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A ride in the countryside

Saturday was my last day in Ramallah, and Amira Hass had offered to drive me around the outskirts of the city to see the many settlements that encircle it–she calls this her “5-star prison tour.”  It took us three hours to do just the north-east quadrant, driving through lovely, disorienting, hills on some roads that had once been closed to Palestinians and were now open, on others that had once been open and were now blocked.  At one Palestinian village, close to the settlement Beit El, we pulled up at a row of houses just downhill from the red-roofed settlement buildings.  Two burnt-out vehicles, a sedan and a truck, were parked by the side of the road; they’d been torched, we were told, by the settlers, in a “price-tag” attack earlier in the year.  Living this close to a settlement is no fun.  But of course the villagers hadn’t chosen to live this close:  their homes had been built when this was Jordanian territory in the fifties and sixties; later, in 1970, some of the village’s land had been confiscated and the settlement had been plonked down  on the crest of the hill.

We were taken up on the roof of one of the houses and shown the results of the stonings the village received from above:  solar panels–attached to rooftop water tanks–had been smashed on either side of where we were standing.  The owners of those homes had finally abandoned their houses and moved elsewhere.  Our host, however, was still hanging in; he’d fashioned a metal grating to shield his glass panels, but that hadn’t deterred the settler youth: there were stones to be seen lying around his rooftop, although the panels, for the moment, were still intact.

  Looking uphill, I estimated that it was about 100 yards from the elaborate settlement security fence down to our host’s roof and remarked that that was quite a throw.  He said that often the settlers projected their stones from slings (in the manner of their ancestor, David).  Then he added, “to be fair,” that not all the settlers participated in this aggression, and pointed to one red-roofed house whose occupants had objected to the stoning, had even called the police in to stop it, on one occasion.  (Their house shows up on the far right in this photo.)  Astonishing that he should feel the need “to be fair.”  I asked what he did for a living:  he was a teacher in a local school, he said, having taken a master’s degree at my university, Al Quds.

Still more puzzling than this Palestinian’s decency is the vehemence of the Beit El settlers.  Why bother to stone their neighbors’ rooftops when there are so many other ways they can, with the help of their government, impose their presence on the villagers?  They’ve got the land, the water, the infrastructure, the arrangement of roads, the security patrols–and the military power to contest any attempt to deprive them of these advantages.  Why this archaic stoning?  Where is this hatred coming from?  What need is it satisfying?

I’m embarrassed to find myself citing Oscar Hammerstein’s schmaltzy lyrics from South Pacific but, in fact, “you’ve got to be taught”!  I’d had a run-in with the fruits of such teaching earlier in the spring.  I’d learned that an Israeli organization called Zochrot, dedicated to reminding Israelis of their own suppressed history, had organized a tour to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the massacre of the Arab villagers of Deir Yassin during Israel’s 1948 “War of Independence.”  So a friend and I took the Jerusalem light rail out to the western edge of the city, which had, in the intervening years, fully incorporated what was left of Deir Yassin into its dense, high-rise, urban fabric.  A survivor of the massacre, now in his 70s, showed a group of us around, pointing out his family’s house, the elementary school he had attended (now a Lubavitch Chabad), etc.  There were about twenty of us on the tour–mostly Israelis, along with a couple of Palestinians and some other foreigners–and as we were assembling in a parking area I had noticed a bunch of soldiers and police hanging out nearby.  “Oh god,”  I thought, “are they here to give us a hard time?”  But no, they were there to protect us from right-wing hecklers, it turned out, and a good thing, too! For we were to be followed through what had been the streets of the village by a small but demonstrative crowd who were, fortunately, kept by the soldiers at a safe distance.  At one point, we had assembled in front of an Arab building so that our guide could read out the names of the 93 dead from that day back in 1948.  As each name was read out, in Hebrew and Arabic, our hecklers cheered, and two teenaged girls who had somehow insinuated themselves into the front row of our group clapped their hands loudly.  I was appalled and later went up to one of the girls–she’s wearing glasses and a long blue skirt in this photo–and asked her how she could applaud the killing of anyone.  She should be ashamed of herself, I added, but before I could get that short sentence out she had countered–in English–“It is you that should be ashamed of your self!  Marching with our enemies!”  What can she, at sixteen, know of her enemies except what she’s been taught in her religious school: that the Arabs “are” Amalek, the tribe who attacked the Israelites on their way through the desert all those centuries ago?  I had first learned of that equation in 2011, when the Chief Rabbi of Israel cited it in his funeral oration over the body of a young father murdered, with his family, at the religious settlement of Itamar, near Nablus.  Since then I’ve run into frequent references to Amalek in reports of right-wing polemics:  “Amalek is here!” as the Chief Rabbi insisted, and, among the religious-nationalist settlers–like the stone slingers of Beit El–that allusion counts as history, a history that informs–and ought to inform–their present conduct.  The shame is not that some relatively small fraction of Israeli society believes in Amalek, but rather that their mostly secular but highly cynical politicians have, down through the years, seen nothing wrong in encouraging such devout hatred.

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