.
Take an ant and he will build an anthill. Take a Jew and he will
create a ghetto. Take a
Palestinian… Well, my friend Musa invited his old father from
a Samarian village to his new
home in Vermont, and his old father began to build terraces to
plant olives.
The Palestinians can’t imagine themselves without the land and
its unique way of life. Thousands
of years ago, after the Great Mycenaean Drought was over, their
ancestors formed a symbiosis
with the olive, and the vine, and the donkey, and the small mountain
springs, and their shrines on
the hilltops. This single complex of the landscape, the people
and the Divine spirit was the great
achievement of Palestinians, and they carried it through centuries
and preserved to this very day.
If they will be undermined, mankind will lose its anchors and
crash on the rocks of history. We
were much privileged that they accepted our small help.
In the evening, we trekked back to the village, to the spacious
mansion of Hussein. It would not
seem out of place in Cannes or Sonoma. On its great balcony,
we sat in the straw chairs made
by the Beidan villagers. The friendly but dignified cats of Hussein
jumped on our laps, while his
shy daughters brought in sweet mint tea. Folks came in to chat
with the strangers as they are
wont to do in the remote villages. Small kerosene lamps stood
on the tables and banisters: the
Israeli overlords refused to connect the village to the electric
grid. Even that was good, for we
watched the full moon of October slowly floating in the darkening
skies and shining on the
terraced hills, and on the roofs, and on the dull armour of a
Merkava tank on the hillside, his
guns trained on the village, and on the silent ancient knurled
olives of Yassouf.
Israel Shamir is an Israeli journalist based in Jaffa. His articles
can be found on the site
www.israelshamir.net In order to subscribe to this list or to
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