“We’re not allowed to talk to you,” the soldiers said Monday, offering instead a piece of paper written in Hebrew with an appeal in the name of the “Military Commander, Binyamin Sector.” On Sunday evening they invaded the home of a family in the village of Beit Ur al-Tahta, southwest of Ramallah. They ordered the family to take their living-room furniture out of the room, placed a bright yellow chemical toilet in the yard, and hung two Israeli flags on the roof.
Eleven people live in that well-kept house on a hill in the southern part of the village. Five or six soldiers have ensconced themselves in the living room and occasionally go up to the roof or into the garden. The women say that even though the soldiers put a portable toilet in the yard, they urinate off the balcony.
Turning a Palestinian residence into a military position is a yawn for journalists. A yawn represented by the failure to report; by the lack of public interest. Children’s fear of rifles, the disruption of family life and violent invasive acts have become a natural norm in a state where settlers’ needs define everything.
“Dear residents, recently a number of attempts by young people to attack Israeli citizens in your area have occurred,” states the piece of paper the soldiers handed out. “In response, military forces have been forced to act in the village to prevent the continuation of danger to the citizens’ security.
“The military activity of the military forces in the village is intended to reduce the number of violent incidents against Israeli citizens traveling on roads and living in the area, to protect the security of the region, not to disrupt your routine.”
Routine: Military jeeps keep entering the village when the drivers feel like it. Tear gas and stun grenades. Military positions all around. Wide Route 443, built on the land of the village and other villages in the Ramallah district, but forbidden for Palestinians to travel on. The road and its branches, which connect the coastal region to Jerusalem and the settlements (Givat Ze’ev, Ramot, and others), sketch a wide strip inside the West Bank that has in effect been emptied of Palestinians save for laborers who work in the settlements. This is how the natural continuum between Ramallah and its suburbs, and the villages north and south of the road, is broken.
Routine: 36 percent of the village’s 5,650 dunams are in Area B (where Israel permits the Palestinian Authority to plan and build), and the rest – 3,575 dunams – is in Area C, under exclusive Israeli civilian and military control. For the common soldier, C is the State of Israel, and this is apparent in Beit Ur al-Tahta, a synonym for the ban on Palestinian construction, the ban on paving and improving agricultural roads, or the ban on refusal to expand master plans.
Even this onerous routine was disrupted last Thursday. A combined force of the army and Civil Administration equipped with a bulldozer managed to enforce the Area C laws within two hours. In a farmed wadi south of the village they destroyed an ancient cistern rehabilitated by the Palestinian Agriculture Ministry, as well as a planted plot and a stone fence.
On a hill planted with olive trees in the northern part of the village, they destroyed a small, old concrete structure that was used for storing tools, and at the entrance to the village they confiscated a prefab room that a car-parts firm used as an office and poured sand on five junked cars. They confiscated a parked backhoe and a backhoe blade they found on the hill above, and for dessert they destroyed an iron gate and rummaged through an empty plot on the side of the road.
“We believe that you too want to live in peace and without any military activity in the village and in your homes,” the military commander concludes on that piece of paper. “Therefore, remove those who carry out terrorist acts and violence. In a joint action that will prevent terrorist activities, we will reach peace in the region.”
But in the dictionary of the residents (and mine), destruction of cisterns, theft of land and livelihood, and invasions of homes are acts of terror.
Amira Hass
