Saturday, January 30 2010 Al-Tal’a, Um Zaituna- By David Shulman “The most desperate fights are often the most hopeful,” Istvan says to me as we stand on the hill looking down at the shepherds and their sheep. You can always rely on Istvan for the surprising Hungarian perspective on things—not usually an optimistic one, but humane and morally acute in a dark, perhaps ironic way. This is his fourth trip with us to South Hebron. He likes the Ta’ayush mode, which he thinks exemplifies the central Gandhian principle: what is inside shapes what is outside; if you can overcome your ...
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Thursday, December 31 2009 ibn Ezra To ibn Ezra This website is run by Joseph Dana and Mairav Zonszein. We are Jerusalem based, American-Israeli Ta’ayush activists. Our work has been featured in The Nation, Haaretz, Global Voices Online and regularly on Mondoweiss. We offer an on-the-ground perspective on life in Israel and the reality of the settlement project for Israeli and Palestinian society. We post exclusive footage from the West Bank that often includes acts of settler violence, IDF policy and conduct and settlement expansion, to name a few topics. To ibn Ezra
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Friday, December 25 2009 Christmas in Sheikh Jarrah from David shulman This time I was sure they’d arrest me—I’d somehow eluded them, without trying to do so, the last three times I was here for the Friday demonstration—but once again it didn’t happen. Maybe I’m too old? Last week they clearly went after the young people. Gabi was standing next to his son, Boaz, who was arrested (though he had done nothing to deserve the honor); Gabi asked the policemen to take him, too, but they refused and pushed him rudely away. It’s almost insulting. We had 27 arrestees who spent ...
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Thursday, December 10 2009 Sheikh Jarrah (2) As always in violence, it’s impossible to put together a coherent story. You lose track of what happened first, what came next, who got hurt when; the moments stretch out endlessly, run together, overlap, images are superimposed or interwoven; the physical pain gets buried somewhere safe, more or less, inside the surreal limbo of your memory, which seems oddly to correspond to the external limbo of the action as you saw it unfold. So this time I won’t try to tell the story. Instead, a few vignettes: n      A grey, cold ...
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Friday, December 4 2009 Sheikh Jarrah, Eastern Jerusalem Exhibit A. Kindly examine the attached photograph. Let’s make an inventory. Three stuffed animals, two face up, one face down. The yellow-and-red one, half animal half cushion, has an inscription: “I love you.” One school bag. Two unidentified red toys. Five pieces of yellow lego. One armless, legless doll. One yellow brush with blue bristles. An Arabic newspaper. A broken pole wrapped in red cloth. A broken flower, perhaps freshly cut, probably thrown out with the vase it sat in. I don’t want to overload your inbox, so I won’t add ...
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Friday, November 27 2009 New Caravan from Badia Dwaik According to the fowling for the situation from youth against settlements group in Hebron city ,in 27th of November 2009 ,Friday after noon the settlers with Protection by the Israeli army in Al Bwera area in south north Hebron city ,the Settlers set a new caravan in the area to large kharsena settlement which related to illegal kiryat arba settlement ,notice that this step became after the Israeli government decision to stop building the new settlements for 10 months , Knowing that the settlers ...
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Saturday, June 6 2009 Susya and Khirbet Safa By David Shulman It never, and I mean never, rains in the south Hebron hills in June. Days are counted on a simple continuum of hot-hotter-hottest. But here I am standing in the steep road at Khirbet Safa at 9:30 in the morning under an almost cloudless sky, and raindrops are splattering against my skin. It’s no storm, but still a kind of miracle. I put it down to Obama’s visit to Cairo this week and to his speech which—probably for the first time in decades from an American president—spoke the ...
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Saturday, December 1 2007 A Visit to Tuba Tuba, December 1, 2007 David Shulman Tuba: another minute, almost invisible point on the map; another village of black tents and wobbly huts and a well and a few caves carved into the barren hillside, almost hovering in space on the edge of the desert that cascades and flows, white yellow and brown, all the way down to the Dead Sea. In the distance you can see the purple mountains of Moab in Jordan. There is, I think to ...
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