In
the Labyrinth of Solitude: Time,
Violence and the Eternal Frontier
Peter
Lagerquist
Our
territory is inhabited by a number of races
speaking different languages and living on
different historical levels…. A variety of
epochs live side by side in the same areas
or a very few miles apart, ignoring or devouring
one another…. Past epochs never vanish completely,
and blood still drips from all their wounds,
even the most ancient.
—Octavio
Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude
Palestinians
of the south Hebron hills in their cave
home. (Eddie Gerald/geophotos.com) |
About
20 minutes south of Hebron, the land of the West
Bank becomes noticeably more arid, the olive
groves sparser. Around three miles before the
border with Israel the concrete carapace of an
army post floats by, then a last hardscrabble
village whose dusty children scatter quickly
on sighting a car with Israeli yellow plates.
After that point clusters of shacks and tents
begin to appear on the surrounding slopes, some
more than a half-mile adrift of the road. As
you progress past turnoffs for thinly spaced
settlements, red-tiled roofs and agro-industrial
cowsheds poised on surrounding hilltops, the
places slide in and out of view behind folds
of scrubland, until they are finally gone. A
few minutes later, you come up to the border
terminal, with its booths and pylons straddling
the road. The last bit of Israel’s fence curves
up from the west and knots here, leaving open
the hills which rolled past you on the way, clear
down to the Dead Sea. It’s like looking back
over the edge of a world, and if you read power
only in what it constructs, in concrete and steel,
you might briefly think that here the order of
things somehow fades. Then you might recall those
encampments, and how you never passed a single
paved exit road or a single place sign.
One
way of describing the hills wedged in between
Route 317 and the southern border of the West
Bank, an area also known as Masafir Yatta, is
to say that they cover some 3,600 hectares, an
area roughly the size of a US county. It could
also be said that they take at least two hours
to cross, what you would need to traverse many
US states by car. It’s the sort of observation
that brings to mind how the former UN Special
Rapporteur for Human Rights, John Dugard, caused
such a stir in 2007, when he said that the segregation
of roads in the West Bank between Arabs and Jews
was unheard of even in apartheid South Africa—how
he was speaking of those parts of the West Bank
where there actually are Arab roads.
Visitors
who come to narrate the conflict in these parts
are frequently struck by the barrenness of the
landscape and the poverty of its inhabitants.
For this reason Masafir Yatta is often described
as being both physically remote and as belonging
to a different time—as seeming to hover, in fact,
outside of time. It is a place where the conflict
acquires, according to one New York Times journalist,
“a distinctly biblical feel, like the flimsy
tent encampments and dank caves in which some
local Palestinian farming families dwell,” confirming
that biblical mise-en-scènes remain a
staple of certain kinds of Holy Land reporting,
but also adumbrating a community—the “cave dwellers”
of the south Hebron hills as they are otherwise
known—who afford that kind of narrative a rare,
live ethnographic prop.
The Times was
among a number of news organizations that made
the trek down country in June, after an attack
by Israeli settlers on one family of cave dwellers
was recorded with a digital camera lent to the
family by the Israeli human rights organization
B’Tselem. Noting the primitive ways of these
sudden cineastes—“there is no electricity. Water
is drawn from a well, milk is kept in sheepskins,
bread is baked in an outdoor stone oven”—the
story is not so much of people clashing as of
eras colliding. It is therefore perhaps not surprising
that the journalist never thinks to ask why these
people live in “dank caves.”
What
is surprising is that hardly anyone else asks,
either.
Narratives
of Masafir Yatta propounded by human rights organizations,
chiefly the UN Office for the Coordination of
Human Affairs (OCHA), B’Tselem and the Israeli
Association for Civil Rights, exhibit many similarities,
among them a shared conservationist idiom, in
which circumstances otherwise legible as an index
of hardship instead figure as an ethnographic
category. According to B’Tselem, “In the southernmost
West Bank, some one thousand Palestinians have
maintained the way of life of their ancestors:
living in caves and earning a living from farming
and livestock.” OCHA argues that “families forced
to move away from southern Hebron lose their
traditional lifestyle and means of support.”
In
their disparate fashion, these narratives are
about accounting for violence, and time, in a
way anticipated by the video captured in June.
Broadcast a few days later by a number of news
networks, the jerky footage shows four masked
settlers, truncheons in hand, approaching by
foot across a parched field, an older woman standing
in the foreground. A farmer suddenly steps into
view, the men launch themselves at him and, as
the woman cries out, the camera veers wildly;
there is a glimpse of someone on the ground,
truncheons coming down, screaming. Not surprisingly,
it is in that brief final blur of violence that
the media found its pathos. The New York Times article
is accompanied by a screen capture of the masked
settler, club poised to strike.
Those
who watched the video carefully, however, could
have noted from its time track that some 30 seconds
had been edited out—imperceptibly so, because
of the shaking of the camera—between the moment
when the settlers appear and the moment when
the first blow falls. From a forensic perspective,
this edit may have been inconsequential; in television
time it would have felt like years. Precisely
for that reason, however, those seconds also
pointed to a different understanding of what
has been done here. It’s the difference between
the dramatic texture of something sudden and
almost immediately lost from view, and the chronicle
of a tragedy foretold. Scroll back to those men
walking across the field, without hurry, coming,
still coming, as if they had all the time in
the world.
Consider
the family, trapped in the frame.
Excavating
That “Biblical Feel”
Jewish
settler at Magen David in the south Hebron
hills. (Eddie Gerald/geophotos.com) |
The
first reliable map of the south Hebron hills
to appear in the modern era was published in
1883, being one of 26 sheets included in the Survey
of Western Palestine, produced by the British-based
Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF). Copies of the Survey can
still be found in the Hebrew University Library
in Jerusalem, showing the names and locations
of each of the hamlets in the area, the surrounding
wadis, some of the hills. Over a century later,
these names appear neither on Israeli road maps
nor on the first maps of the area produced by
the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Planning.
Cartographically, Masafir Yatta became over the
intervening period a terra nullius, an
act of disappearance all the more poignant because
it began with the construction of that first
map, and with it, what might later be termed
a “distinctly biblical feel.”
Founded
in 1865 under the patronage of Queen Victoria
and notables in the Church of England hierarchy,
the PEF charged itself with “investigating the
archaeology, geography, geology and natural history
of Palestine”—whose religious significance was
bringing it closer into the European orbit, though
it was at the time a part of the Ottoman Empire.
Closely allied with imperial interests, the PEF
was to play some part in strengthening the gravitational
pull. The British War Office seconded a succession
of officers to carry out the organization’s survey
work on the doorstep of a weakening Porte. Half
a century later, as World War I came to the Levant,
the maps that Claude Conder, Horatio Kitchener
and T. E. Lawrence had prepared would unlock
the southern gates of Palestine for the British
army, moving up through the Naqab desert to take
the Ottoman garrison in Bir al-Saba‘—today’s
Beersheva—by surprise. Long before that, the
ground had been prepared in other ways.
When,
in 1875, the London publishing house George Phillip
and Son published Lt. Claude Conder’s Tent
Work in Palestine, an account of his surveying
in the Holy Land, it tapped deeply into a burgeoning
colonial curiosity. The book was part of series
on “The World’s Great Explorers and Explorations,”
also including titles such as Livingstone
and the Exploration of Central Africa, Mungo
Park and the Niger and John Franklin and
the North West—a region where the US surveyor
appointed to America’s brief and abortive answer
to the PEF, the Palestine Exploration Society,
had himself worked, surveying newly pacified
Indian Territory. As with the Society, interest
in Conder’s account, which became a bestseller,
was leavened by a religious curiosity, famously
both satirized and reinvested by Mark Twain’ Innocents
Abroad, which married the thrill of exploration
with the fantasy of faith.
In
mapping the territory of the Holy Land, a region
which, unlike central Africa, had already been
well-charted by Europeans, the PEF sought to
recoup its terrain for the religious imagination,
retrieving the original map of the Bible from
the place-names of a predominantly Arab and Muslim
country. The idea, as Nadia Abu El Haj puts it,
was that “contemporary Palestine would ultimately
be brought, through mapping, back into a historical
geography they already knew.” Yet in chronicling
this process the PEF would also do something
more, literally reinserting Palestine, a land
thought lost to civilization and progress, into
the stream of time. Readers of the organization’s Quarterly
Statement would accordingly find interspersed,
among essays on “The Royal Canaanite and Levitical
City of Debir,” “The Empire of the Hittites”
and “Scenes from David’s Outlaw Life,” articles
like “Colonization of Palestine,” submitted by
a former US consul, which plotted in minute detail
the future development of the country through
colonization by European Jews, a group which
by then had emerged as a likely candidate for
the redemption of the land.
As
elsewhere in Africa and Asia, the march of progress
was not something that the natives themselves
were going to lead, languishing as they were
outside of time. That very attribute, however,
also marked them as subjects of a new ethnographic
tradition, exemplified by Conder’s dispatches,
which, in retracing King David’s peregrinations
across the southern Hebron hills, fleeing the
wrath of Saul, sought reference in “the custom
of the modern Bedawi, whose tents in winter are
on the sheltered plains by the Dead Sea shore,
but in summer on the hills at the verge of the
cultivated districts.” For it was not only the
landscape that held clues to the past, but also
the people, because of the place-names they preserved
in their speech, but also because they were thought
to be living links to biblical lifestyles.
Yet
in narrating as palimpsests the land—and lifescapes—of
Palestine, the PEF’s accounts were also peculiarly
transformative. Memoirs of the Topography,
Orography, Hydrography and Archaeology, which
accompanied the Survey of Western Palestine,
deconstructed what its authors deemed to be the
salient components of the landscape and captioned
them according to toponyms—the names of villages,
ruins and hilltops—obtained from the communities
that they visited. And in that imaginative mingling
of lifescape and ruin a curious elision took
place. The sites that the PEF surveyors passed
through were living communities, replete with
people, sights and sounds. This is an excerpt
from the archaeological section of the Memoir,
about the south Hebron hills:
Khurbet
al Fekhit (L x). — Traces of ruins,
and a cave
Khurbet Jedeibeh (L y). — Traces of
ruins
Khurbet Kueiwis (L x). — Traces of
ruins.
It
is only occasionally, in lines like “there are
many rock cisterns all round the village,” that
the reader is reminded of a living landscape
hovering over this vast necropolis, if only as
an ethereal trace. It was a way of reading the
land that deconstructed as it reconstructed,
one in which other pilgrims to Palestine at the
time were well versed. Fond of making meaningful
displays of their guns when encountering Palestinians,
Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad had patience
for the natives only when they were felt to evoke
biblical stock characters; if possible, they
preferred to get straight at the hard foundations
of their faith. Describing a visit to a Galilee
mosque on an apocryphal biblical site, Twain
recalls how “we entered, and the pilgrims broke
specimens from the foundation walls, though they
had to touch, and even step, upon the ‘praying
carpets’ to do it.” It was the dawn of a new
era of discovery, at the peak of which Conder
could report that the PEF had “recovered more
than three quarters of the Bible names,” and
were “thus able to say with confidence that the
Bible topography is a genuine and actual topography.”
In that act of recovery, however, something else
had begun to happen.
Once
Were Villagers
Drying
tomatoes in the sun in the south Hebron
hills. (Eddie Gerald/geophotos.com) |
A
few years ago a man old enough to remember things
took me on a walk around the hamlet of Jinba,
a dozen tarpaulin tents and sheep pens scattered
over the foot of a craggy, mile-long escarpment,
overlooking the desert. “We owned all of that
land, all the way to Arad, and the Dead Sea,”
he said, pointing out across the lower-lying
hills, now part of Israel. From a distance they
look all but empty. The Jahhalin Bedouin from
whom the people here say they once bought the
land are now gone; most were expelled to Jordan,
some shunted to unrecognized villages and government
“development towns” in the northern Naqab. The
others live on a rubbish dump outside the settlement
of Ma’ale Adumim, east of Jerusalem.
What
happened on this side of the border has been
taking more time and it was that time we were
searching for. Having talked a bit, the man took
me around the encampment, trailed by curious
children and scurrying fowl. The downy grass
that briefly covers the high Naqab in spring
had long ago withered and dust puffed up around
our feet as we picked our way around the tents.
“Here,” he would say, sometimes stomping lightly,
and I would bend down to look, readying my notebook.
Sometimes it was a slight indentation in the
ground, other times shallow pits filled in with
gravel, a meaningful regularity in that pile
of stone. Sometimes there were just his words
to go by. Then we came on the remains of a standing
wall, the emptiness of a window still set in
the masonry.
The
standard historical narrative of Masafir Yatta
is that the ancestors of its present-day inhabitants
first settled the area in the early decades of
the nineteenth century, and that they were farmers
from the village of Yatta, today a large town
dominating the southern reaches of the Hebron
mountains. Their descendants will show you Ottoman-era
tax receipts and sometimes ownership documents,
proving their title to some stretch of land.
It is thought that the migration occurred because
of pressure on existing land reserves around
Yatta; in many instances, it was of a seasonal
variety, the farmers setting up camp on their
lands in wintertime, sheltering with their families
in tents and caves, which they successively built
out or improved with stonework.
The
lands that were settled enjoy only modest rainfall,
marking the cultivable margin of the desert frontier,
but in their own fashion, with the means that
were then at their disposal, the arrivals from
Yatta made the desert bloom. Today the agriculture
of Masafir Yatta is about shepherding and the
sale of derivative dairy products like cheese
and ghee. In addition, there is dry-land farming—entailing
the rain-fed cultivation of grains, pulses, fodder
and olives—and smaller-scale cultivation of vegetables
and tobacco. In that respect, you might think
that little has changed over the past two centuries,
barring the addition of tractors and plows. You
would be wrong, perhaps not surprisingly so.
In the historical accounting of things around
here, it’s usually the middle bit that’s the
problem.
A
couple of miles east of Jinba, similarly situated
below the ridge line of the Hebron mountains
on the 1967 Green Line, lie a collection of ruins,
the remains of modest houses and small built-out
caves with masonry doorways still peeking out
from underneath folds of terrain. The site is
just a hundred yards or so off the road that
leads down from the terminal in the wall, hidden
behind the overhanging ridge, and into the towns
of the Naqab. Masked as it is by a low rise of
land, it is easy to miss, but ask people around
here, and they will tell you these are the remains
of the village of Kureitein. Standing on its
ruins, you can overlook the military firing range
that the Israeli army operates here, marked by
a lone rusting tank and concrete slabs spray-painted
with warnings to passing shepherds, all the way
to the tips of the high-rises of the Israeli
town of Arad, and contemplate the alternate future
of Masafir Yatta.
“Khurbet
el Kureitein (K y). — Traces of a large ruin
and caves. Apparently a large town.” The future
excavated by the PEF was once a settlement on
the road connecting Bir al-Saba‘ with Hebron
and Jerusalem, also founded by migrants from
Yatta. According to the people of Jinba, it was
destroyed in an Israeli raid just before the
1967 war, a date they remember well, because
Kureitein’s fate was almost theirs. The same
raid demolished 13 houses in Jinba. Today, the
story of Kureitein endures largely as a folk
tale among the people of the Naqab and the southern
Hebron hills. It is a place about which there
is otherwise very little information; on the
website Palestine Remembered, which catalogues
interviews and information about Palestinian
communities destroyed over the course of the
conflict, no entry exists under that name.
Kureitein
was testimony to a diversity of ways of understanding
the Hebron hills that has since been ironed out
of contemporary discourse, a diversity of pasts,
as well as possible futures. For while it may
be the case that the early migration to the area
was seasonal, and that those who lived here sheltered
in caves, in improving these shelters, adding
walls and, finally, fashioning them into houses,
a tipping point was in some places reached. Today,
transcripts of such development can be found
in nearby towns like al-Karmil, closer inland
to Yatta, where the old houses, often surmounting
the original cave, serve as feed storage units
or animal shelters for families who live above
them in modest, but otherwise modern concrete
houses. Unlike what happened in al-Karmil, however,
time does not always go forward.
Aerial
photographs of Jinba, dating from 1945 to the
present era, chronicle the deconstruction of
a community and the incipient emergence of a
shanty-people. The first image shows numerous
houses, clustered together and surrounded by
extensive orchards outlined in neat rows. The
old man taking me around the hill said that there
were some 30 to 40 houses then—many built out
of natural caves—as well as two shops and a mosque.
In the next photograph, taken in the 1960s around
the time of the border raids, the trees are gone,
along with a number of the houses. In the final
image it is still barely possible make out a
community, some rudimentary structures among
the rock and gravel of the otherwise barren frame.
In the intervening period, Israel had conquered
the West Bank, and a few years later, in the
1970s, established Fire Zone 918 on the lands
of Kureitein and Jinba. There, the Israeli air
force and army would continue to reenact a conflict
that had begun well before 1967 and was now to
enter its redemptive phase. The Innocents had
returned, this time with bulldozers.
Walking
me across his hilltop 40 years later, the old
man had little trouble remembering the names
of the people to whom the rubble had belonged,
most of them being his uncles or cousins, many
of whom were still living here, among their own
ruins. Pinning down the years was more difficult.
Mostly he talked in terms of periods: “1982–1984,”
“before the 1980s” or “the early 2000s.” Sometimes,
because of intermittent repairs, a single structure
had taken time to erase, requiring several demolitions,
over many years. Sometimes it had become something
else. “We built that from the remains of the
house,” he said, pointing to a rocky pen covered
with tarpaulin and chicken wire. We spent the
better part of an afternoon on the hillside and
during this time I made 32 entries in my notebook:
What would have been houses, in what was once
a village, now were mounds of stone and sand,
seeking a form.
Remaking
the Map
The
mapmaker whom I met in a Jerusalem coffee shop
years later was a congenial man, balding and
a bit paunchy, with the reassuring air of a middle-school
teacher, leaning in and smiling when I asked
him questions. He got started, he said, as a
young officer in the Israeli army with a penchant
for Bible history, flying over the southern hills
of Hebron with Ariel Sharon. “It was in 1981,
and I was sent to settle the Nahal camps in the
Hebron area. There were no settlements in the
area then. So I came to the commander of the
Nahal. He said to me you will have a tour in
a helicopter with the general director of the
Ministry of Defense and when I came to the airport,
he was there also, and said, ‘I want to come
too.’”
The
colonization of the southern hills began over
a decade into Israel’s occupation of the West
Bank. Sharon, who that year went from being agriculture
minister to defense minister in the government
of Menachem Begin, was the chief architect of
this renewed land grab. As in many other locations
around the West Bank, settlements were established
on sites commandeered by the settlement brigade
of the Israeli army, but the underlying map from
which they were working had been laid beforehand.
“We talked about Jewish history,” recalled the
mapmaker, “the archaeological sites, the Bible
stories everywhere. I was very knowledgeable
about that.” And like everyone else he had a
favorite story. “There was the one about King
David, the time that he was fleeing King Saul….”
There
are at least two ways of narrating what happened
in the years following that helicopter-borne
reconnaissance. Taking one community as an example,
one could say that the hamlet of Susiya, situated
north of Route 317, had the misfortune of being
close to some Byzantine ruins familiar from nineteenth-century
maps, leading a team of Israeli archaeologists
in 1971 to conduct excavations that unearthed
an ancient synagogue. Thereafter, “the settlement
of Susiya was established in 1983 about two kilometers
southwest of the synagogue. The area was declared
as a National Park in 1985 and the community
was evicted from their original caves in 1986.
The evicted Palestinians settled in an area south
of the original village. When the IDF built an
army base near the synagogue in the late 1990s,
the villages found themselves trapped between
the base and the settlement. A series of demolitions
took place beginning in 2001 prompting a series
of legal proceedings.”
The
latter part of the above paragraph is culled
from a brief on vulnerable communities in the
south Hebron hills, prepared by OCHA, and is
easily obtained by any journalist seeking information
about the area. I write this because in June,
the New York Times, in covering a certain
videotaped attack on the village of Susiya, would
tell its history of excavation, displacement,
demolition and expropriation as follows: “Ancient
Susiya contains the ruins of a synagogue dating
from the Roman period, attesting to a long and
robust Jewish presence here. Jewish settlers
started moving in again after Israel occupied
the West Bank in 1967.”
It
was not just the Times that developed
problems with the middle bit. As history was
welded together across the southern hills, with
new roads, houses, electricity pylons, water
pipes, sprinklers and bus routes, something very
different happened out in Masafir Yatta. Between
1985 and 1987, the IDF demolished 40 caves, 20
houses and one mosque in the place known once,
and yet again, as “Khurbet Janbah (L y). — Traces
of ruins. Foundations and heaps of stones.” Government
policy and the local settler population ensured
that the stones would stay in heaps. In 1991,
Jinba and its surrounding hamlets invested some
120,000 shekels to pave a road that would connect
them with Yatta. Settlers closed the road the
following year and remaining work was aborted.
The next year, the Oslo accords were signed,
an agreement that promised new autonomy in the
urban population centers of the occupied territories,
but left most of the territory as Area C, in
which construction required permission from the
Israeli Civil Administration.
The
mapmaker fondly recalled those times. “Yasser
Arafat used to call me Abu Kharita, Father of
Maps,” he likes to tell journalists, “but it
is a joke because there is another Arabic word
which sounds similar which means ‘nonsense.’”
What that would mean for the residents of Masafir
Yatta would be inflected by the work of another
kind of mapper, a young reservist who had completed
his research in the previous decade, and published
his ethnography, Life in the Hebron Caves, in
1985, courtesy of the Israel Defense Forces,
which had for some reason taken an ethnographic
interest in the area, or perhaps only thought
it worthwhile that someone did. Ya’acov Havacook’s
book would gather dust on the shelves for the
next 15 years, but its readership picked up thereafter.
“A
Unique Way of Living”
The
first evacuation of Masafir Yatta took place
in October 1999, and for a few days it might
well have seemed as if history was repeating
itself. Everyone was herded onto trucks, men,
women and children, some 700 people in all. Caves
were sealed and belongings and sheep packed off,
some dumped as far the northern Jordan valley.
“We had to pay 50 shekels per head to ship them
back,” said the old man in Jinba. Not since the
villages of Latrun were emptied after 1967 war
had so many people been forced from their homes
in the West Bank, and if the army had had its
way, the outcome would have been the same. Further
evacuations were carried out in November, and
still they sneaked back across the hills. “The
soldiers said we are like rats,” related the
old man, grinning. By then, however, another
appellation was also swinging into fashion. The
“cave dwellers” of the south Hebron hills had
emerged.
The
first petition to allow the residents to return
to the area was filed on behalf of four local
families by the Association for Civil Rights
in Israel (ACRI) in January 2000, and never has
the road back to a dark, dank place been paved
with better intentions. The lawyer, a Jew of
Arab descent from Yemen, had, as she put it,
“been involved in the issue of cultural rights
inside Israel,” and it was that experience that
gave her the idea of making the ethnographic
argument. It was also a humanizing strategy,
she added later. “Israelis never think of Palestinians
as having culture,” a form of condescension she
herself had experienced. As she put it, the ethnographic
argument was “a decoration” on the core of the
petition. “There are so many violations, you
want your case to succeed, so you have to make
it special.” Yet the choice at hand in this plea
would ultimately prove far from incidental. “We
could have said, ‘Some Palestinians were deported’
or ‘Look, a poor people, living in caves.’”
In
expelling the residents of Masafir Yatta, the
government argued, through the extended, and
ongoing, legal process that ensued, that they
were clearing an area that had been a closed
military zone since Fire Zone 918 was established.
The petitioners were not permanent residents,
but lived there on a seasonal basis, and could
therefore be evicted. Under pressure from the
courts, and public opinion, the government soon
offered to regulate the time the Arabs could
spend there, allowing them to work the land during
planting and harvesting season, and Jewish holidays.
This way of eviscerating the meaning of being-in-place
would not coincidentally be exported to the closed
military zones sheared off by Israel’s wall.
If the Arabs were not yet nomadic, in other words,
the state intended to make them so.
ACRI’s
case relied on arguing more or less the opposite.
In this respect, Havacook’s Life in the Hebron
Caves, the anthropological text that came
to serve as the standard referent for the legal
debate, contained something for everyone,
and not enough for anyone. “It wasn’t so good
for us, because he wrote that they only lived
there part of the year,” recalled the ACRI lawyer.
“But what was great is that you could see that
the people were there from before; they didn’t
just arrive there two years ago.” In actuality,
Havacook’s book did suggest that at least some
residents were permanent residents, but the case
was already being tried in a bigger arena than
the Supreme Court building.
Residents
performed for the camera, acting out the emotional
significance of the caves, something that played
well with Israel’s culture vultures, as well
as liberal figures within the political establishment.
First into the fray was Israeli writer David
Grossman, who accompanied then-Knesset speaker
Avraham Burg on a visit to the southern hills,
a declaration of conscience all the more notable
because Grossman would, two years later, along
with writers Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua, sign
a letter to the Palestinian leadership in response
to the outbreak of the second intifada,
which vowed that Palestinian refugees would never
be allowed to return to their homes in what is
today Israel. But these were not “some Palestinians
who had been deported.” “It is a unique way of
living,” the lawyer emphasized several times
and I believed she believed it, even as she added,
as an afterthought, “unique enough to get to
the heart of the judges.”
When
the court finally acceded to the residents’ return,
pending the outcome of an ultimately abortive
mediation process, the lawyer felt that “it was
an unbelievable decision. I never expected it
to happen.” Yet it is not difficult to see how
it did. The culture on display was not the poetry
of Mahmoud Darwish, but caves. In a sense, what
was being promoted was the right of the southern
hills residents to be ethnics, bearers of a culture
outside history, one that is neither a product
of nor reproduces national identity and its derivative
claims. Such a role meshes well with the colonial
sensibility about what and who Arabs are that
has been under development since at least 1865.
As the lawyer put it: “I think we explained to
the judges who these people were.”
Drawing
the Line
In
his final commentary on a shaky video feed from
a remote corner of the West Bank, a BBC reporter
grasps for poignancy. “Violence against Jews
as well as Palestinians has long scarred this
place. Video may now be giving us a new and raw
view, but for most people here, the only answer,
a political deal, remains out of sight.” He need
not have grasped. A closing line of sorts curves
conspicuously over the hillcrest that overlooks
Susiya and the Hebron hills. The mapmaker would
have drawn the line elsewhere, he said, and at
first he did. In 2004, the idea was briefly put
forward to transfer the inhabitants of Masafir
Yatta to a small plot on the other side of the
fence. But certain considerations intervened.
It will still take land, that is clear, but how
much, and what does it mean, and for whom? I
lost track of the number of times that he used
the word “compromise” during our meeting. “It
is very hard for me, every single centimeter.
But I know that I do this job better than people
who have no feelings about the land,” he told
me.
Something
about the compromise that prevails in Masafir
Yatta feels pertinent to this closing horizon.
Toward the end of our conversation, the lawyer
told me that she had concerns about the repercussions
of pushing a culture-centered legal strategy
to its logical conclusion. “I talked to anthropologists
and they said this should be declared a UNESCO
site. I didn’t pursue it because you know what
happens if you put people in a site like this.
They will be unable to live there. It becomes
a reservation,” she said. What she had forgot
to mention, was that the Israeli Supreme Court
did not allow caves to be repaired, or houses
rebuilt. Time would not go forward. The people
of the south Hebron hills have been ensured of
survival, after a fashion, by being cast as a
museum exhibit—and perhaps something else, as
well.
Commenting
on the success of its Shooting Back video project,
a B’Tselem spokesman interviewed by the BBC introduced
the protagonists as people “who all the year
were used to being attacked and trying to avoid
trouble, trying to go around the corner because
they didn’t want [inaudible].” We never learn
what they want, and perhaps it doesn’t matter.
It is something modest and apolitical—that is
clear. When they Shoot Back, the New York
Times will be there to put it in context.
Archaic ethnics are the most up-to-date of humanitarian
subjects, model citizens of a country forever
awaiting a political solution, stranded in time.
