Gideon Levy : They came, they razed, they left: A visit to a destroyed Palestinian village
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Israel is continuing to destroy systematically the villages of shepherds who live in the Jordan Rift. Last week, the Civil Administration demolished Homsa, another tiny Palestinian village. In January, 160 residents of the valley were made homeless; last year, twice as many were left homeless as in the year before.
The remains of Homsa, March 10, 2014. The demolition was over in an hour. Photo by Alex Levac
……………………..http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/twilight-zone/.premium-1.585009Israel is continuing to destroy systematically the villages of shepherds who live in the Jordan Rift. Last week, the Civil Administration demolished Homsa, another tiny Palestinian village. In January, 160 residents of the valley were made homeless; last year, twice as many were left homeless as in the year before.
Again the same unconscionable sights:
heaps of debris, bare metal pegs lunging out of the earth, crushed
fences, destroyed animal pens and squashed tin huts; remnants of
personal property strewn all over; sheep wandering about looking in vain
for shade; chickens pecking about; despondent shepherds; wretched sheep
dogs; runny-nosed children curled up in Grandmother’s lap and merciless
sun beating down.
Residents of Homsa. April 10, 2014. Photo by Alex Levac
Another Palestinian shepherd community
trampled into the ground. Not the first, nor the last to meet such a
fate in this hard, battered valley, whose Palestinian inhabitants Israel
has set itself the goal of cleansing itself of, far from the public’s
eye. Step by step, devastating act after devastating act, community
after community – there are hundreds whose lives and property have been
laid waste recently by the Civil Administration.
It’s the law that’s to blame, of course,
the occupier’s law. It’s the law, under whose apparent aegis illegal
outposts are established and legalized in the twinkling of an eye. And
it’s the occupier, thanks to whose auspices these thousands of people,
native sons, have neither running water nor electric power nor rights to
inhabit the slopes of the verdant, flourishing Jordan Valley.
In 2013, according to United Nations
data, Israel more than doubled the demolition of homes and other
structures belonging to Palestinians in the valley, as compared to the
previous year. Last year, 390 structures were demolished, compared to
170 in 2012, and 590 people were made homeless, compared to 160 the
previous year.
The Palestinian news agency Ma’an
reported that in January of this year alone, 160 more people were left
to fend for themselves under the open skies, after the Civil
Administration demolished their homes. On January 8, for example,
Khirbet Ein Karzaliyah, home to 25 souls, 15 of them children, was
razed; on January 30, the hovels of Khirbet Umm al-Jimal, where 61
people, half of them children, lived, was the victim of a similar fate.
Last week came the turn of Homsa,
located in the northern part of the valley, home to four families of
shepherds – a total of 30 people, 15 of them children, and some 500 head
of sheep.
About half a year ago, last September,
the community of Khalat Makhoul, adjacent to the settlement of Hemdat,
was almost completely eradicated, leaving 12 families without shelter.
The residents have since rebuilt their homes and their sheep pens, and
now the community has risen again, phoenix-like, from the rubble. It’s a
joyful, encouraging sight to see. New tents and tin shacks have been
erected in place of the ones that were destroyed, new faucets have been
connected to the water containers (of course, this site is not hooked up
to the water system), plus there is solar-generated electricity in the
new Khalat Makhoul.
Together with two of its residents,
Burhan and Bassam Bushrat, we went this week to see what the Civil
Administration had inflicted upon their neighbors, members of the Homsa
community.
Immediately after the Jewish settlement
of Bekaot, at the end of its well-tended rows of grape vines which are
now covered with protective nets against all intruders, we turn onto a
long serpentine, dirt path that ascends eastward into the hills and
traverses the fields that belong to Palestinian landowners from Toubas
and Tamoun; at present, the fields are being worked by local tenant
farmers.
Under the blazing light, the wheat and
the barley are lush and green now. On the slopes of a remote hill, in
the heart of a sea of stalks, far from any other place of habitation,
lie ruin and devastation. Sitting in a white tent donated by the
Palestinian Red Crescent, surrounded by mounds of ruins, is Hakam Abu
al-Kabash, a shepherd. The aftermath of the shock is still etched on his
face. He’s 28, the father of four young children, the youngest of whom
is 7 months old. He was here last week on Tuesday, just after 7 A.M.,
with his wife, their children and his parents when the forces of the
Civil Administration swooped in to ravage his hamlet.
The troops, Israel’s agents of
destruction, a fleet of about 25 vehicles including trucks and
bulldozers, accompanied by Border Police and others, had come to uproot
the community, on the grounds that their habitation was illegal, even
though they had lived there for years, on private Palestinian land.
Kabash was born here, and for the past eight years he has lived in Homsa
in the heart of the wheat fields.
The act of demolition was swift; it was
all over in an hour. They came, they razed, they left. According to
Kabash, no one bothered to explain why. Maybe the troops were in a hurry
– another tent encampment was demolished that same day, belonging to
another shepherd, Abed al-Fadiya, not far away, near the settlement of
Hamra.
Three days earlier, Civil Administration
personnel, armed with cameras, had come to Homsa and documented what
they saw, on what turned out to be the eve of its destruction. It was a
bad omen. On the fateful day, the workers removed the meager household
effects, cranes lifted up the huts and the pens, and the bulldozers
crushed the remains, flattening the hamlet, as residents watched from
the side. As easy as pie.
Not a word about this appeared in the
Israeli media. I couldn’t find any mention of it this time even on
websites of Israel and Palestinian human rights groups that generally
report on such events. Who cares? More Palestinian rubble in the Jordan
valley? Boring, routine.
“Where will the child go?” asked the
neighbor from Khalat Makhoul, Burhan Bushrat, himself a study in the
survival of ordeals, in reply to my question about Kabash’s infant. “The
baby was here and so was his mother,” the father said in a flat tone of
voice. “And now he is out in the sun.” What will you do? Kabash is
taken aback by the question. “We will stay here. We will rebuild. Where
can we go?”
The spokesman of the Coordinator of
Government Activities in the Territories told Haaretz this week: “This
was an illegal structure [referring to Kabash’s home, although we asked
about the community in general], which was built without a building
permit. The request of the owner for a permit was not completed after a
process of two years. With no response having been received from the
owner or his representative at the institutions of the Civil
Administration, it was decided to implement the demolition order on
April 1.
A source within the administration
explained the process in the following way: The original demolition
order was issued to the structure’s owner on May 10, 2012. Prior to the
owner’s appeal, which was submitted on August 2, 2012, he was given
three extensions. On March 6, 2013, the owner was told he had 30 days to
demolish the structure himself.
A boy loads a newborn lamb onto the back
of a spluttering Subaru pickup. The sheep pen used to be here, and the
tent where the family lived was over there. Grandma Jamili is sitting in
the white tent of the Red Crescent and half a dozen toddlers are
snuggling up to her, all of them barefoot and with runny noses, their
faces covered with sores and flies. Some of the children have blonde
hair and blue eyes.
The closest school is 20 kilometers
away; the children are usually transported via a cart hitched to a
tractor. Now they are all sleeping in the open, in the cold and in the
heat, and the men watch over the sheep, which have no pen, all night. An
open packet of biscuits, half eaten, protrudes from the heap of
household goods they managed to salvage, along with a pair of tattered
gold-colored women’s shoes. The small silver-colored suitcase in which
Kabash keeps his documents is also part of the pile. A T-shirt with the
words “Our Theater” emblazoned on it in Hebrew flaps on the clothesline
in the spring breeze, next to a Palestinian keffiyeh.
Not far away, at the entrance to Bekaot,
something different is flapping in the wind: a banner, announcing
“Independence Day. 7 PM in the amphitheater. Berry Sakharoff, Knesiyat
Hasechel and fireworks. The Jordan Rift. An Israeli success story.” On
our Independence Day, fireworks bursting in the air in the skies over
the Jordan valley will illuminate the surrounding fields on a dark and
joyous night.
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