As the sun sank in the sky yesterday afternoon, the daughters and I harvested grape leaves at the destroyed property of their late uncle about 20 meters down the hill. When the uncle died, his wife and children moved to Yatta, presumably due to pressure from settlers, but the space was still hauntingly beautiful with lush fruit trees and ancient sabra cactus growing among the ruins. Three caves were carved into the hill – two for human use and the biggest one for livestock.
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We held a crickedy ladder beneath the eldest daughter as she reached for grape leaves from the vine overhead. Modern Palestinian ballads played from their phone and the girls all laughed at my (lack of) dancing skills.
Later, when wrapping dawali for dinner, the other activist and I were called into the yard: settlers were intruding onto the uncle’s space where we had been less than an hour before. They smashed the rusty iron gate repeatedly and threw rocks to try to instigate a response. We just filmed and watched until they got bored and left.
The family and I stayed up into the morning hours waiting and listening for them to return. Thankfully we were able to get a few hours of sleep before one of the settlers came back, this time with his sheep. He came very close to the family’s house and sang songs loudly in Hebrew. He was so distracted by his effort to taunt and intimidate us that he lost control of his sheep. Watching him try to round the flock back up brought a bit of levity to the situation.
After an hour or so the settler said goodbye to us in English and made a show of leaving. But before we could exhale, a silver car and ATV raced up the road. The men from the family we are staying with joined us as we rushed towards the southern valley where the settlers were heading. We got there just in time to film them marching over to an elderly Palestinian shepherd, machine guns in tow.
We aimed our cameras and got between the Zionists and the grey-haired man. After shouting in Hebrew, they got back in their ATV and drove full speed into his flock as the settler shepherd from earlier laughed, his sheep grazing safely behind him.
The ATV continued to drive back and forth between us. A few more Palestinians arrived for support as another settler arrived on horseback. I recognized him from previous encounters. He is well-known in the area for being especially aggressive. We decided to call for backup in the group chat for volunteers in the area and Israeli activists arrived soon after. They used their citizenship privileges to call the police and the settlers finally dispersed. Only when they were back at the settlement did the police drive by.
There is no expectation of justice from the corrupt authorities but the family I am staying with is working with a lawyer to bring the numerous reports they have acquired to court. They hope that the hundreds of videos they have depicting settler violence will someday bring about some tangible repercussion.
Settlers can be annexed which means they are prohibited from returning to their countries of origin and are cut off from state-given funding. Rarely do they receive jail time. Even when convicted of murder, the punishment is 3 years imprisonment on average. Some murderers are sentenced only to 6 months community service. (If you need an Israeli organization to verify this outrageous truth, see this).
There have also been plenty of occasions where the victim and those close to the victim have been arrested instead of the criminal. Every Palestinian I have talked to has had a family member or friend put in jail and tortured for the crimes of an Israeli, if they hadn’t been through that experience themselves. Israelis, even those whose presence Israel sees as “illegal” (put in quotations because every Israeli occupier is illegal according to international law) are tried under civil law whereas Palestinians are tried under military law, often without an interpreter.