Hill Dancers
The Sheriff

By Aviv Lavie

Original Haaretz Article

Avri Ran has a farm and Jewish followers in the West Bank. But for his Arab neighbors, it's a rule by force.

The admiration shown for Avri Ran by the Jewish residents of hilltops in Samaria is matched only by the fear and loathing he arouses among the Palestinian neighbors there and the peace activists who are working with them. All of them agree that the kibbutznik who got religion and set up a farm on the easternmost hill of the territory encompassed by the master plan for the West Bank settlement of Itamar is no ordinary person. "The founder of the narrative of the outposts," is the definition offered this week by an activist in the Yesha Council of Jewish settlements. "With his body and by his way of life he is realizing the triple connection: man, land, God." According to the ultranationalist activist and failed Knesset candidate Baruch Marzel, "He is a very serious Jew, and unlike other leaders, he says little and does a great deal."

"He thinks he is a sheriff but he behaves like a terrorist," is the opinion of Abdul Latif Bani Jaber, the head of the council in Yanun, the Palestinian village whose bad luck it is to be located in the valley below Ran's farm. Last October, when the harassment of the village by Ran and his people became intolerable, the residents abandoned their homes, leaving behind only two aged people who refused to accept the decision to go. Some of the villagers have since returned, but the fear in their eyes when they talk about "Avri" is obvious.

David Nir is one person who won't forget Avri Ran. Nir, from Tel Aviv, who has a doctoral degree in physics and is a high-tech entrepreneur, is active in Ta'ayush, an Arab-Jewish partnership. He arrived in Yanun on February 1 to join others in the organization who were assisting the villagers in the face of the harassment by the settlers - "the boys from Avri's farm," as the residents of the area call them. In Yanun, Nir met two peace activists from the International Solidarity Movement, Satoshi Itacura from Japan, and Colin Kelsall from England. They told him that two days earlier they had encountered two settlers on the hill above, who at gunpoint had forced them to strip down to their underclothing, forced them to lie on rocks in the mud and rain, only releasing them some hours later. When they returned to the village, Itacura suddenly realized that he had left an expensive camera back on the hill.

Nir suggested that they go back to look for the camera. The peace activists and their Palestinian hosts warned him about the settlers: Anyone who approached the fence around Ran's farm was taking his life in his hands. Nir decided to coordinate the search with the army, which sent a jeep with five soldiers on the mission. Nir and the soldiers climbed up the hill, and within minutes Avri Ran appeared, accompanied by one of his employees, Yissachar Bander, the two of them armed with M-16 rifles.

They wasted no time. As the soldiers watched, the two began to chase Nir. He heard the company commander shouting into his radio, "This is the last time I'm going to take a mission like this, I'm not willing to get involved." Nir tried to take refuge behind one of the soldiers, but Ran was faster. The pursuit ended in an encounter between Ran's rifle barrel and Nir's face.

The medical report describes dryly a "deep cut from the bridge of the nose on the left down to the left upper lip, and swelling in a lateral area to the left nostril." Nir was taken to Ichilov Hospital, where he had stitches under local anesthetic, though not before he filed a complaint at the police station in the West Bank city of Ariel. To his surprise, the police investigation concluded quickly. Ran was indicted on two counts: "wounding in aggravated circumstances" and aggravated assault. The trial opened in Magistrate's Court in Kfar Sava on March 21; the next hearing is set for the beginning of June.

Eggs and holy places

The title "sheriff" fits Ran very well. The chain of hills east of Itamar is where the orderly occupation ends and the wild West Bank begins, or perhaps the wild east of the Land of Israel. The army and the police rarely show a presence here, letting the residents of the hilltop outposts and the villagers in the valley work things out between them - which they do, in the best tradition of Wild West law. The area has known very few moments of quiet since Ran established his farm.

Long before he became the sheriff of the hills around Itamar, Avri Ran was a boy on Kibbutz Nahsholim. He grew up and attended school there until a year before his army service, when he left together with his mother and his brother, who later joined the Shin Bet security service. People on the kibbutz remember a delightful, handsome boy who was a favorite with the girls. Since he left, there has been almost no contact with him. He served as a company commander in the Armored Corps (he is now a retired lieutenant colonel), afterward living in a small apartment in Tel Aviv close to the old basketball arena of Maccabi Tel Aviv. He made a living from a factory that made sandals and leather shoes in the Ramat Gan area.

After Ran and his wife, Sharona, from Moshav Neve Yerek, became ultra-Orthodox, they decided to make a dramatic change in their way of life. Shortly before the signing of the Oslo accord, in September, 1993, they moved to Itamar, which lies close to Nablus. At first they lived on the settlement itself, building a large organic chicken coop. There was nothing unusual about this. Quite a few former kibbutzniks who turned religious live in Itamar or on other settlements in the area, and some of them have chosen an agricultural way of life and specialize in organic farming.

To strengthen the ties with the land, and at the same time draw closer to God, Ran and his wife decided to move to the top of one of the high hills east of the settlement. Their vision corresponded with the expansionist ambitions of Itamar. Under the Olso agreement, Itamar, like other settlements around Nablus, became a candidate for abandonment in the first wave of evacuations. Itamar decided to fight this possibility by creating facts on the ground: The idea was to establish a series of sites toward the east, in the hope of one day connecting with the settlements in the Jordan Rift Valley, which the Israeli government had determined would not be evacuated even in a final treaty.

Thus, in a series of moves in the second half of the 1990s, under both Labor and Likud governments, Itamar annexed one hill after another, creating a narrow rectangle of about five kilometers toward the east, which gave the settlement a total area of some 6,000 dunams (1,500 acres) according to the master plan that was officially approved in November, 1999. There are a few hundred families in Itamar. By comparison, the city of Bat Yam, with a population of 150,000, has an area of 8,000 dunams.

In short order it turned out that these hills are a holy site for Judaism. One of the local residents, a member of the Bratslav Hasidim community, had a dream that the judge Gideon Ben Yehoash was buried on one of the hills. Immediately a gravesite was established there. Today the tomb is a site of pilgrimage - some of the visitors light candles - and it even appears on some maps. The biblical judge also gave the series of outposts their name: Gideonim Aleph, Bet Gimmel. The fourth outpost, which is 4.5 kilometers from the settlement itself, is called "Gvaot Olam" ("hills of the universe"), and with good reason: It boats a breathtaking view of the Rift Valley and the Dead Sea. It was the local boss, Avri Ran, who came up with the dramatic name.

The hilltop farm, which began to be built in 1998, provides the Rans with a good living. In addition to the organic eggs, they produce cheese from sheep's milk, which is sold at natural goods stores, especially in Jerusalem, under the logo "Gvaot Olam." There are also quite a few horses and dogs on the farm. Visitors to Itamar's Website can get a comprehensive explanation of the advantages of organic eggs, and regular delivery is promised to those who are interested. "The eggs are collected daily by Jewish, Shabbat- observant labor," the site states.

Guru with paychecks

The Rans, who are aged about 50, are not alone on their farm. They have ten children, most of whom, including some of the married daughters, live with them. One of the daughters, Sarah, is married to Neriya, the son of Gabi and Bracha Ben Yitzhak, who have been living for many years in a caravan at Tel Rumeida, in Hebron, and are considered part of the settler aristocracy. To accommodate the many residents, a series of structures was established at the farm, including a synagogue. An agreement that was signed at the time between the Yesha Council and the Labor government of Ehud Barak categorized Gvaot Olam as a "frozen" settlement, but that did not stop it from developing rapidly. In October, 1999 there were ten structures at the site; last August there were 15.

In addition to the family members, the farm is also home to "the boys." This group of youngsters, some of them permanent residents, some who come and go, work on the farm, though their main motivation for being there is that they view Ran as a role model, a spiritual mentor. Young people, some of whom have been dubbed the "hilltop youth," come to the farm from all parts of the country.

A resident of Itamar explains the source of the attraction: "He impresses everyone because of his authenticity, because he is true, and he is also a superb farmer who makes a very respectable living from his land and doesn't get a red cent from any establishment. He relies only on himself and on his people. He is very fanatic.

"All kinds of weird, detached types also come to him, guys who have been thrown out of all kinds of places and find in him a refuge from the establishment and from their parents, and are looking for a spiritual shepherd. When they come to him they do what he says."

Ran has "the dimensions of a mythic figure in the hills," says a person who follows the activities of Ran and his admirers. "It's a bit like an ashram there and he is their guru."

Baruch Marzel describes the relations between Ran and his cohorts in terms of a social mission: "He is the daddy of the hilltop people; he looks after them and takes care of them. He is very hospitable, he has a big heart. He appeals to people who have no home, drawing them close and strengthening them."

One of the youngsters who came to Gvaot Olam to work was Gur Hammel, from Sa'ad, a religious kibbutz. In October, 1998, Hammel visited his sister, Kama, at Itamar and then set out on foot, knapsack on his back, to Avri Ran's farm. On the way, he encountered a 77-year-old Palestinian, Mohammed Suleiman a-Zalmut, from the nearby village of Beir Fouriq. For reasons that are unclear, Hammel smashed Zalmut's skull with a rock. That night the Itamar secretariat issued an information page to the settlers: "We roundly condemn the criminal act." The secretariat emphasized that the perpetrator "is not one of us."Hammel was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in May, 2000.

Hostile to the press

Mussi Raz, a former Knesset member for Meretz and before that the secretary general of Peace Now, met Avri Ran face to face only once, but he remembers the encounter vividly. In the early summer of 1999, during the period of the Barak government, Raz undertook a tour of the outposts with Didi Remez, who was then part of the Peace Now team that monitors the settlements, and Michal Kafra, a journalist with the daily Ma'ariv. In the course of their tour the three came to Gvaot Olam. They were welcomed with open arms. Sharona Ran and the staff thought they were hikers who had come to enjoy the vistas of the Holy Land. They were invited to the guests' pavilion and plied with coffee. They remember a huge cloth-covered pavilion, a long table, small Persian-style carpets, shabby armchairs and sofas, a group of kids around 16 or 17, and the atmosphere of a commune. Kafra described the scene in Ma'ariv: "Long-haired, sloppily dressed youngsters, who despite the kippas and the fringed garments, bore a striking resemblance to their brethren, the young secular freaks, and not least because the fragrance of a joint tickled our nostrils."

Kafra then informed their hosts that she was a journalist. Instantly the atmosphere changed. Sharona Ran chased them out, shouting, "Journalists? Get out of here now, right away!" On their way out they ran into Avri Ran, who had just arrived. He too informed them that journalists were not welcome, then took the opportunity to expound Torah to them for a time.

Kafra, in Ma'ariv: "He has a trenchant, almost piercing gaze. Then he opens his mouth. The tone is somewhat monotonous, ostensibly quiet, and the eyes give no shelter. In his articulate style he explains how the media caused the people of Israel to be the basest of peoples, because it is the only people that betrayed its land. His words, which are hard to reconstruct, are rattled off like a machine gun. You, he says, you would give Hitler, if he were alive, the Nobel Peace Prize. His vast love for the sacred soil, for this divine soil, is mixed with his grudge toward the Arabs and the Palestinians, who are particularly low, and for Arafat and the journalists, who are guilty of the greatest treason of all."

Others who have met Ran have also come away deeply impressed. A correspondent in the territories who visited the farm shortly after its establishment recalls, "Right off you realize that he is not an ordinary person. There is some sort of pent-up fanaticism about him. He speaks quietly, but that quiet reflects a great piety. I asked him for an interview but he refused vehemently, though to my surprise he was well informed about everything that was going on in the media, especially the radio. He gave all kinds of examples, especially the name Sheli Yachimovich [former anchor of a popular Israel Radio current events program]. He emphasized that his advantage lies in the fact that `I have already been where you are today.'"

Hostility to the media is a recurrent motif in Ran's worldview. Some say that even Arutz Sheva - the settlers' pirate radio station - is anathema to him. An employee of the Samaria Local Council relates that from time to time the idea comes up of making use of Ran's charisma for media purposes, but such initiatives always run up against a stone wall. "We wanted to organize a PR item about his cheeses for a food program, but he wouldn't have any part of it."

Scourge of

the Palestinians

Apart from journalists, there is one other group of people who are not wanted at the Ran family farm: Arabs. A resident of Itamar describes Ran's relations with the Palestinians ironically: "They respect him very much, to put it mildly." And, after a pause, he adds, "And they have good reason."

Yanun is a tiny village of about 150 families, most of which have been there for hundreds of years and earn a modest living from olive groves and wheat fields. The village, which is connected to the outer world by a rough dirt trail, is in Area C - under full Israeli control - but in the first few years of the Oslo process the political changes did not affect the quiet valley in which it lies. The tranquility ended on the day Itamar started its eastward expansion. For the past seven years, the residents of Yanun have paid a high price for their original sin: They live in a place that is like a thorn in the heart of the settlers' expansion.

Abdul Latif Bani Jaber, 48, is the head of the Yanun local council. He is almost the only person the residents - most of whom are women, children and elderly people - can turn to in distress. He walks around with a large brown notebook covered with a thick layer of Scotch tape, in which he keeps a systematic record of the untoward events that the village is experiencing. In the past few years the notebook has been filling up at a worrying rate.

The change, he says, began in 1996, even before "Avri" showed up. The villagers noticed activity on the hills around: Here and there a tractor was leveling the ground, there was an increased presence of settlers. Suddenly it was dangerous for the villagers to go too far in their fields, and the hills became forbidden ground. Those who violated the rules paid dearly, like the old man who one day returned home beaten and bleeding because he had crossed some invisible boundary line.

One morning at the end of 1997, the villagers awakened to the sound of tractors that mowed down wheat fields and olive trees on the outskirts of Yanun. Soon tents were set up there, and it was obvious that they were there to stay.

Bani Jaber first met Avri Ran in 1998. He had gone to the district liaison office (which no longer exists) to complain that Ran was building a farm on village land. He was told that everything had been approved and that Ran only wanted to live quietly on the hill. Instead of quiet, though, a violent storm soon raged. The complaint, Bani Jaber says, irritated the farm people and they reacted by shooting in the air, denying the villagers access to their well and generally intimidating them, all under the auspices of the New Middle East of the Oslo accord.

The ring around the village tightened. The surrounding hilltops were soon covered with watchtowers, caravans, permanent structures and fences. "Walk through the streets of Yanun at night; the small village is dark and the surroundings are pastoral," the historian Gadi Elgazi wrote in an article in Haaretz. "But even in the village itself the inhabitants are not alone: On the hill above, the settlers' watchtowers can be seen, and from the hill on the other side you can see the caravans and the vehicles. The people of Yanun are surrounded in their homeland, like a reservation whose days are numbered."

The villagers had no security even within the reservation. The incidents multiplied, the words in Ban Jaber's notebook became increasingly cramped for space. There are the relatively minor harassments: the settlers' Shabbat walks along the village's paths, with their weapons, their children and their dogs, when they sometimes demand that the villagers stay in their houses while they take in the view. These walks have become a custom - so much so that the village children ask their parents every day in fear whether "today is Shabbat."

On weekdays, too, Yanun is visited by the occasional settler, usually one of the boys from Gvaot Olam, who cuts through the village on an all-terrain vehicle or on horseback. At night the settlers sometimes carry out intimidation marches on the villagers' houses. Every night the village is illuminated by searchlights that the settlers beam from their watchtowers.

The thin line between harassment and outright violence was quickly crossed. In May, 2001, B'Tselem, the human rights organization, reported a serious incident, in which a large group of settlers seized five residents of Yanun who were working a field that belongs to their family. The Palestinians were working about 300 meters from the farm fence. Shortly after they arrived, two civilian jeeps, carrying about 12 armed settlers, pulled up. Ghasan Khader Suleiman, 35, the eldest member of the group of Palestinians who were in the field, gave a B'Tselem fieldworker the following account:

"They saw that we intended to leave and three of them started to shoot at us and at the herd of sheep. We hid behind boulders and started to move away by crawling backward. Suddenly I saw that five of the settlers were running toward us from the opposite direction. The five settlers caught up with me. I recognized one of them, a man named Avri, about 50. Avri aimed his weapon at my head and demanded that I go with him to the settlement. I explained to him that we had done nothing wrong and were only grazing our sheep. He hit me on the head with the butt of the pistol he was carrying and told me to come with him. I told him I would not go to the settlement even if he shot me. Avri ordered the other four settlers to shoot us if I continued to refuse to go up to the settlement with him. They formed a circle around us and started shooting with their rifles at the ground, close to out feet. We started to cry and shout, even though we were not hit by the fire. I decided that we would go with them.

"They led the five of us in a column. I was the last in the line and Avri kept grabbing my hair with his pistol pointed at my head. We walked about 300 meters until we came to the fence. They ordered us to lie on the ground, face down. The four youngsters lay down, but I refused because I was afraid they would shoot and kill us while we were lying down. They started to kick me and hit me with the butts of their weapons. I cried and begged Avri to leave us be, but my please didn't help...

"At a certain stage I noticed Avri putting his gun behind his back, going about three meters and picking up a large stone, which weighed more than 20 kilos, and then starting to move toward me. I got up in a panic and he threw the stone on the ground and started to curse. He called the other settlers and they hit me all over. Most of the blows were in the chest, the face and the area of the testicles.

"A lot of blood started to run down from my face and my body began to turn blue. I felt dizzy, and then I saw another civilian jeep arrive. A settler with a long stick got out of the jeep. The settler hit me with the stick while the other settlers laughed loudly. I got up in a fright, pushed the settler with the stick, and started to run. I don't know where I got the strength. Avri, who was standing and watching them beat me, took his pistol and fired at me when I was about two meters from him. I figured that they would try to shoot me, but I preferred to die like that and not from torture. I didn't feel that I was hit and I kept on running."

On the way, Suleiman met Palestinian shepherds, with whose help he managed to get to the Palestinian police station at Aqraba. The Palestinians called the Israeli police, who dispatched policemen to the site of the incident and freed Suleiman's relatives. Suleiman was taken to Rafidiya Hospital in Nablus, where a bullet was removed from his left thigh.

King David meets Robin Hood

In the few meetings that have taken place between Bani Jaber and Avri Ran, in which Jaber's brother, who speaks Hebrew, acts as interpreter, Ran has made clear the new rules of the game: I am the local ruler, I make the rules. Forget the Israeli army, forget the police, I make the decisions in these parts. These lands are mine and I am doing you a favor by letting you work them. This being so, he explained, the villagers must not take any action, however small, without first getting my authorization. And so it was: Not long after the United Nations' Development Agency installed a generator in the village, to supply power and push water up the hill, Bani Jaber awoke for his morning prayers and noticed a strange glow coming from the wadi. Someone had torched the generator. A few days later, he relates, Ran told him that the act had been carried out by the long arm of his people, and that the generator had been set ablaze because it was installed without his go-ahead. The settlers also pushed the water containers down the hill, delivering another clear message.

One Saturday, Bani Jaber noticed a few settlers bathing in the village spring. This is not necessarily an act of pure pleasure, because to get to the water you have to go down a rickety ladder into a pit. The settlers were bathing in their clothes. When Bani Jaber asked them to leave, because they were polluting the village's drinking water, they reacted by taking their dogs with them into the water and informed him that he would pay dearly for his effrontery. The next Saturday, when the settler arrived for their regular outing, they demanded to enter his house. He refused. That incident ended with him being grabbed by three settlers, one of whom struck him in the head with a rifle butt. The resulting wound is still clearly visible.

As the olive picking season approached last fall, tension rose in Yanun, as in many other locales in the West Bank. Every entry into the olive groves posed the danger of being met by settlers. One such encounter, on October 6, resulted in the death of Hani Bani Maniya, 22, from Aqraba. He was picking olives with some other members of his family when a few armed settlers opened fire at them from a distance, killing him.

Shortly afterward, the residents of Yanun decided to leave their homes. The children could no longer bear the terror, the high-school students were in constant danger of being beaten up while walking to their school in Aqraba, which is about three kilometers from Yanun. Most of the people from Yanun moved in with relatives at Aqraba.

Their dramatic move led to the rapid mobilization by Ta'ayush activists and members of the International Solidarity Movement. They moved into the village, and in their wake the media, mainly the foreign media, also showed up. The settlers adopted a lower profile and some of the villagers returned. The violence that had been aimed at them was now directed at the peace activists from Israel and abroad. On October 27, about ten armed settlers attacked a group of peace workers and Palestinians who were harvesting olives, and in the months after, a series of violent events of a similar nature followed. The latest casualties were David Nir, Satoshi Itacura and Colin Kelsall.

As far as is known, only one Israeli journalist has so far persuaded Avri Ran to give an interview: Channel One reporter Nitzan Chen, who in 1995, did a special report on the situation of the settlers in the wake of the Oslo accords. "He was amazing," Chen recalls. "I had a hard time editing his remarks. His farm looks like an estate from two centuries ago. He was the first, then came the Maon Farm, and then everyone copied their pattern. He seemed to be a combination of King David and Robin Hood."

Chen's report shows Ran, in his chicken coop, wearing a blue work shirt and a large green kippa, looking straight into the camera with cold steel eyes and delivering his piece: "Every egg that I collect and every chicken that I handle and every animal or weed in my yard is part of my covenant with the Land of Israel and the Torah of Israel. If the IDF leaves Nablus, that will only strengthen us, steel us, certainly it will not make us downcast. What gives me the greatest confidence is the women who drive on the roads and the children who travel on the roads, because they are the true soldiers here in the field.

"If Trumpeldor [the legendary defender of Tel Hai, in Upper Galilee, who was killed in a battle with Arabs in 1920] were to say today, `It is good to die for our country,' he would be placed in administrative detention. This land is me and my flesh, it is the substance of my existence, I breathe the air from above and draw from the earth below in the same measure. To say that I will lay down my life for this place - yes, definitely, I will lay down my life for this place and I am even ready to endanger the lives of those who are closest to me for this place, yes, absolutely. Because this place may demand sacrifices."

Through his lawyer, Sasi Gez, Avri Ran declined to be interviewed for this article or to respond to it