We woke up Saturday morning while it was still dark out. From our hotel balcony, we could see a thick fog covering the streets of East Jerusalem. We packed our bags and boarded onto buses heading east. As we drove through Jerusalem, I looked out the window and watched streams of Jews heading to the Old City to pray. It was Shabbat, the day of the week when our tradition invites us to imagine and embody what life would feel like in “Olam Haba”, the world to come, the world we wish to be true. I closed my eyes and dreamed about this world existing, without the countless checkpoints, demolished homes, and military court rooms that I had witnessed in the past week.
Guided by organizers from Ta’ayush, our delegation split into two separate groups for the day; one for the Jordan Valley and the other for the South Hebron Hills. Being Area C land, these vast rolling fields are areas of high friction between Palestinians and settlers. They contain some of the highest poverty rates in the Occupied Territories, as the shepherds and farmers living here are subjected to ever growing frequency of demolition orders, closed military zones on their land, cut off access to water, and violence from settlers.
Starting early each morning, the shepherds in many of these villages spend hours corralling their animals around the outskirts of their land, in search of scarce patches of grass for the herd to eat from. Today we went to a tiny village called Ouja, located directly adjacent to the illegal settlement outpost of Mevo’ot Yericho. When we arrived, our guide, Amiel, briefed us. Ta’ayush has learned that the settlers tend to be particularly violent on Shabbat. They come driving or running into the fields in the morning to scare and disperse the herds of animals, to wreak havoc on Palestinian lives and publicly disregard their rights to their homes and lands. They come with cameras, phones, dogs, whistles and guns. Our job was merely to witness any violence that arose and act as intermediaries between the shepherds, soldiers, and settlers.
Eventually, a solider drove up in a jeep. He walked to us with a map. Through broken translation of Arabic the solider began to communicate that the shepherd should not be here, that getting too close to where the settlement was could be dangerous for him. He held up his hand-drawn map and pointed to a nonexistent line in the sand that marked the boundary of properties. Until now, I think I had been holding onto some illusion of democracy in these processes, thinking that fair or formal transfer of land in these areas exist. But in this moment, I was so blatantly proven wrong. Land theft is not rooted in a system of justice; it is an exploitative manipulation by people in power. I asked the soldier what his name was and how old he was. Pesach, 22. My heart sank with the reminder that the vast majority of soldiers upholding this occupation are many years younger than me.
Amidst the circles of repetitive argument, Amiel stopped and crouched down in the middle of our crowd. He bounced between English, Hebrew and Arabic while pointing to a caterpillar building a chrysalis around itself. Later, I asked him why he paused the seemingly dire conversations over land disputes to draw attention to a bug. He kept walking for a while before saying, quietly, “we are all part of the same nature.” Minutes later, while heading back to the road, we were looking forward to the herd ahead of us when a goat birthed a baby onto the sand. It was tiny and slimy and breathing rapidly. Throughout a day that was far from resembling “Olam Haba,” filled with violence and fear, these moments stood as reminders that beauty and pain are most often side by side.
