A-Infos (en) Palestine-Israel, MEDIA, The joint struggle* in the Jordan Rift Valley had some results - Twilight zone / Herding the shepherds

The Dararma family was distraught this past Sunday. Around noon on that hot day, two jeeps 
- one belonging to the Israel Defense Forces, the other to the Civil Administration - 
arrived at their home. A few officers emerged from the vehicles and informed the family 
that they would have to leave their home within a few hours and could not return until the 
following morning. The reason: an IDF exercise was to be held in the area. It turned out 
another 40 Palestinian families had received the same order. But not, of course, the 
residents of the nearby Jewish settlements.

Although he's been subjected to evacuations and demolitions before, Kassem Dararma, a 
shepherd, was deeply troubled: Where was he going to take his wife, four children and 
dozens of grandchildren? What would become of his 120 sheep and goats, his only source of 
income? It would be impossible to build a makeshift pen to protect his livestock from the 
beasts of prey roaming the desert; he would have to stay up all night to guard them.

About 500 people live nearby, and they too received the temporary mass-expulsion order. 
Someone suspected a "maneuver" was involved, but not necessarily of the military kind; the 
following morning, they would not be allowed to return to their homes and lands. This 
happened in dozens of Palestinian villages in 1948 - indeed, some of the local residents 
are refugees from that time. They feared the calamity was perhaps about to recur. But 
toward evening good news arrived.

-----------------------------------------
* [Transkator censorship? In the original text in Hebrew it was printed:

"See what a miracle: early evening the harsh decree was canceled. The interventionof the 
activists of Betselem, Road Blocks Watch, Active Stills, Anarchists Against the Wall*, and 
the United Nation coordination office for humanitarian issues (OCHA), caused the canceling 
of the calamity."

The above was replaced with:

"Thanks to the intervention of various officials - extending all the way to Palestinian 
Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, the residents said - the order had been canceled, or maybe 
just deferred."
	
---------------------------------------------------------

The Civil Administration said the next day that the whole thing had been an unfortunate 
mistake. The Dararmas were able to sleep in their house. Well, house is one way of putting 
it. Their home is actually a ruin - the remnants of a Turkish inn built on the Hamam 
Al-Maliah springs that once produced hot mineral water, but have long since dried out. 
Only mud puddles remain, from which a few shrunken cows try to slake their thirst. Remains 
of colorful balconies and a few eucalyptus and palm trees are testimony to better days. 
People used to come here on vacation, but for the past 10 years it's been the home of the 
Dararma family.

The property belongs to the Catholic Church, which long ago stopped collecting rent. The 
large rooms are empty apart from a stack of mattresses, spread out on the exposed concrete 
floor at night, and swarms of pesky flies. There is no running water and no electricity. 
In the scorching midday heat a mule climbs the stairs leading to the courtyard, desperate 
for a bit of shade. One of the children is stretched out on the hot sand, asleep. It's hot 
in the Jordan Rift Valley.

Nearly every one of the hundreds of herder families that live here, in some cases for 
generations, has at some point received an evacuation or demolition order. This 
"evacuation of outposts" has been going on for a few years, but now seems to have been 
kicked into high gear - the hell with "natural growth."

A few years ago, Israel built a system of trenches between the valley roads and the homes 
of the shepherds, cruelly preventing them from using these separation roads. Over the past 
two weeks, the IDF has placed dozens of concrete cubes along the Allon Road - which 
descends from the road to Jerusalem to the lowest place on earth. The signs call out a 
warning: "Danger. Firing zone. No entry." These cubes, a new type of outdoor sculpture, 
block the entry to the remote dirt trails leading to the hundreds of tent camps that are 
home to some 15,000 shepherds and their families. Dozens more cubes can be seen sitting 
next to Kfir Brigade headquarters: their time will come.

In the meantime, the shepherds continue pursuing their traditional way of life behind the 
warning signs, firing zones or not. These are their lands, this is their life, they have 
nowhere else to go. Does Israel intend in the next stage to block all the dirt paths and 
stifle the shepherds for good? Does Israel plan to evacuate these 15,000 people from their 
homes and tents? Is this part of an ethnic cleansing plan, ahead of talks on the future of 
the Jordan Rift Valley?

It's a biblical landscape, and a few abandoned mud huts also evoke Africa - 90 minutes 
from Tel Aviv, 10 minutes from the settlement of Ma'aleh Ephraim. Occasionally the stark 
desert landscape is broken by splashes of lush green. There are fish ponds in the 
settlement of Roi, cultivated vines in Bekaot, hothouses in Mekhora. But the valley's 
original inhabitants have no water. Not even a drop. Not one of these thousands of 
shepherds is hooked up to the water system, let alone the power grid.

What do the Rift Valley settlers - who for years taught us not to call them mitnahalim, as 
the West Bank settlers are known, but mityashvim, the traditional term for the Zionist 
pioneers - all of them living on kibbutzim and moshavim (cooperative farming communities), 
the salt of the earth, Labor Movement stalwarts, so different from the loonies of the Gush 
Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) movement - what do they think when they leave their gated 
settlements with their barbed wire, iron gates and electronic systems? Does it occur to 
them that their fish have water, but the children of the "natives" have none? Do the 
residents of Roi, for example, ever notice how their neighbors across the fence live?

One such neighbor, a 59-year-old shepherd named Abed al-Rahim Bashrath, has three wives 
and 27 children. His family is imprisoned, thirsty and poor - just like the other 180 
souls in the desert tent compound of Al Hadidya. Only three times a week (Sunday, Tuesday 
and Thursday), for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon, does the IDF deign 
to open the iron gate preventing them from traveling to the town of Tubas, which is the 
center of their livelihood. Since 2002, they have been evicted four times - each time 
their meager property is destroyed and they are displaced to a different site.

On the last day of evacuation and destruction, in 2007, Bashrath's youngest daughter was 
born. He named her Tsumud, signifying the desperate but steadfast clinging to the land. He 
received the latest demolition order a few weeks ago, which states that their structures 
are illegal. However, the only "structures" here are the steel poles to which he attached 
empty "Produce of Uganda" sacks to act as a roof over their heads. This is his "Uganda 
Plan": to cling tenaciously to the land.

"Is this a structure that needs to be authorized?" he asks. "Everywhere in the world you 
need authorization for buildings, not for sacks that will fly away with the first wind." 
We are sitting in the shade of the sacks and drinking Tapuzina, an Israeli orange drink.

Because the gate is locked, the children cannot be bused to their schools, many kilometers 
away; therefore during the school year they live with their mothers in a rented apartment 
in Tubas, far from the men, who stay behind with the sheep. They must bring water from 32 
kilometers away, in tanks tied to tractors - that is, when the gate is open.

The tuk-tuk of a water pump can be heard clearly. Next to Bashrath's tents, a touch away 
but fenced off, is a modern well from which a wide pipe emerges. These are the waters of 
the settlements. Sweet, flowing, pure water of life. It's for the settlers - to irrigate 
their fields, fill their pools and fish ponds, grow their decorative gardens. Bashrath has 
pleaded to be allowed to hook up to this water line, in return for payment, of course, so 
that his family and sheep can have water. He has been met with refusal. Nowhere is the 
injustice more flagrant than next to this well. Nowhere is the apartheid more blatant than 
it is here, in the Jordan Rift Valley.

Bashrath: "Their pipes cross our fields. You can hear the noise of the water and the 
pumps, but you can't get a drop. We are ready to pay any price. I am not a politician, I 
am a shepherd, but the politicians say that under the Oslo accords this is Area C. If so, 
Israel has to supply the basic human services here: water, electricity, health and 
education. Why do we not deserve to have drinking water? Sometimes the settlers' pipe 
bursts and the water scatters. Five percent of the water lost can meet our needs for one 
year. We work in the settlements, so they are nice to us, but if we approach their fence 
with the herd they attack us and the sheep."

In the past few weeks, another 32 new eviction notices were distributed to 300 more souls. 
According to Fathi Hadirath, coordinator of the Jordan Rift Valley Solidarity 
organization, Israel's policy has taken a sharp turn for the worse. Since January 2006, 
the valley has been cut off from the rest of the occupation zones in the West Bank, and 
only registered residents of the area are allowed entry. Even landowners who lack a 
permanent home in the valley are barred from accessing their land. Farmers have difficulty 
getting their produce out and thousands of dunams of land have been closed off as "firing 
zones."

The dozens of concrete cubes placed in the valley over the past two weeks suggest that 
worse is still to come. Hadirath is convinced that the cubes will be followed by 
checkpoints which will prevent entry to and exit from the tent compounds completely. 
Israel's policy, he says, is to herd all the shepherds into five villages, five 
"settlement blocs," if you will - except that the population density in these villages is 
already intolerable. Since 1967, Israel has not allowed even one new home to be built there.

A case in point is Bardalla, the largest of the five villages, where 2,300 people live on 
just 500 dunams (125 acres). In Zabidath, next to the settlement of Argaman, the residents 
wanted to build a playground for the village's 500 children, but Israel would not 
authorize the project. There is no room in these villages for the new refugees Israel 
seeks to create, and in any event the expulsion of the 15,000 shepherds from their land 
will permanently deprive them of their sole source of revenue. Hadirath believes that 
underlying the evacuation is an ambitious Israeli political plan to "cleanse" the Rift 
Valley - which constitutes a third of the territory of the West Bank and is home to 56,000 
Palestinians - of most of its inhabitants. This will be easier than evacuating one Jewish 
settler outpost.

The IDF spokesperson stated in response: "Central Command notes these are areas that 
constitute recognized firing zones, which are not designated for habitation and were in 
the past marked with metal warning signs. Over the years the signs were stolen and the 
firing zones remained unmarked, so that the area was open to the entry of civilians in a 
way that put them at risk. In the wake of this, the IDF in the past two weeks placed in 
the Jordan Rift Valley, along the Allon Road, dozens of concrete cubes on which a warning 
about firing zones appears."

No response from the Civil Administration was received by press time.

Two weeks ago, the IDF demolished the wretched sheep pens of the Rehail family, made up of 
30 souls; the pens' remains lie on the yellow ground. The Dararma family lives right 
behind a new concrete cube placed at the entrance to its tent compound opposite the 
settlement of Mashkiyot. There is an ancient well in the valley across the road, but 
whenever the children try to approach it the settlers of Mashkiyot arrive on all-terrain 
vehicles and chase them away.It's theirs, only theirs.
============================

* Rumors were that the AAtW are involved in an organization of a direct action.

The following post was distributed in the AAtW Mailing list:

   "This Afternoon army and civil governance people arrived at Al-Malikh in the Jordan 
valley and announced that all of them (30 families, over 200 people including children. 
sick, old and babies) must leave.
Army claimed that it is for a military drill and will be allowed to return 24 hours later, 
but it is like that it will use it to ruin their houses and/or evicted.

  The people there has asked the assistance of Israelis - if you can come tonight or 
tomorrow, please call. K."
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