For weeks under the cloak of night Palestinians secretly renovated four caves and built a tin-roofed house in the West Bank hamlet of Ar-Rakeez where only a handful of residents live. Last week they opened the homes in a “bringing life back” ceremony.
The event was not announced in advance as to avoid any potential disruption by the Israeli army, locals said.
The caves were refurbished by Palestinians from the southern West Bank villages of Susiya, Masafer Yatta and At-Tuwani who are part of the Protection and Sumud Committee, a local group that seeks to prevent home demolitions, and with support from the Palestinian Authority.
Because of rigid Israeli planning restrictions and frequent settler harassment, most of Ar-Rakeez’s villagers moved to the nearby city of Yatta over the last 20 years. Four families said they will move into the fixed up caves, joining the three families who already live there.
Ayman Abu Arram, 40, said he will be one of the Palestinians coming back to Ar-Rakeez, “We left in 2004 because of settlers but we never completely left as we were coming from time to time to work on the land. We want to come back.”
“There is no land in Yatta and it is overcrowded. Life is better here, with clean air. I am not afraid of the army or settlers. I decided to come back with my family, and we will stay in the cave for now. We own it,” he said.
Mohammed Abu Arram, 51, who is originally from Ar-Rakeez said he wants to move back. He explained, up until the late 90s there were around nine families in the village. He also said many left due to ongoing “Israeli settler harassment.”
The South Hebron Hills has one of the highest rates of settler harassment in the West Bank. In 2017 the United Nations found 33 Palestinians were killed in violence attributed to settlers.
Ar-Rakeez is located in Area C of the West Bank, an Oslo-era delineation where the Israeli military maintains full security and civil control. For scale, around 60 percent of the West Bank is in Area C. Palestinians living in this region cannot build any permanent structures without an Israeli permit, which are rarely issued as figures indicate. Between 2010 and 2014 only 1.5 percent of Palestinian construction permits were approved in Area C. Last year, a mere five permits were issued.
As a result, many Palestinian houses in Area C are not connected to electrical or water lines, or sanitation services. Israeli forces have also declared some areas in the South Hebron Hills a “firing zone,” or a training ground for the military. With errant bullets from practice sessions and frequent mock raids, Palestinians read such designations as an attempt to expel them. Villagers from Ar-Rakeez said it was a quiet process of “a slow ethnic cleansing.”
Yet in recent years locals have developed a strategy to repopulate abandoned villages by renovating caves, a legal loophole that circumvents Israeli policies of demolishing homes constructed or upgraded without a permit.
During Wednesday’s event, Walid Assaf, head of the Commission for Resisting the Wall and Settlements said the efforts to repopulate Ar-Rakeez is part of a larger context of the Palestinian struggle, “It is the same battle in Al Mughayer, Al Khan Al Ahmar, Susiya and here,” adding, “it is about existence.”
In 2017, a local group of young organizers called the Youth of Sumud (sumud is the Arabic word for steadfastness) held the Sumud Freedom camp with the help of international Jewish activists on the site of Sarura, a Palestinian village in the West Bank whose villagers were evicted by Israeli forces in the 1980s and 1990s when the hamlet was converted into a military firing zone. When the protest camp was raided by Israeli forces, all of the temporary structures built by the activists were destroyed. Still, the group has maintained a presence in two caves in Sarura. One of them has a small kitchen, a stove, an outdoor toilet and running water. The group works during the night. This project has allowed some of the families to visit two to three times a week to work in their lands. It also creates hurtles for nearby settlements planning to expand.
Ali Awwad, 20, one of the young activists told Mondoweiss, “The people in Ar-Rakeez follow the model we started in Sarura, and for sure we will support them.”
“Israeli settlements keep expanding. We know that Israelis want to connect the outposts of Abigail and the Ma’on settlement, and we are here to stop the plan,” he said.
Since the Sarura protest camp was established two years ago, Awwad has lived there in a cave with other activists. Once a month he leaves to visit his family in the town of Tubas in the north of the West Bank. “Settlers and soldiers come every week to harass us. Just yesterday they destroyed 22 olive trees we just planted two weeks ago. I have already been arrested three or four times,” he said.
Sami, 21, another activist in the group, helped with the construction “secretly at nighttime so Israeli forces would not confiscate our tools and equipment as they did in the past in Sarura.”
Sami said he was attacked by settlers while at the freedom camp and his leg was fractured in two places. “We did shifts in the night in Sarura. The Israelis gave us a demolition order for the toilet, but they cannot say anything about the cave,” he said.
One has to admire the tenacity of these folks in refusing to be made homeless by the rogue entity.
Full respect to them and those caves look extremely comfortable and inviting.
Well, secret no more. Good going…
Three years ago I visited the Tent of Nations. The owner’s family bought the property almost a century ago, and – unusually – has the paperwork to prove it. There are five settlements on the nearby hills, and they want it, but he won’t sell it. It’s his nahala, to use a Biblical word – his inheritance, which he feels is not his to sell, even if he wanted to, which he doesn’t. When I was there, settlers had just come in the night and cut down his orchard of fruit and olive trees, which were just ready for harvest.
There’s a cave on the property, where his grandfather lived when he came to work on the land. The Israelis cannot demolish it, because it’s not a structure. No doubt that is why these people are refurbishing caves and living in them.