IN THE HEBRON HILLS
Resilience and resistance in Umm El-Khair
REPOSTING THIS IN MEMORIAM OF AWDAH HATHALEEN, MURDERED BY A JEWISH SETTLER (NEVER CONVICTED) ONE YEAR AGO TODAY
Umm El-Khair has been a community under siege for quite some time. It’s part of the broader Bedouin area in the Hebron Hills known as Masafar Yatta. Its 150 or so residents are remarkably resilient, despite everything they live through daily. Refugees from the Negev, they arrived in the Hebron Hills post 1948, purchasing land and farming it. Today, they are impacted daily by an unfriendly neighbor, the Jewish settlement Carmel. Founded in 1980, Carmel has been particularly aggressive under the Netanyahu government, snatching more land, harassing the Palestinian villages, harming their livestock, and now, surrounding them with new facts on the ground by placing caravans on either side of the village so that the villagers are hemmed in.
This is the story of one small area in the Hebron Hills, one example of a systematic occupation by Israel of the West Bank and Gaza, supression of the Palestinian need/desire for freedom and dignity and statehood. The story I tell here is one chapter in a long, and endless novel that needs to be ended. It is not about a few bad or messianic people. It is about a system that needs to be stopped for the good of both Israelis and Palestinians.
A day or so before I arrived, the settlers had seized a family’s outdoor toilet, a facility used by the women of the family. The settlers, who plopped down a caravan behind the family’s home, sit guard and have set up cameras to watch over the family and ensure that they can’t use their own toilet. Additionally, they are preventing this family from getting to their tiny herd of goats, to feed them or milk them. Israeli human rights lawyers are litigating the case presently on behalf of the family.
The Jewish settlers are protected and aided by the Netanyahu government--especially Far-Right Minister Orit Strook, Minister of Settlement and National Mission (can’t make these titles up!), who is, herself, a resident of Hebron, living in a Jewish enclave amid a Palestinian city. Strook set up new gates, painted in bright yellow that adorn many of the roads leading from the outskirts of the Jerusalem border through the Hebron hills. These gates, locked by the Israeli government, prevent access to Palestinian fields, schools, and make it difficult for villagers to even access their village. Settler kids have planted Israeli flags rimming the road and on the village’s grounds, surrounded by stakes that can hurt anyone who tries to remove them.
Masafar Yattah has been in the press both in Israel and internationally a lot in the last few years. Never for good reasons, always because of attacks on the villagers, their lives, and livelihood. Israeli NGOs and human rights lawyers, along with international activists and foreign governments, are aiding the villagers against the power of an Israeli government of settlers for settlers that is passing as many laws and sending as much money as possible during their last days in office to promote, protect, and expand the Occupation.
One year ago last July, 30-year-old Awdah Hathaleen, an English teacher who also worked on the Oscar winning documentary, No Other Land, was murdered in the place where I stood--a community center supported by the international community. His murderer was never brought to justice; though it is widely assumed that he was killed by a local Jewish settler active in violence across the region--Yinon Levi, who, after being placed under house arrest, was simply set free, with a court claiming there was not adequate evidence.
When I visited, this small center was filled with activity, with kids playing and teachers leading them in song. One of the teachers was Hathaleen’s widow, thirty-year-old Hanady who was married to her husband for five years. I talked to her in the library while she tried to calm one of her three young children, a three-and-a-half-year-old boy who saw his father murdered. Her other two sons are a year and a half and five years old.
“My husband’s death affected everyone in the village because he was a community leader beloved by everyone. We try to do our best for these kids to survive, but it’s very hard. One moment you lose everything in your life. Your life has changed because of a terrorist settler. He ended our kids’ lives. My baby Kilan was six months old when his dad was killed.
“We created this library with all our love to help the kids because they are suffering a lot right now with attacks all the time. We come here with them each day, to create a place for them to have fun, to enjoy life, to let them kind of forget the occupation, kind of forget what they’re suffering. The situation here has become worse. 24-7 we suffer from attacks.
“The settlers. come in the middle of the night. They put fences. They push the people. They hit them. Like this week, it’s been a hard week because each night, there’s an attack. You’re not safe to go anywhere because they will attack. “
The Israeli army comes late, when called, and they “just punish the Palestinians. They stop the Palestinians. They start an investigation on them, detain them, and the settlers do whatever they want. It’s not a solution. And then they tell you, go to Kiryat Arba, complain there. “
Kiryat Arba is a police station under Israeli control, a Jewish enclave in the heart of the Palestinian city of Hebron. Among its residents is Kahanist Israeli Minister (who oversees the police) Ben Gvir.
“We go there, we wait for like six hours, seven hours. They will let you wait, until you don’t have any patience. They make it a police matter not an army matter.” When and if the army comes, they turn the area into a closed military zone.
I visited Umm el-Khair with an activist from an Israeli NGO called Mothers Against Violence, Ketty Bar, who lives in Tel Aviv and has been working with the women in the village to create and sustain a play area and library for the village children. MAV began as a reaction to police violence against pro-democracy protesters in Tel Aviv and in Israel proper, but, she said, “Over time, we understood that violence cannot be divided into separate categories. Police violence, settler violence, racism, dehumanization, occupation, and war are interconnected. They all shape the moral fabric of society. Today, Mothers Against Violence is a movement of thousands of women across Israel Jewish and Arab, secular and religious who believe that a safer future begins with civic responsibility, dialogue, education, and the courage to stand against violence wherever it occurs.”
WAV built the Ouda Library in the village, though it is more than simply a children’s library, it is also “a community educational center and a place of hope. In the mornings, it offers educational activities for children aged two to five. In the afternoons and evenings, older students attend enrichment programs in English, mathematics, reading, and other subjects, “Bar told me.
The project is entirely managed by the community with the teachers, educators, and coordinators all from Umm al-Khair.
(The library itself was built through donations from hundreds of people in Israel and abroad. Today, the New Israel Fund in Israel, Canada, and the United Kingdom helps support the salaries of the teachers and educational staff who operate the summer programs. You can support it via NIF on line).
Meanwhile, the kids in the village missed more than 45 days of school due to the Iran war. And, while the schools were closed, the security guard for the Carmel settlement placed pillars onto the one road that the children walked to school with razor wire. This was meant to protect the new Jewish settler caravan neighborhood, while preventing the kids’ ability to get to school. There was no warning and no explanation. And the villagers have no recourse except for now to work with the activists and lawyers who are aiding them from Israeli NGOs and to ask for support from the international community. A good way to keep up with what is happening is to subscribe to #PeaceNow’s settlement updates. They are monitoring the situation in Masafar Yatta and throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territories: https://peacenow.org.il/en/extensive-demolitions-in-masafer-yatta .
