The Green Rain of Yassouf
By Israel Shamir
October 27, 2002
Most soothing, tender and sensual to the touch, picking olives is akin to
telling beads. Oriental men wear ‘mesbaha’ beads of wood or stone on their
wrist, reminding of prayer and calming down frayed nerves, but olives are
much better: they are alive. Olives are tender but not fragile, like peasant
girls, and picking them has a touch of comfort: nothing can go wrong. Olives
detach themselves from the branch without fear and remorse, smoothly enter
the palm and roll down into the safety of the ground sheets stretched to
catch them.
It is harvest time, and
every tree on the terraced slope is attended. Whole families are out, under
the trees and up on ladders, forming a vast pane suitable for Pieter Bruegel
the Elder’s brush. We pick olives together with Hafez’s family, five or six
of us; we stand below the thick branches of the broad stretched-out craggy
old tree, fingering this live rosary of our lady, the sweet land of
Palestine. Hair of ripe Minnesota corn, sky-blue eyes, - unexpected for a
stranger, but not unusual features in these places, - laughing lips,
seven-and-a-half-year old Rowan, young daughter of the sturdy shrewd Hafez,
climbed to the treetop, and the olives she picks fell down on our hands,
shoulders and heads like green rain. Before going to the next tree, we lift
the edges of the sheets and the dense stream of olives fills the bag. A
light grey foal grazes nearby, gathering strength for his turn: he will
carry the bags into the village above the valley.
We pick olives in Yassouf, a
blissfully obscure village in the highlands. Its spacious and tall houses,
made of soft and light stone, witness its old prosperity, created by the
relentless toil; broad staircases lead to the flat roofs, where they lounge
warm summer evenings and enjoy the breeze from the distant Med. There are
plenty of pomegranate trees, and in a thousand years old description of
Palestine, by a contemporary of William the Conqueror, the village of
Yassouf is mentioned for abundance of pomegranate and for wisdom of a
learned sheikh al-Yassoufi who made himself a name in remote Damascus.
It is paradise, or not too
far from it. We arrived yesterday to the village, built on the ridge between
two valleys. Above the village, a hilltop retains the old sanctuary, bema,
one of the high places where ancestors of Hafez and Rowan witnessed the
miraculous communion of celestial and earthly forces. The villagers often go
there, to seek spiritual comfort, as did their forefathers, the people of
the small principality of Israel: we are in the Holy Land, and for its
people, a daily miracle of faith goes hand in hand with the daily portion of
toil. The kings of the Bible tried to ban these local bema places and
monopolise the faith in the centralised, easy-to-tax-and-control temple, but
ordinary people preferred their local sanctuaries for daily worship. The
peasants preserved the two-tier structure of local and universal faith,
similar to Shinto-Buddhism link in Japan. They are religious but not
fanatic. They do not wear the Islamic garb; women do not cover their pretty
faces. These two aspects, local and universal, survived millennia and
blended together. The temple became the gorgeous Umayyad Mosque of al Aqsa,
and on the high place of Yassouf, people pray to its God.
These are venerable old
trees; they have heard many an oath and seen many a secret in their long
lives. A miraculous shallow well that never runs dry even in the hottest
July, but rests in rainy winter; a holy tomb which probably changed name
many times since the days immemorial, and now is called Sheikh Abu Zarad.
There are ruins from the first days of Yassouf, well over four thousand
years ago, and since then the village has not been deserted. In the Bible
heyday, it belonged to Joseph, the strongest of the tribes of Israel. When
Jerusalem fell under sway of the Jews, these lands and these people retained
their own Israelite identity, and eventually accepted Christ. The domed
shrine at the top still calls for prayer. In February, the hilltop turns
white with almond blossoms, now it is fresh and green, and affords a superb
view of the rolling hills of Samaria.
But we came too late for the
view from the hilltop, as sun sets early in the autumn. Instead, in the dusk
we went down to the village spring, the throbbing heart of the village.
Water was quietly gushing from the opening in the rock, flew in the covered
tunnel and poured out to give life to the gardens. We sat under the fig
trees, and they spread their broad trefoil leaves like Japanese Noh dancers
raise their fans, in one incessant gracious movement. In the moonlight,
between the leaves, giant black butterflies took wing: it is bats, dwellers
of the nearby caves, emerging in the dark to drink water and feast on the
fruits.
Usually, a talk at the spring flows freely and joyously like its water.
There is no better place to sit and chat with the villagers about the
harvest, the good old days, the children, and the last essay of Edward Said
reprinted in the local paper. The farmers are not boors: some of them
travelled the big world, from Basra to San Francisco; others attended a
small university branch in the vicinity. Their political education was
completed in Israeli jail, an almost unavoidable stage in the upbringing of
a young man in our land. Their Hebrew, acquired there, or through long work
in the Israeli building industry, is fluent and idiomatic, and they are keen
to practice it with a friendly Israeli.
But now our hosts were
gloomy, and worries did not move away from their sad eyes. Even at the
dinner, as we feasted on rice with nuts and yogurt, they were rather
pensive. We knew the reason: a new dread had nested on the bare hilltop and
spread its webbed wings over the village. The army had confiscated the lands
of Yassouf for military purposes, and passed the site to the settlers. They
built a concrete prefab monster entwined by barbed wire, interspaced with
guard towers, and appropriated the name of the nearby Apple spring. The
settlement was not willing to stay put on the land stolen a decade ago from
the people of Yassouf, but kept encroaching on the entire countryside,
throwing out its metastases onto surrounding hills, eating up the olive
groves and vineyards.
The farmers did not dare to
go to their own fields, for the settlers were harsh men with guns, quick to
draw. They shot at villagers, often kidnapped and tortured them, set fire to
their fields. They had to keep the farmers away for five years, and after
that, according to the Ottoman law they found in the old books, the fallow
land would revert to the state. To the Jewish state. The state would then
give the land to the Jewish settlers. Meanwhile, they tried to starve the
farmers.
The village was cut off from
the world by trenches and mounds of earth six feet high. Even small unpaved
roads, barely suitable for a four-wheel drive, were truncated by the army.
The village became an island. The British ambassador to Tel Aviv recently
said that Israel had turned Palestine into one huge detention camp. He was
wrong: instead of one camp, they created a New Gulag Archipelago of
Palestine. The Nobel-winning author of Gulag, Alexander Solzhenitsyn claimed
that the original Russian Gulag was designed and managed by Jews; his claim
was questioned and denied by Jewish organisations. But there is no doubt who
designed the Gulag of Palestine. Cars cannot leave or enter the island of
Yassouf, and visitors are forced to leave their cars before crossing on
foot. The nearest city, Nablous, or Neapolis of old, is eight miles distant,
but four hours’ drive and many humiliating checkpoints away. It took us ages
to reach Yassouf, as we drove through numerous checkpoints and roadblocks,
and we had to abandon our car half a mile away from the village, stopped by
an insurmountable siege dam.
On the way, devastation was
everywhere: olives on both sides were torched or uprooted, as if this
venerable tree was the foremost enemy of the Jews. And in a way it was:
olive is the chief provider and intercessor for the Palestinians. Their main
meal consists of flat oven-baked bread and olive oil, spiced by thyme and
enlivened by a bunch of grapes. Their kings and priests of old were anointed
with oil. The sacraments of the church, a precious gift of Palestine to
mankind, are but consecration of olive. In baptism, the Palestinians are
anointed before the full immersion, and their skins retain the soft
suppleness of olive oil. Oil is used for the rites of wedlock, and for the
last rites, confirming the inseparable bond of the people and their land.
The famed explorer of Qumran scrolls, John Allegro, ruined his reputation by
penning a heretical book identifying Jesus Christ with the hallucinogenic
mushroom. If and when I shall decide to follow him, I shall compare the
Olive Tree of Virgin Oil and Our Lady the Virgin, the supreme mediatrix of
Palestine.
As long as there are olives,
the peasants of Palestine are invincible, and that is why their adversaries
turned their rage towards the trees. They cut them whenever they could. In
the last years, eighteen thousand beautiful olives, old giants and young
saplings, were uprooted. The settlers stopped the farmers from harvesting,
ambushed them on the way home and robbed them. We, the International and
Israeli friends of Palestine, came, like Seven Samurai in the old Kurosawa
film, to help the peasants pick their olives and protect them from the
robbers.
Of the many good things one
can do on our good Earth, helping Palestinians is the best and most pleasant
one I know of. Kibbutz can’t compete with it. Young kibbutzniks are usually
boring and aloof, while old kibbutzniks are, well, old. In kibbutz, you have
the company of other foreigners, or none. Palestinians are so friendly, so
open, so ready to talk to you. The Internationals bask in their
friendliness, live in enchanted villages, see the warm blue sky over the
incomparable landscape of Palestinian hills, and enjoy the fabulous
hospitality of the peasants. And if occasionally they are shot at by the
settlers or the army, it is just a small cost for all the fun, an additional
divertissement courtesy of the IDF. That is, after all, why the Samurai are
needed.
The people who help
Palestinians are quite different from kibbutz volunteers. They are more
heterogeneous, from a 19-year-old student from Uppsala to a housewife from
Brighton, from a Reverend from Georgia to a teacher from Boston, from a
French farmer to an Italian MP. They are united by their feelings of
compassion, of natural justice, and, yes, by their daring. They work in the
shadow of Israeli tanks, and protect the olives and men with their own
bodies. The harvest in the Samarian mountains is a joy but not for timid
souls. We were to experience its rough side without further delay.
We were picking olives, filling the bags with the green gold, when suddenly
a Jeep drove down the stony ruddy road, and screeched to a halt near us,
raising a cloud of dust; behind it was a bigger vehicle, an army troop
carrier full of soldiers. A single man jumped out of the jeep, aiming an
automatic rifle M-16 straight at the child on the tree.
“Go away, you bloody Arabs,”
he yelled in Brooklynese. He lifted a rock and hurled it into the nearest
group of workers. A farmer, who could not turn away, was hit and nursed his
hand.
“Come one step closer and
I’ll shoot!” he shouted when Laurie tried to talk to him. He was large,
unkempt, ferocious, intentionally working himself into a high degree of
hysteria.
“Don’t even touch the olives!” he screamed at the peasants.
From around the road bend,
three men appeared running. They looked like nothing you ever saw. To their
shaven foreheads, black boxes were strapped by narrow black belts; black
belts crisscrossed their bare arms. The Jews put on the phylacteries, as
this setup is called, for a morning prayer, but on these young men they
looked like the amulets of a warlike tribe. They wore dark trousers and dark
tee-shorts, while white shawls with black stripes flew behind their backs.
Their rifles were pointed at us. They looked possessed by some strange
demon, these young men in Jewish ritual dress and with their ideas from the
Book of Joshua. I was not astonished when one of them pulled out a long
curved blade. The scene reminded me of the recent movie, “The Time Machine,”
with the sudden appearance of ferocious Morlocks and their onslaught on
bucolic Eloi.
They pushed the women and
cursed the men, their eyes burning with hate. Timid peasants, the
Palestinians recoiled. A Samurai unarmed, I tried to reason with the
attackers.
“Let the farmers harvest
their olives,” I beseeched, “it is their trees, it is their life. Be good
neighbours to them!”
“Go away, you Arab-lover,”
hissed one of them. “You support our enemies. It is our land. It is the land
of the Jews; the Goyim do not belong here.”
In more peaceful
circumstances, I would laugh: these disturbed young men from New York wished
to expel the proper and rightful descendents of the people of Israel from
their ancestral land. Never mind the incredible silliness of
two-thousand-year-old claim in the country where five years of absence voids
all claims. Never mind that their ‘Jewish’ ancestors probably hiked from the
Eurasian steppe and never saw Palestine. Never mind that even the Jews of
old never lived and hardly visited the land of Israel, between Bethel,
Carmel and Jezreel. Soon the Romanian guest workers from Bucharest may expel
the people of Florence, claiming direct descent from ancient Rome. But their
rifles were no laughing stock.
“Why do you burn olives, are the olives your enemies, too?”
“Yes, the olives of our
enemy are our enemies. And you are our enemies, too!” he shrieked.
“Anti-Semites!”
This word works magic with
the Americans. Whenever an American is called an ‘anti-Semite’, he is
supposed to prostrate on the ground, and swear eternal love and fealty to
the Jewish people. I know it because daily I receive letters from people who
were called ‘anti-Semites’ for their support of Palestine and they could not
cope with it. I provide them with first psychological aid: after being
punished for anti-Soviet activity, and condemned for anti-American opinions,
an anti-Nomian lover of anti-Quity, I take the anti-Semitic label in my
stride. Nowadays, if one is not called an anti-S, it means one is clearly in
the wrong, sandwiched between Sharon and Soros.
Like ‘Arab-lover’, or
‘Nigger-lover’, an ‘anti-Semite’ is a label that smears its user by
association. It is often used by the settlers, by Foxman the spymaster,
Kahane the racist, Mort Zuckermann the USA Today owner, Conrad Black the
husband of Barbara Amiel, Sharon the mass murderer, Richard Perle the
warmonger, Tom Friedman the shyster, Shylock the loan-shark and Elie Wiesel
the pay-as-you-cry holocaust weepy. It was used against TS Elliot and
Dostoyevsky, Genet and Hamsun, St John and Yeats, Marx and Woody Allen, and
it is a much better company to be in. Still, our Americans hesitated for a
moment, our good Israelis began to explain their position, but it was a good
English girl from Manchester, Jennifer, who proved the superiority of Brits
and saved the day by a brusque ‘fuck you’.
The barrel of M-16 rifle made a curve and pointed at her. The soldiers
looked at the goings on with interest. I turned to them.
“Stop them! They’re aiming
their guns at us!”
“They haven’t shot you,
yet”, answered the sergeant.
The soldiers would not
intervene as long as the Morlocks had their way, but the moment we engaged
them, the awesome armed might of the Jewish state will be visited upon us.
The Morlocks knew it too: they smashed a camera of Dave’s, pushed Angie,
poured insults at the girls, and threw stones.
“Won’t you stop them?” I appealed to the soldiers.
“Sorry, pal. Only police may
deal with them,” replied the officer. “But we can arrest YOU, if you
insist.”
The army takes care of the Palestinians, and the police attends to the
settlers - this simple ruse is one of the better inventions of the Jewish
genius. Probably they borrowed it from the European settlements in China,
where they had different police forces and different sets of law for
Europeans and for Chinese. That is why the Morlocks may do what they want.
The Palestinians were visibly upset: they are not fighters, but farmers with
women and children harvesting their olives; they did not come there to die.
Not yet, anyway. The settlers kill the villagers for sport or for fun, with
and without provocation. For the last week, they murdered a few men who
dared to harvest their own olives. If the villagers would defend themselves,
would just dare to raise their hands at a Jew, they would be all slaughtered
and their village wiped out. But the olives had to be harvested, and the
stand-off continued.
“All the troubles are caused
by the bloody settlers,” called out Uri, a good Israeli, who kept off the
settler thugs to the right of me. “Without them, we would live peacefully.
We would visit Yassouf with passports, like tourists. It is them, the
settlers.”
Indeed, it was easy, almost
obligatory to hate the vicious young men, who destroyed crops and starved
villages. This particular settlement is known as a bulwark of the Kahanist
or Judeo-Nazi creed, as the late Professor Leibovich called it. They
celebrated the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin; they worshipped Baruch
Goldstein, the mass murderer from Brooklyn; they published the banned book
of Rabbi Alba that openly proclaims the religious duty of the Jew to
exterminate Gentiles. They were so evil it required no effort to hate them
and to agree with Uri.
But as I looked at the blank
faces of the soldiers, a memory came back from the days of my childhood. The
hoodlums do not go around robbing strangers: they would send forth a small
kid to relieve you of the burden of your wallet. If you’d push the kid away,
they would fall on you like a ton of bricks for molesting the youth. It was
quite pointless to hate the small kid since he was sent by the bigger hoods.
These young crackpots were sent by the bigger hoods, too. That is why the
soldiers did not bat an eyelid when the settlers attacked the farmers. It
was the division of labour: the thugs starved the peasants, the army
protected the thugs, and the government endorsed it. While the army guns
kept down the Palestinians, the US army kept down Iraq, the only state in
the region that might be able to provide the balance of power, and the US
diplomats wielded their veto in the Security Council. And beyond them, one
could see the biggest hoods that did not care for olives, peasants or
soldiers. On one end of the chain of command, there was a crazy Brooklyn
settler with M-16; on the other end, Bronfman and Zuckerman, Sulzberger and
Wolfowitz, Foxman and Friedman.
And somewhere between, were
we, the Israelis and the American Jews, who duly voted and paid taxes and
supported the scheme, because without our support, Wolfowitz would have to
conquer Baghdad single-handedly and Bronfman would have to burn the olives
himself.
Still, each man and beast
has its pest, and we had to deal with our own. The farmers of Yassouf and
their international supporters, that’s us, stood our ground and did not
flinch. Police arrived and consorted with the settlers. In a while, a smiley
tall hair-cropped liaison officer came down to us.
“You may pick your olives, but work in the bottom of the valley, where the
settlers won’t see you and get annoyed.”
It was a minor victory, a
compromise, but it didn’t matter. We would harvest olives, that was the
bottom line. We rolled down the valley, its slopes reinforced by numerous
terraces, and the harvest continued. Down here, the olives were smaller and
fewer. For three years, the peasants were prohibited from working their
fields, although the olive needs a lot of care. Normally, peasants plough
around the trees every year by an old-fashioned plough pulled by a donkey:
the terraces are too small for tractor. Without it, winter rains run off the
land and fail to reach the roots. The terraces also need a lot of
maintenance. But it couldn’t be done now, for the farmers prudently avoided
taking up their hoes and spades, dangerous weapons in the eyes of their
well-armed tormentors.
Again the small streams of
green and black olives ran down our hands to the ground sheets. They grow on
the same tree, as God made them different, some green and some black,
Hussein told us, but they give the same oil. It was a God’s sign to us
humans: we are made different, and it is a good thing, making the world more
beautiful and various, if we remember our common humanity.
We laid out our lunch under
a big olive tree. Umm Tarik, the only woman in many-coloured national dress,
brought big round bread straight from the oven. It was liberally sprinkled
with olive oil, as were the balls of white goat cheese. Hassan passed around
a zir, a Palestinian amphora full of cool water from the Apple spring. The
zir was cold and wet outside, covered with minuscule drops of dew. It is
made of porous clay, and it sweats profusely cooling the drink inside. With
years, the pores clog up, and then it can be used to store wine or oil.
“I miss Ramat Gan” (a suburb
of Tel Aviv), said Hassan. “Before the trouble, I used to work there,
painting houses. It was good work, and my Yemenite employer was a decent
man, he treated me as a member of his family. Sometimes I would overnight
there, and have an evening stroll in Tel Aviv by the sea. Now for two years
I have not left the village.”
Everybody had good memories
from the days they worked in the big cities in the West of Palestine, and
brought some cash back home. It was a mutually convenient arrangement for
the newcomers and the peasants, profoundly unequal but bearable. All over
the world, farmers and peasants work for a while in the cities when their
land does not call them for harvest or planting. For local people, “the
Jewish” Tel Aviv and Ramat Gan were no more foreign than “the Arab” Nablus
or Jerusalem, as the country is but one unit. Palestine is a small country,
and Yassouf is in the very middle of it, thirty miles to the sea, and thirty
miles to the Jordan border. The industrial cities of the seaboard were built
well before the state of Israel came into being; they were built by the
labour of Yassouf’s peasants, and they were rightly theirs. Not exclusively
theirs, but theirs as well. The arrangement was undone, when the Jews began
their land snatch.
“Do you see the settlement”,
- Hussein asked us. “My father sowed his wheat on that hillside. At first,
they took the land, and later, they locked us up in the village. Now we have
but little land, and no work”.
“The story of the Holy land repeats the story of God’s promise,” said the
Reverend. “Christ said: everybody is chosen. The Jews replied: sorry, only
we are. Now, Palestinians say: let us live together in this land. And the
Jews reply: sorry, it is for us only.”
“There should be an
independent Palestinian state,” said Uri, “with its own flag, and a real
border. Barak cheated everybody, as he offered to split your lands into few
entities. We should go back to ’67 borders, and then things will be fine.”
- Do you know how the Talmud
rules on partition, - I asked. – Two men found a shawl, and each one said,
‘it is mine’. They came to a judge, and the judge asked them, “How should I
divide the shawl?” The first one said, ‘divide it 50-50, equally’. The
second one said, ‘no, it is all mine’. The judge said, ‘there is no
disagreement about one half of the shawl, both agree it should belong to the
second man. I shall divide the remaining half of the shawl equally, so the
first man, the seeker of justice, will have one fourth, while the second
man, the egoist, will have three quarters”. That is the Jewish approach.
Maybe Palestinians should learn it, too.
Kamal added some broken
twigs into the small fire to make coffee. He was an elder man, respected by
the village, an important man in the local politics and beyond. In 1967, a
young man of 20, he parted with his newborn daughter for he was sentenced by
the Jews to forty years of prison for his belonging to the Resistance. He
emerged from the eternal shade of Ramleh Gaol when his daughter was twenty
one.
- We also have a story of dividing a find, - said Kamal. – It is the story
of a woman who found a child and brought him up. Then another woman came in,
the natural mother of the child, and demanded him back. They came to be
judged by Sheikh Abu Zarad, and the sheikh said: I shall cut the kid into
two parts, and give each one half. One woman said, ‘good, let us split the
child’. But another woman said, no way, my child won’t be carved up. And the
sheikh awarded the child to the second woman, as she was the real mother.
My cheeks were burning with
shame. Kamal did not tell me anything new, but, trying to wisecrack, I
forgot the true wisdom of Solomon’s judgement, and he, a real descendent of
Bible heroes, reminded me of it. The Palestinians, like the true mother, did
not agree to partition. History proved they were right: Palestine can’t be
divided. The peasants need the industrial cities to work between the seasons
and to sell their oil; they need the seashore of the Med, splashing a few
miles away from their home, they need the wholeness of the land as one needs
two hands and two eyes.
The settlers were not
monsters, but thoroughly misled men. Like me, they read too much of the
Babylonian Talmud, too little of the Palestinian Bible. They felt the
incredibly strong pull of the land, and it attracted them to the hills of
Samaria. They were looking for union with the enchanted land of Palestine,
and they loved it with the weird love of necrophiliacs. They were ready to
kill the land just to get it. They did not understand the local ways, and
earned their living by collecting money in America. Instead of hatred, I
felt sorry for the settlers. They had a unique chance to make peace with
their neighbours, and with the land, and they blew it. By ruining the land,
they prepare their new exile with their own hands. The true mother will have
the child, and therefore the Palestinian victory is inevitable, for the
judgement of Solomon is but a parable of Divine judgement.
- But where are the good
Jews, - the reader hastens to enquire. - For the balance, for the political
correctness, for our comfort, please show us some good Jews! There are not
only settlers, but Peace Now and other movements friendly to Palestinians.
Yes, there is a difference
between the brutal settlers and their supporters, on one side, and the
liberal Israelis, traditional Labour voters, on another side. The Jewish
chauvinists want Palestine without Palestinians. They would import Chinese
to work the fields and Russians to guard the Chinese. They were an obviously
repelling lot.
The liberal Israelis could
envisage a sort of common future, where Palestinians could leave their
watched-over Bantustans and come to work in Tel Aviv equipped with a working
permit, to be harassed by police, to work without social security, below
minimal wage, underpaid by their employers. The idea of brotherly equality,
not of some heavenly sort, but of ordinary fair play towards the native son
of the land was as foreign to them as to the settlers. They would give them
a flag and an anthem, but take away their land and their way of life.
Both sorts of Israelis were
united in their rejection of Palestine. They sang of a ‘new dress of
concrete and asphalt for the old Land of Israel’. The liberals dreamed of
creating a high-tech sliver of America, and did not need the hills of
Samaria. The chauvinists wanted to erase the very memory of Palestine, and
re-create the kingdom of hate and vengeance.
And few, very few of us
understood that we have been given a rare chance to learn from the
Palestinians. With our East European arrogance, we came to teach and change
them, but we should learn and change ourselves. It was not enough to help
them; we, the conquerors, have to adjust to the supreme civilisation of the
conquered. It was done before us: the victorious Vikings adjusted to the
ways of England and France, Russia and Sicily; the triumphant Greeks of
Alexander became Egyptians and Syrians, Imperial Manchu became Chinese. It
has to be done for our sakes as well, since otherwise we are doomed to
re-create a ghetto for us and a ghetto for them.
Take an ant and he will
build an anthill. Take a Jew and he will create a ghetto. Take a
Palestinian… Well, my friend Musa invited his old father from a Samarian
village to his new home in Vermont, and his old father began to build
terraces to plant olives.
The Palestinians can’t
imagine themselves without the land and its unique way of life. Thousands of
years ago, after the Great Mycenaean Drought was over, their ancestors
formed a symbiosis with the olive, and the vine, and the donkey, and the
small mountain springs, and their shrines on the hilltops. This single
complex of the landscape, the people and the Divine spirit was the great
achievement of Palestinians, and they carried it through centuries and
preserved to this very day. If they will be undermined, mankind will lose
its anchors and crash on the rocks of history. We were much privileged that
they accepted our small help.
In the evening, we trekked
back to the village, to the spacious mansion of Hussein. It would not seem
out of place in Cannes or Sonoma. On its great balcony, we sat in the straw
chairs made by the Beidan villagers. The friendly but dignified cats of
Hussein jumped on our laps, while his shy daughters brought in sweet mint
tea. Folks came in to chat with the strangers as they are wont to do in the
remote villages. Small kerosene lamps stood on the tables and banisters: the
Israeli overlords refused to connect the village to the electric grid. Even
that was good, for we watched the full moon of October slowly floating in
the darkening skies and shining on the terraced hills, and on the roofs, and
on the dull armour of a Merkava tank on the hillside, his guns trained on
the village, and on the silent ancient knurled olives of
Yassoof.