A group of rabbis seek to show that Judaism should not be equated with the extreme right, writes MICHAEL JANSEN, Nablus, West Bank
OUR minibus speeds past the dusty, deserted Huwara checkpoint, south of the northern West Bank city of Nablus. Huwara used to be a major obstacle, jammed with cars and people; today neither a vehicle nor a person is in sight. The road between Ramallah, the Palestinian Authority’s administrative centre, and Nablus is open, except when Israeli troops decide to mount a flying checkpoint.
We turn east and make for the rolling hills clad in olive trees, their trunks dark and twisted, leaves green and silver. Most of the trees are young, perhaps half a century old, but here and there stands an ancient tree, planted hundreds of years ago, its trunk hollow, its branches bowed. Palestinians compare themselves to the rooted and steadfast olive trees. When settlers burn or bulldoze them, Palestinians mourn olives as family members.
These sunny, apparently quiet hills are a theatre of war.
“Palestinian farmers have a lot of trouble with settlers in this area,” observes Rabbis for Human Rights director Arik Ascherman.
“We help the farmers plough their fields and pick their olives. Our legal department deals with expropriations. We also rebuild [Palestinian] homes that have been demolished and plant olive trees. [The fact that] we are rabbis sends a message [to the Palestinians] that they should not equate [the Jewish] religion with the violent extreme right” in Israel, Ascherman says.
He points out that after the Oslo accord was signed in 1993, Israel accelerated settlement construction. While Palestinians expected that the land Israel conquered in 1967 would be theirs, the Israelis planned to negotiate over this land and sought to lay claim to as much of it as possible. After the second intifada erupted in 2000, Israelis tried to “stop Palestinians from working their land so that after some years this could be claimed by settlers”, he says.
“Ours is the only rabbinic organisation in Israel dedicated exclusively to human rights. It was established in 1988, during the first [Palestinian] intifada . . . For the past seven or eight years Trócaire has supported our programmes.”
We wait in the countryside for Jamal, who bounces along the road on an elderly red tractor. “His own tractor was trashed by settlers,” asserts Ascherman, who has come to work out with Jamal when to send volunteers to accompany him when he ploughs two large fields covered in golden grasses which nod in the breeze.
By law Palestinians should have access to their land, and the army is supposed to protect them, but since settlers generally have a free hand, these rabbis act as human shields.
Upper Yanoun is a hillside hamlet with 200 inhabitants belonging to the same clan.
“In 2002 settlers came in the middle of the night and expelled the villagers,” says Ascherman.
“The settlers harass the villagers, burn their olives and wheat fields. The settlers enter the village constantly.”
After coffee with Rashed, the clan leader, we proceed to a house occupied by four Ecumenical Accompaniers who are based here to deter attacks and report them to the UN. Pat Devlin from the UK says: “A group of 19 settlers came into the village, took the cover off the well, climbed down and swam in it. The army said they were ‘brave youth’. . . They are taking land [that] villagers farm and use for grazing, driving down their capacity to earn an income,” she states.
Back on the flat on a narrow road running between the fields, we spot a herd of gazelle foraging in the tall grass.
“Palestinians say the only good thing about the settlers is they have stopped us from eating all the gazelle,” remarks Ascherman.