Ishmael El-Adra, Palestinian shepherd injured in settler knife attack, in Bir El-Id, near Hebron, photo by David Kattenburg
The other day, the State Department refused to condemn Israeli actions in the occupied Hebron Hills. What are those actions? Well, they include the settler attack on Ishmael El-Adra, above, aimed at forcing him and his fellow villagers to leave the land and move into the nearby city of Yatta. His village is Bi El-Id. One of the settler outposts that neighbor his village is called “Lucifer’s Farm.”
This violence is documented by Canadian journalist Dave Kattenburg in an audio documentary at his Green Planet Monitor site focusing on: Israeli home demolitions, evictions, and settler attacks in the South Hebron Hills, and on the apparent death of the Two-State Solution. The documentary (accompanied by text and photos), features the voices of Rabbi Arik Ascherman and a couple of lawyers from Rabbis for Human Rights, Ezra Nawi (Israeli human rights activist), several residents of the Hebron Hills cave village of Susya, Jeff Halper (Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions), and Ha’aretz columnist Amira Hass.
Also included in Kattenburg’s audio doc: some interesting clips from a pair of Jewish settlers, and the frank views of Yigal Orgad-Cohen, Chancellor of Ariel University of Samaria, regarding the future of the Two-State Solution (no future at all, Orgad-Cohen assures us). One settler in Kiryat Arba says, “Jewish people are not violent. All the time it is a reaction.” Another rabbi from the West Bank says that he can’t restrain the violent actions of young settlers, who are “dropouts… anti-bourgeois, they rebel against their parents and live in the hilltops”–and memorialize Israeli victims of Palestinian attacks.
Documentary runs about 38 mins. It begins and ends in the Hebron Hills, with the voices of two Jewish settlers, Amira Hass, Jeff Halper and Yigal Orgad-Cohen (chancellor of Ariel University) in the middle.
“dropouts… anti-bourgeois”
And who pays the salaries of the soldiers who make their biblical fantasy possible?
The Tel Aviv tax paying middleclass.
Hilarious.
When I see the word “shepherds”, I think nomads, mobile, not belonging to one particular area, temporary, can pick up and leave at a moment’s notice. That’s the Western stereotype, isn’t it?
So when you include that description, Phil, is it possible that it could be self-defeating?
I mean, why not simply call them, “Palestinians”? Why is it important to tell the reader that they are “shepherds”?
They need to stop demonizing themselves.
These are the hills that CPT member Art Gish spent at least a decade going out to live with these Palestinian shepherds to help protect their land. Oh the stories most are in his book “Hebron Journal”
Will watch the documentary later… illegal settlement called “lucifer farm” if it is true at least they are admitting they are doing the work of the devil, darkness, evil.
Charlie Manson would have been at home in Kiryat Arba.