December 26, 2015 Yesterday there was an engagement party for Sa’id’s son; Ezra and Ada went down to celebrate. The little girls, Gamar and Asil, whom we know well from the weekly marches, were all powdered and made up; today when we meet them, we still see traces of yesterday’s eyeliner. They’re busy playing with the coffee pot bubbling over on its bed of stones. Their older brothers are playing soccer under the indifferent eyes of the soldiers, their jeeps parked on the ‘Awad lands. Sa’id is talking to one […]Saturday, October 31 2015 Gawawis by David Shulman October 31, 2015 It’s tense in Hebron, tense in Jerusalem, tense inside people’s minds. For several weeks now we’ve had random stabbings (mostly by Palestinian teenagers); extra-judicial on-the-spot executions of Palestinians, or people who happen to look like Palestinians, by soldiers, settlers, and hot-headed passers-by; daily hysterical, hate-driven statements by Netanyahu and the thugs who surround him; attacks on hapless Palestinians by the Fascist squads of Lehava, prowling the city streets at night; and the de facto re-partition of Jerusalem. By contrast, in south Hebron we have a peaceful, almost […]
Saturday, September 26 2015 Bi’r al-‘Id by David Shulman 26/9/15 It’s the end of ‘Id al-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice, and Palestinians in the occupied territories are visiting their relatives and resting and celebrating, away from fields and grazing grounds, so it’s a good day for us to work again on the road to Bi’r al’-Id. You may remember that last time we calculated we’d need some 200 work days or more to finish this task. To prepare twenty meters or so is a day’s work: gathering stones, filling the potholes, arranging the rocks in some mosaic-like order, leveling […]
Wednesday, September 9 2015 Appeal for urgent assistance to fund a civil suit by Mahmoud Awad against the State of Israel
In the early morning of March 21st, 2011, Mr. Awad left his home and was on his way to Hebron, when he was attacked by a masked settler of Ma’on Farm, an extremist Israeli outpost in the southern Hebron Hills. The settler was armed with a knife with a 10-centimeter-long blade, and stabbed Awad in the chest and arm. Awad managed to escape and call for help, as the attacker run towards Ma’on Farm. There was an IDF jeep in the vicinity, but the soldiers did nothing to prevent the […]Sunday, July 12 2015 Bi’r al-‘Id By David Shulman
July 11, 2015 From early morning, when the air is still almost cool, until noon, when the sky is aflame, we work on the rock-and-dirt path to Bi’r al-‘Id. First you gather the medium-size rocks from the side of the road and the hill and arrange them in even rows; then you gather many bucketfuls of gravel and sand, scraped with rakes and picks from the caked surface of the soil, and pour this over the rocks; then you cover it all with earth carried in buckets from wherever you […]Monday, June 8 2015 Asfar by David Shulman
June 6, 2015 You may be getting tired of hearing about our micro-victories, especially since what is happening in Israel in general, and on the West Bank in particular, is so appalling. We live in Bibiland, ruled by Bibispeak and a government mainly composed of grotesque figures, totalitarian by inclination, racist by persuasion, self-righteous and malicious by creed and need; never, not even in recent years, has Israel seen a government such as this. The race to self-destruction is accelerating, with none to stop it from inside. How strange, then […]Monday, June 1 2015 Hebron, Abu Anan by David Shulman May 30, 2015 Happily, nothing very dramatic happened today in South Hebron, unless you consider acts of friendship, perseverance, and somehow doing the decent thing as in their own way dramatic. I spent the whole day harvesting the fields of Abu Anan. He’s an old friend, a lovable man of almost mythic qualities. Born in Hebron long ago. Driven from his first home, then his second home, by Israeli settlers, who also stole considerable chunks of his land. Still he didn’t give up. He built a third, and then a […]
Tuesday, May 19 2015 Umm al-Ara’is, Mufagara, Harruba by David Shulman
There are some pleasant surprises in store for us today. We have already set off on foot by the main path to Umm al-Ara’is, a good half-hour’s walk through the desert; shepherds wave hello from the slopes above us. It is 8:30 and still not too hot. I’m happy to be walking through this landscape once again—I was away for a month because of minor surgery—but within a few minutes Sa’id arrives in his clunky, white, infinitely expandable van: we count seventeen children and not a few adults. They tell […]
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