Taayush

מתנחל מעתניאל תוקף רועים, עדרים ופעילות/ים

taayush2012 — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 17:05:33 +0000

היום, אדמות אום אל עמד הסמוכות לעתניאל. מתנחל חמוש באקדח משיג גבול באדמות פלסטיניות פרטיות, תוקף רועה ופעילים/ות, מאיים ומגרש עדר. והכל לעיני החיילים שלא עוצרים בעדו, ולסיום לוחצים את ידו.

Settler from Otniel attacking shepherds flocks and activists

taayush2012 — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 16:59:58 +0000

Today, Umm Al Amad lands, near the settlement of Otniel. A settler armed with a gun invades private Palestinian lands, attacks a shpherd and activists and scares away the flock. And all in front of the soldiers who do not stop him, and finally shake his hand.

Weekly activity report

taayush2012 — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 19:38:31 +0000

Ta’ayush activists spent the Saturday (as any Saturday) in several locations of the South Hebron hills region, and cooperated with local Palestinians.

On the lands of the village of Um el Amad, activists accompanied local shepherds and their flocks of goats and sheep, while they went grazing near the settlement of Otni’el. This time the military nor the settlers did not disrupt the shepherds.

Accompanying shepherds

The shepherds noticed that earlier that week a new invasion into a different part of their lands that started last January, was extended further and was plowed and fenced. Some of the activists managed to take pictures of the new invasion, while soldiers tried to prevent the documentation and threatened to arrest some of the foreign activists.

One of the soldiers tried to prevent documentation of the new invasion by stepping on our GPS device

New invasion into Palestinian lands near Otniel

In Um el Arayes a large group of Israeli and Palestinian activists tried once again to access several plots of land privately owned by Palestinians, near the unauthorized outpost of Mitzpe Yair, where Jewish settlers have put up greenhouses (which have impending demolition warrants issued long ago). The scene was very similar to previous attempts to access these land in the recent months: activists were met by large military and police forces upon entering the plots. One border policeman was yelling at some children and being quite violent with some of the activists, grabbing them by the hand/shirt/backpack and also threw one activist to the ground and handcuffed him. The activist was told he was arrested, but minutes later was released, and a closed military zone warrant was issued, making all activists evacuate from the premises or risk being arrested (this time for real).

Border police pushing Ta’ayush activist (photo by Amir Bitan)

Activists confronting IDF, police and settlers in an attempt to reach the stolen lands (photo by Amir Bitan)

In Um el Kheir near the settlement of Carmel, activists accompanied local shepherds with their flocks. They were harassed by soldiers who insisted on arresting an elderly Palestinian from the village, claiming he had no right to be there. He was released a few hours later, without being taken to the police station for questioning.

Near the outpost of Assa’el, activists were joined by Palestinian farmers from a nearby village who own the lands around the outpost. Together they tried to visit and run a basic survey of the lands in order to see where access is not allowed. Soldiers and border policemen prevented their access to several plots around the outpost and threatened arrests, claiming that the Palestinians were penetrating into “a special security parameter”.

אום אל עמד, אום אל עראיס ועוד

taayush2012 — Sat, 04 May 2013 20:53:58 +0000

קבוצה גדולה של פעילים יצאה לאדמות אום אל עמד שסמוך להן נבנתה ההתנחלות עתניאל. לאחרונה תיעדנו עבודות הכנה להרחבתה הצפויה של ההתנחלות, וכן התנהגות עבריינית ותוקפנית של החיילים במקום כלפינו וכלפי הרועים. חלק מהסרטונים שלנו מצאו את דרכם לתקשורת הזרם המרכזי הישראלית ואף הבינלאומית.

לכתבה בבלוג הניו יורק טיימס, העוסקת בחלקה השני בפעילות תעאיוש

בעקבות החשיפה, ניכר בשבת זו כי החיילים קיבלו הוראות מפורשות שלא לדבר אתנו כלל ולשמור מאתנו מרחק פיסי. עם זאת, החיילים המשיכו להכריז על “קווים צהובים” דמיוניים, וגרשו את הרועים מאדמתם באופן בלתי חוקי ומבלי להציג צו שטח צבאי סגור כנדרש בחוק הצבאי.

כבשה מחפשת קווים צהובים

שתי קבוצות נוספות יצאו לשני עברי המאחז הבלתי חוקי אביגיל, האחת לליווי רועה תושב כפרון המערות אל מופקרה, והאחרת למרעה וקציר באדמות משפחת ג’בארין.

קציר ידני למרגלות הווילות באביגיל

המרעה והקציר עברו ללא בעיות מיוחדות, וחלק מהפעילים אף זכו לצפות בהמלטה של אחת הכבשים.

צפו בסרטון שצילם וערך גיא

קבוצה רביעית יצאה לאדמות אום אל עראיס אשר סמוך להן נבנה המאחז הבלתי חוקי מצפה יאיר. לאדמות אלה פלש תושב חדש במצפה יאיר, אחיו של תושב ותיק בהתנחלות סוסיא. הפולש הגיע לאזור מהגולן, לאחר שעסקיו שם נכשלו ולאחר ששמע מאחיו על התנאים המועדפים להם זוכים חקלאי האזור, בייחוד אלה המתגוררים במאחזים בלתי חוקיים, הכוללים בין השאר אספקת חשמל ומים חינם אין כסף. בעקבות הפלישה, הוכרזה הקרקע על ידי רשויות הכיבוש כ”אדמה במחלוקת”. עם הגיענו למקום בחברת בעלי האדמה, משפחת עווד, חסמו חיילים את דרכנו ומנעו את גישתנו לאדמה. הזכרנו לחיילים שגם על פי ההגדרה “אדמה במחלוקת”, הגישה לאדמה מותרת ורק העבודה בה אסורה. החיילים השיבו כי הם חוששים שגם מתנחלים ייכנסו לחלקה וכך ייווצר חיכוך. החיילים לא הציגו צו שטח צבאי סגור, אולם בעל הקרקע החליט שלא לממש בשלב זה את זכותו החוקית להיכנס לקרקע משום שבעוד שבועות ספורים ידון בית המשפט הישראלי בסוגיה והוא עדיין מקווה שהיא תוכרע לטובתו.

בנות משפחת עווד הצעירות לומדות לשמור על הסדר הציבורי

מאום אל עראיס נראית דרך העפר הלבנה המסמנת את הקו הירוק, ומעבר לה מרחב עצום ובלתי מיושב בתוך שטח ישראל. יש לשער כי בתוך מרחב זה לא יזכו מאחזים בלתי חוקיים לאותם תנאים מועדפים כמו בשטח הכבוש, ולכן נותרת אדמה זו בשממונה.

נשות משפחת עווד על רקע הקו הירוק

קבוצה אחרונה של פעילים יצאה לאדמות שסמוך להן נבנתה ההתנחלות סוסיא, השייכות בחלקן למשפחת שאמסטי. בעקבות פלישת המתנחלים לכאן, מכונה האדמה בפי רשויות הכיבוש “יהודית” ולא “אדמה במחלוקת”. כאן הציגו החיילים צו שטח צבאי סגור וגירשו את בעלי הקרקע.

חייל שומר על “אדמה יהודית”

בדרך חזרה לירושלים נתקע הטרנזיט, וזכינו לאירוח נדיב וקפה איטלקי אצל חברינו פעילי ארגון “אופרציונה קולומבה” המתגוררים בטוואנה, עד שלבסוף המשכנו בדרכנו.

קצין בועט בכבשה, אום אל עמד

taayush2012 — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 20:41:47 +0000

צפו בסרטון שצילם וערך גיא

IDF Major kicks a sheep, Umm Al Amad

taayush2012 — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 20:38:05 +0000

Watch the film made by Guy

Umm al-‘Amad by David Shulman

taayush2012 — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 20:13:42 +0000

Today we have the New Rules. In some respects they’re rather

like the Old Rules. The aim and sole rationale remain the same:

dispossession, expulsion, taking more land. The army has, it seems,

given up on its favorite device of declaring Closed Military Zones,

week after week; perhaps the outright illegality of this practice

ended up causing them too many problems in court. Instead, the

soldiers simply chase us—Palestinian shepherds, farmers, Israeli

activists—physically away, pushing, shoving, threatening, beating.

They also have decided they won’t allow us to document their crimes

on film; as soon as we start filming, they rush at us and block our

cameras with their cell phones. It’s as if they’d decided to circumvent

the whole irksome apparatus of the courts and to resort instead to

brute force. It’s much simpler, and maybe more effective.

At the same time, there’s been a wave of further annexations.

The settlers are paving new roads, which become de facto

boundaries, far beyond the settlements’ periphery. Plots of land that

the Palestinian owners have worked for some years, or have

reclaimed, often with our help, have been declared “in dispute”—

which means that settlers have access to them, but the rightful

owners don’t. All over South Hebron there are attempts from above

and from below to roll back the gains we’ve made in recent years.

Probably officers in the Civil Administration have been devising

creative schemes. And there have been the usual, routine detentions,

harassments, lethal threats, arrests—more, in fact much more, than

before. Add to this a wave of pure nit-picking and pestering, for

example by handing out tickets to activists, Israeli and Palestinian,

for absurd traffic violations; several of our people have recently been

fined large amounts for crossing the road while not on a marked

pedestrian crossing. Remember we’re talking about the vast open

spaces of a desert; the nearest pedestrian crossing is either in

Jerusalem or Beersheva, 40 miles away. I myself witnessed the police

administering just such a fine the last time I was in the area, some

three weeks back.

In short, things are tightening up. Here’s what it looks like on

an ordinary day. From Beit ‘Imrah we head down over the terraces to

the grazing grounds where the shepherds are clustered with their

sheep. An army jeep is waiting for us. A fat, balding officer heaves

himself out of it and informs Fadil: “You see this path. It’s the border.

You can’t cross it.” The path is an arbitrary line, deep inside the wadi

where, in the last months, they’ve been able to graze—after many

years during which this wadi was completely out of bounds. We start

filming. By now more soldiers, clutching rifles, have clambered out of

the jeep. They prod us, driving us over the line and then farther

uphill, and they’re jamming our cameras with their cell phones,

which they literally thrust in our faces. The commanding officer

doesn’t speak again. We protest, we talk of the law, we talk of the

crimes he’s committing. He doesn’t reply.

I have one of the cameras, so I get the cell phone procedure

over and over, as minutes become an hour, then maybe two hours. It

becomes a kind of game. He blocks me, I wave the camera up, down,

to the side, looping, looking for a crack or a window where I can film.

I manage quite a few short shots, enough, I hope, for the lawyers to

use. But he’s at me, pushing at me, taking joy, I think, in blocking and

parrying, without words, though I’m talking to him, asking him why

he’s so afraid of being filmed and telling him he’ll end up in the Court

of Justice at the Hague and so on and so on, and after a while it

becomes a dance, like nothing so much as the contact-point

improvisation that my wife Eileen has taught me: I take the camera

up to the far right, he brings his cell phone down on the lens, I weave

circles in the air and he follows me, loop for loop, I hold it down to

my waist, switch hands, wave it left or right, over my head, behind

my back, and he follows every move in the morose silence his role

demands. In the broiling dust of late morning, we move, gyrate, twirl

together over rock and thorn.

But it’s not much fun as a game. Today there’s a new tone,

menacing and malicious. I think again about wickedness. Since I

encounter it so regularly, I’ve developed the rudiments of a theory. I

tend to bracket out the pure sadists, who are anyway rather rare, and

to focus on those soldiers and policemen who seem to me capable of

feeling uneasy or conflicted in the reality in which they are following

their orders. For them, I think, like for most of us, the decision is

often a subtle one. But today it’s different. The ranking officer and

one lower officer are into it. Their faces give them away: cruel, hard-

set, disdainful, fully committed to this course. This isn’t cruelty for its

own sake, for the sheer pornographic delight it can provide—I’ve

occasionally seen that in South Hebron– but something arguably

worse, and in no way aberrant. They believe in the necessity of

causing hurt, and they do it without hesitation, driving their

subordinate soldiers, who are far more innocent and, perhaps,

ambivalent, along with them. “An intellectual hatred is the worst,” as

Yeats says. But theirs is not only intellectual.

How they rationalize it may not much matter. Later, after a

long morning of this chase-and-torment, one of the reserve soldiers

tells us: “We have proof that you people pay these Palestinians to

provoke us.” That, I suppose, is how he lives with himself. We’re the

problem. And in a way it’s true—if we hadn’t been here over months

and years, all the lands in the wadi and along the slopes would have

been lost forever, as the settlers wanted. We brought the shepherds

back. Now they’re here on their lands, and these soldiers are here to

cram them back into the little pockets and enclaves they inhabited

before. After a while one of the soldiers begins to scream curses,

sharp and thin in the desert air. “You Ruiners of Israel, ochrai yisrael,

you are aiding the enemies of the Jews, degenerates”—he is waving

his gun, threatening us, fingering the clip. [See http:// www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4372971,00.html and http:// www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-4372939,00.html (Hebrew)]

The only thing missing in the whole mad scene is a bona fide

madman, and indeed he turns up on cue. He’s from Yata, and his

sister lives in Beit ‘Imrah. He’s wearing a thick blue jacket, too hot for

today, and the shepherds tell us at once that he’s crazy. He picks up

rocks—there’s no dearth of them—and lobs a few at the sheep. He

refuses to go away. All we need now is for him to throw a rock at the

soldiers, and god knows what will happen. He weaves his way up and

down the hill, in and out of the herd, cursing the young boys who are

tending the sheep, chanting unintelligible mantras, his eyes bulging,

jagged stones cradled in his palms. The shepherds taunt him; he gets

more and more angry and voluble. I think he fits right in. “Let him

be,” says the fat officer, “hu akhla gever, he’s a fine guy.”

— The shepherds are impressive; cool, unintimidated. ‘Abd, in

an elegant black shirt, tells me he’s in 10th grade, studying math,

physics, Arabic, English. Grades one to ten are all packed together in

a single kuttab classroom. After two more years, he wants to study

engineering in Hebron or Ramallah or Nablus. He asks me what I do,

and I tell him. He likes Indian films and has actually picked up a little

Hindi, so for a few minutes, in the midst of everything else, the sheep,

soldiers, shepherds, lunatic, all playing their parts to perfection, we

chatter in Hindi and Arabic. He’s smart, quick to learn. He needs a

computer, and then maybe through his cell phone he could pick up

the internet even out here, in Beit ‘Imrah, strange as that must sound.

— As we’re getting ready to leave—the sheep have eaten their fill of

thorns—my friend Anas turns up. The last times I was here we had

long theological discussions, which included the troubling question

of whether turtles can get into Paradise (the answer is yes, in case

you’ve forgotten). He says he’s missed seeing me. He’s interested in

the little book I am carrying in my front pocket, so I hand it to him,

and he flips through the pages. Most of it is in Greek: I tell him there

was once, long ago, a great poet called Homer. He hasn’t heard of

Homer. On the cover it says: Iliad XXI. He examines it closely and

says: “It means Iliad, whoever he is, extra extra large.”

Beneath the bonhomie there is trauma. Anas, 16 years old, was

arrested some weeks ago by the Border Police, who took the trouble

to hit him with various trumped-up charges. By great good fortune

we had video footage that clearly showed the Border Police were

lying, but still they held Anas for thirty hours, hand-cuffed, stripped

bare, outside in the freezing cold, with no food or water. They

wouldn’t let him go to the bathroom. They told him they were going

to hold him for twelve months without trial. Finally he saw a judge,

who freed him without conditions. But Anas has changed since I last

saw him. He has bad dreams at night; they are coming to kill him.

— On the way back to Jerusalem, Gabi asks me if I still think there’s

some possibility for the two-state solution. I shake my head. Guy,

who’s in South Hebron all the time, says, “Yes, of course, that’s what

Israel wants. They want the Jewish state here, on the ground, all of

it, and the Palestinian state can be somewhere else, maybe on the

moon.”

— I come back disheartened and weary—exactly what our enemies

hope to achieve. Many hours in the thirsty sun, climbing up and down

those hills, are nothing compared to the mild agony of dealing with

those soldiers. Today’s motto, from Staretz Silouan, the nineteenth-

century mystic, quoted by the incomparable Gillian Rose: “Keep your

mind in hell, and despair not.”

Israeli soldier threatening, cursing and using racist expressions towards shepherds and activists

taayush2012 — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 16:53:28 +0000

Watch the film made by Taayush activst Guy, showing an Israeli soldier today near the settlement of Otniel, threatening, shouting, cursing and using racist expressions towards Palestinian shepherds from the village of Umm Al Amad and Ta’ayush Activists.

Translation of some of the expressions used by the soldier: “Watch out! Shut up, I’ll let you have one in the head! Get out of here, you asshole! You guys are worse than Arabs! assholes! You help Arabs!”

חייל מאיים על רועים ופעילים באום אל עמד, מקלל ומתבטא בגזענות

taayush2012 — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 16:29:14 +0000

צפו בסרטון שצילם וערך פעיל תעאיוש גיא

Illegal evacuation and disturbing of legal photographing in Umm Al Amad

taayush2012 — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 20:22:02 +0000

Watch the film made by Ta’ayush activists