The Plague: Farmers and Settlers Clash in South Hebron
It wasn’t so easy to find a lone Palestinian man in the vast open spaces of the desert. The six of us—Israeli activists in Ta’ayush (Arab-Jewish Partnership), a group of peaceful volunteers committed to protecting Palestinian farmers and herders in the South Hebron hills—were dropped off near Mufagara, with its tents and sheepfolds. We walked along the rough goat-paths skirting the Israeli outpost of Chavat Maon, up and down the hills, scanning the horizon for some sign of Shehade Mahamra Salama or of his tractor. We were there to be sure settlers didn’t attack this Palestinian and his fellow farmers, driving them at gunpoint from their fields.
It was almost midday, the winter sun washing over us, the air cold and clear. We could see in the distance the cream-colored desert and two tents just beneath the village of Tuba and across the Jordan River an ethereal, ghostly blue line—the mountains of Moab. Opposite Tuba, barely visible, a Palestinian flag was flying in the wind, and not far away from it two camels and a white donkey were winding their way somewhere.
A man cuts an almost imperceptible figure in a wilderness, but we found Shehade and the tractor driving up over the rocks from the even smaller encampment at Swaiy, and soon they were furrowing the resistant dry earth in the wadi and sowing seeds. Shehade sports a white beard; his face is burned red like wine, and his eyes are joyful. He lives in the tiny encampment of Maghair al-‘Abid on one of the eastern ridges overlooking the desert. There are four or five extended families here, living in some twenty caves. The lands they own are scattered in a wide arc over the parched hills—some of them, like the plot they’re plowing today, in the shadow of Chavat Maon, perhaps the most notorious and merciless of the Israeli outposts in South Hebron.
Shehade and his family own this land; the courts have confirmed their claim. But the threat of settlers looms constantly over them. Four times, the Chavat Maon settlers stole this entire field, and each time the court eventually returned it to Shehade’s family. Once, when the wheat had grown tall, the settlers burned it. But it rained that night, somehow the burnt wheat sprouted anew, and eventually the Palestinians were able to harvest a new crop. Put this down to the occasional miracles God allows in his otherwise sorrow-stricken world.
Though he laughs easily and often, Shehade reports the usual tales of trauma. One time a settler shot an old woman at Maghair al-‘Abid in her legs. Soldiers appeared but of course neither arrested the settler nor helped the woman, whose family lifted her, bleeding profusely, onto a horse to get her to a hospital. Anyone who knows these hills knows what kind of a ride that must have been. Shehade tells many more stories like that one, of attack and humiliation, out-and-out theft and sadistic torment—too many for me to record and remember. This man, however, seems strangely empty of bitterness. He is the South Hebron embodiment of the bon vivant, if one can use such a phrase for a man who lives so close to the ground, with so little, with enemies continually at his throat. He went to Hebron, the big city, last year for the first time, to visit the graves of the Patriarchs, and he was moved. “We [Palestinians and Jews] are brothers,” he says to me. “We know this, and if anyone doubts it he has only to go to the grave of our common father Ibrahim in Hebron. I see those graves and I know: God exists.”