First, an apology to readers. I’m moving, so my posts will be intermittent. Also: I’m aware of what a lousy job I’ve done of monitoring comments, reading them. Very unprofessional. It has in part to do with time/pay. I might be getting paid for some posts before long, who knows…
Everyone who follows the Middle East news should read the shocking review in the New York Review of Books of poet David Shulman’s book Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel/Palestine. Shulman moved to Israel from America in 1967, when he was 18. He got dragged into politics almost against his will. "Mad Israel hurt him into politics," reviewer Avishai Margalit says, quoting Auden. But Shulman doesn’t concentrate on the giant issues–Annapolis, Camp David, water rights–he performs nonviolent resistance against what he terms "evil" and I call the religious left: the support for the settlement policy, which for four decades, he writes, has granted a "haven" to "destructive individuals… to terrorize the local Palestinian population…"
One horrifying story leaps forth. Shulman has worked in the Hebron Hills, a remote area outside the second-largest West Bank city where Jewish religious settlers have built outposts with the army’s protection, from a deed they found in the Bible. Crazies. Supported by the U.S. government. For hundreds or maybe thousands of years, Palestinians have moved through these hills and lived in caves, herding goats and sheep on the rocky terrain.
It began some two weeks ago when Palestinians from [the village of] Twaneh noticed a settler —almost certainly from Chavat Maon, the most virulent of the settlements in the area—walking deliberately through their fields in the early morning. Shortly afterward the animals got sick and the first sheep died. Then the shepherds found the poison scattered over the hills, tiny blue-green pellets of barley coated with… deadly rat poison from the fluoroacetate family…. The aim was clear: to kill the herds of goats and sheep, the backbone of the cave dwellers’ subsistence economy in this harsh terrain, and thus to force them off the land.
Visiting the Arab settlement, Shulman writes:
After half an hour I start to wonder if we have come here for nothing. I stare hard at the rocky ground, the purple wildflowers, the thorns, the fresh sheep droppings. Still no poison. Then a surprise: bending low, with my face nearly touching the soil, I see two —no, three—of the blue-green grains of poisoned barley….
Five minutes later Judy [his companion] strikes gold—a huge cache of them….
Shulman then observed that all the while, on the hill opposite, directly under the settlement,
one of these settlers, with his gun, is watching us, advancing…as we move; he is dressed in black, an ominous presence, an Israeli Darth Vader. Farther up, a set of army jeeps is also in place. Maybe this time, at least, they’ll keep the settlers from attacking us.
What a sick story. Shulman does not excuse Arabs in his book, per Margalit. They also have developed an exterminationist ideology. But where is the American responsibility to be fair? We are totally on the side of these nuts who are destroying the Arab ways of life, for the most tribalist reasons–because they are traditional, because they are not Jews, because they oppose Jewish expansion in this biblical realm. None of this would be happening if our country did not sign off, year after year, on this criminal, despicable behavior.
And you wonder whether these stories are not repeated across the Arab world (Yes). And you wonder if they are not poisoning the Arab world against us….Time was when a moral outcry like Shulman’s commanded wide attention. His book came out in June, NYRB is the first I’ve heard of it.The story of the sheep should be on the front page of our national newspapers, as crimes underwritten by the U.S. Blindness. Self-inflicted.
