Friday June 20 2003

Nice breakfast of flat bread, local cheese, apricots, strong sweet coffee, and a piece of cake from the neighbor ladies. Now that there is a woman (Effie) in this house, they are not so shy.

I brought with me $1000(US) for donation to the village of Yanoun. The money had been raised at a benefit supper held at the Athabasca United Church by the Tai Chi Club. I need to consult with community members, and started with Najah. He is the one whose wife is in the village of Beit Furik a few kilometers over the hill visiting her parents. The road to Nablus from Beit Furik has now been closed, and his wife can't get back home even by the roundabout way of 50 kms. Worse, his youngest son there needs some medical attention in Nablus and can't get there.

In a nutshell, Najah suggested I get three of the village council together, Adnan, Rashid, and Abdel Latif to discuss the best use or uses of the money I brought with me. This way, whatever is decided will be documented, and not left to Abdel Latif alone. I will ask the three of them in the next day or so for a meeting. The final decision is mine, but I will also talk to IWPS about it.

Next I went with Rashid on his tractor and wagon to pick up sheaves of wheat that had been hand harvested in the east draw above the olive grove there. There was just a wagonload to be picked up from the ground. Since it does not rain here in the summer, the sheaves had been stacked in bundles and left on the ground, each pile with a rock on it. Plenty of rocks on hand.

We took the load of wheat over to the Abu Hani yard to be threshed. Earlier a MF 165 with a PTO driven threshing machine had come over from Aqraba to put the wheat through. The sheaves were hand fed into the top, the threshed grain was put directly into a bag, and the straw gathered on a tarp in back. This wheat will be stored in bags at the house until needed for making bread. They take some into Aqraba for grinding as needed. This way it stays fresh.

Before this had finished, Rashid asked me if I wanted to go to Aqraba with him to show the combine operator the road to Yanoun. So we got in his old (actually ancient) Ford Cortina and off we went. It took a bit before we could find the combine, since it was lost. Thank God for cell phones. It is a diesel MF 850, a huge machine for these little fields. Our neighbor in Canada has an MF 850, but he farms 2000 acres.

Just as the combine entered the first patch, a settler on an ATV quad drove up the road from the south. As he drove by, I made eye contact, and said, "good morning." He scowled and drove on up from the grain fields into the village proper. He was armed with an M16 (U.S. Army issue) with the magazine inserted ready for rapid fire. Effie had seen him also and called me on the cell phone. She was to call IWPS and/or the DCO (District Commanding Officer) of the Army.

As I trudged up the hill, puffing, I could see him round the switchbacks and head east past the international house, then abruptly reverse when he saw Effi, and head down and out of the village to the west. Effie saw him descend into the grain field, cross over and leave to the east.

An armed Jewish settler can invade the village anytime he wants. The villagers can't even step more that a few meters above their own homes onto their own land without risk of being attacked: beaten, stoned, or even shot.

Later when I talked to Rashid and his wife about it, they told me his name is Victor, and is a really a very nasty guy. It was Victor who put the bullet holes in Rashid's tractor, and burnt the old generator. But there were many such fanatics among the Itamar settlers, all convinced that because their Bible says God gave this land to the ancient Jews, any present day Jew can now appear and seize it from the inhabitants, some of whose forefathers have been here since at least Roman times.

Almost every villager has a hair-raising story to tell about the marauding and vandalism before the Israeli peace activists and internationals started standing guard here. While I was visiting Najah this morning, he was showing me all the new trees and plants he has started. On the downhill side of his yard there was a new barbed wire fence, something you almost never see in Palestine. I jokingly asked him if this was to keep the settlers out. Yes, it is some kind of barrier to keep them from driving through his yard ripping up trees and shrubs as they did last year and before. That doesn't happen anymore due, at least in part, to the presence of the internationals.

There is a nice house and a beautiful yard on the lower eastern edge of the village, overlooking the cultivated land. Nobody lives there. Sometime last year a group of armed settlers shot open the door, entered and shot up the place when the wife was home alone. She escaped to the roof and barricaded the door. The house was trashed. They now live in Aqraba, and are too scared to move back.

In the scale of human tragedy around the world the ethnic cleansing of Yanoun is not a big deal. It is the symbolism of what happened, and for once, was reversed. These remaining villagers love this place, and they also know they stand for something when they refuse to be intimidated into leaving, now that they have support from the international community, and, it is important to stress, from Israeli peace activists.

Sometime in the afternoon, after the settler had left, a pretty young woman came walking up the switchback below the International House with several kids tagging along. She was talking and joking with the kids in Arabic, but she was not wearing a head scarf, so I spoke to her in English and got a reply in fluent, idiomatic English in some-hard-to-pinpoint accent. American perhaps, I thought. She is Leila Shelimar, an Israeli who has spent a fair amount of time here over the past year. When I saw the "kiss both cheeks" welcome she got from the neighbor ladies, it was clear she was loved here in the village. And, she clearly loves the village and the villagers.

Effie also is held in high esteem. So here I sit with two Israeli women, in the depths of the Palestinian homeland, surrounded by Bible and M16 toting fanatic Jews, who would like nothing better than to see the villagers dead or gone or both. And yet, two courageous Jews are willing to defend the village.

Leila later joined Rashid, Abdel Latif, Sameh, and a host of younger men and boys to pickup the 50-60 kg sacks of wheat from the fields. I went along to take pictures and enjoy the beautiful weather and gorgeous scenery. Leila asked me to take some pictures of her in that environment since she liked it so much. She tells me that when she dies she wants to be cremated (warning signal that she is not an observant Jew) and her ashes scattered in a beautiful place such as this. I find it remarkable that she is willing to talk to a stranger in this way. But our Weltanschauung can't be too different simply because we are both here opposing the oppression of one people, the Palestinians, by another, the Israelis.

Tomorrow, Saturday, June 21, 2003, is of course, Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath. Leila is staying with one of the families tonight, but tomorrow she will stay at this house, since the settlers become more aggressive on Shabbat, and we might even institute some kind of night guard duty.

Adnan came by for a visit with us, and I got a chance to talk to him about how to use the money I brought with me from the Athabasca peace community. Tomorrow I will meet with Abdel Latif in the morning to explain that I want to have a meeting with him, Adnan, Rashid, and me, to talk over the dispersal of the money. I get the feeling there are two overriding needs: diesel fuel for the generator, and wages for the school bus driver for next school term. Without the generator, I doubt that many families would stay, plus it makes for a feeling of some security to know that if there is a settler incursion into the village, they can be seen. As near as I can tell there was a grant to pay for fuel for a period of time, but that is now over. I will track down the economics of the generator for a fuller explanation. Adnan suggested that if the money, or some of it, was to be used to pay for diesel fuel, the payment could be made directly to the supplier in Aqraba, so there could be no suspicion that the funds were being diverted.