Israeli Settlers Have Found a New Way to Abuse Palestinian Shepherds: Bankrupting Them - Israel News - Haaretz.com
Seven-hundred sheep are scampering to freedom. A few pause to gobble weeds, some are actually limping. The dash for freedom evokes the galloping of antelopes in Africa when they ford rivers. Equal measures of unbounded joy and great turmoil. The sheep have just been liberated from the pen that was built specially to hold them after they were impounded by Israel's security forces. The animals were ambushed when they passed through what has been declared a forbidden zone. Their owners, Palestinian shepherds who reside on the other side of the highway, had to pay the inconceivable, draconian sum of 150,000 shekels (almost $40,000) in cash to the Jordan Valley Regional Council, run by the settlers, in order to get the animals back.
For hours, Border Police troops kept watch over the sheep and the shepherds, until representatives of the latter were able to round up the ransom. It's not the first time that such gargantuan fines have been levied on Palestinian shepherds here. No such fines, it's safe to assume, have ever been levied on settlers who own flocks.
This new measure – disproportional punishment aimed at bankrupting the shepherds – fits well with the other methods that have been wielded lately against the pastoral communities in the northern Jordan Valley, with the aim of making their lives miserable and ultimately cleansing the region of their presence. Settler violence, arrests, fences, land expropriations, home demolitions, prevention of pasturing of animals, and all the other means have now been supplemented by this new method. We'll leave them penniless and maybe then they will leave their lands. The money, it goes without saying, goes straight into the settlers' coffers, with police backing.
Early in the morning of Monday of this week, Aiman Ada'is and some of his brothers headed out to pasture with the family's sheep. That's the custom in this season, when the Jordan Valley is spectacularly carpeted in vivid green. The extended family's home – a collection of huts, tin shacks, tents and animal pens, lacking electricity or running water – lies opposite the settlement of Masua in the northern part of the valley. The Ha'oved Hatzioni (Zionist Worker) movement established this settlement in 1974, after it had been an outpost of the Nahal brigade of the Israel Defense Forces, and named it for the ancient Jewish custom of lighting torches (masu'ot) on nearby Mount Sartava.
Shepherds and Border Police near the Masua settlement. The money goes straight into the settlers' coffers, with police backing.
Since then, the shepherd community across from the settlement has been fighting to cling to the land it still has, whatever hasn't already been seized from it by force. Since the formation of the present government, a little over a year ago, the shepherds' living conditions have worsened, and since the war began, things have only been more difficult. The violent settlers have donned uniforms to serve in the local emergency squads and as volunteers in the police force, and their behavior has become even more tyrannical. But what happened on Monday this week tops everything.
At around 8:30 A.M., the shepherds passed through the rocky land south of Masua on their way to the grazing lands in the mountains, west of the Jordan Valley highway. A Border Police force, which was already waiting for them, ordered them to stop and escorted the large flock of some 700 sheep to a pen erected by the regional council that morning. The animals were herded into the crowded pen, the shepherds were ordered to retreat eastward a few hundred meters to the edge of the highway, and the festivities began. The shepherds' families arrived, along with a Palestinian television crew. The latter weren't allowed to approach the sheep – they had to stand on a distant mound to film them. We too were not permitted to get close to the sheep. The animal pen was now a closed military zone.
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The penalty was clear-cut and painful: immediate payment of 150,000 shekels to the regional council, or the sheep would be taken to an unknown destination in the two large trucks that had been brought to the site earlier. The shepherds were fearful for the fate of their sheep. Some of them had left lambs behind at home, waiting for their mothers, and as it was, the sheep were left without water and food for hours, pressed up against each other and probably frightened. The shepherds were no less frightened. The Border Police had arrived in at least five large vehicles, together with a number of local settlers in uniforms who strutted around with the usual lordliness. War or no war in Gaza, here the sheep shall not pass without a proper Zionist response.
The summonses were issued quickly: two demands for payment to the Jordan Valley council, each to the tune of 75,000 shekels, to be paid by Ada'is Shehadeh and Ada'is A'id, the shepherd brothers. "Details of the charge: capture and transporting of animals. Capture of 150 sheep [although the shepherds claim 700]. After Jan. 22, 2024, an additional sum will be added for moving, guarding, feeding. Executed by Roman Pasternak. To be paid by Jan. 22, 2024."
Cows on the Darajma brother's farm in Ein Hilwa. During the past year they lost 200 head of cattle, they relate.Credit: Arik Ascherman / Torat Tzedek
Not a word about the reason for the seizure of the sheep, if there actually was one, or about the dubious legality of the action. Members of the community knew that if they did not pay the fine immediately, the future of their sheep would be at stake and the amount of the fine would only rise. A crowdfunding operation was immediately launched among the pastoralist communities in the area, and within a few hours, a large black envelope was brought to the site containing 150,000 shekels in cash. But the Jordan Valley Regional Council, headed by David Alhayani, declined to accept a payment of that size in cash.
Time was beginning to run out. Some of the shepherds spread prayer mats on the ground and began to recite prayers. Despair was written on everyone's face. Volunteers from the Israeli organization Looking the Occupation in the Eye were at the site, among them Rachel Abramovich – wife of the veteran television news commentator Amnon Abramovich – who with the other women in the group is doing inspiring work on behalf of the shepherds. Another arrival was Rabbi Arik Ascherman, from the Torah of Justice organization, who is active here with infinite dedication on behalf of the shepherds' rights – and he came up with a solution. The NGO would pay the fine with a check and the shepherds would reimburse it with the cash.
After the passage of quite some time, in which phone calls were made and bank transfers executed, the matter was settled. When 150,000 shekels entered the account of the regional council, the Border Police allowed the shepherds to reclaim the sheep. The pen was opened, the sheep stampeded toward freedom. "We are here to separate the sides," one of the police officers said, without explaining which two sides he meant. "We are the Border Police."
The Israel Police did not respond to a request for comment from Haaretz.
A few dozen kilometers to the north, close to the Green Line and Beit She'an, is the pastoral community of Ein Hilwa. Alongside each of the concrete slabs that the IDF installed a few years ago at the entrance to it and every other every shepherd community throughout the entire Jordan Valley, bearing the message, "Firing zone, entry prohibited," someone has also recently stuck Israeli flags in the ground. The lands of these communities were long since annexed to Israel in the eyes of these settlers, who don't like to be called settlers – some of them are, after all, good kibbutzniks and moshavniks, people of the Labor movement.
Palestinian shepherds near Masua.Credit: Alex Levac
The brothers Adel and Kadri Darajma, aged 61 and 57, respectively, live at Ein Hilwa together with their families and their animals. During the past year they lost 200 head of cattle, they relate. Some were impounded, some were stolen, some were killed by settlers. Outside their tents a few cows are grazing – the boniest, thinnest cows I have ever seen, other than in film clips about drought in Africa. As cows are impounded every time they take them out for grazing, the owners are fearful of leaving their compound, and the cattle are dying of hunger. In one case, the brothers relate, and Rabbi Ascherman joins them in the telling, cows were taken by a mysterious hand in the dead of night from the grazing areas and transported far away to land of the Hemdat settlement, where they were impounded by regional council inspectors as strays.
Here, too, the cattlemen were forced to make huge payments to the regional council to redeem their livestock. On January 1, they paid 49,000 shekels, and on January 15, another 143,910 shekels as payment for the "capturing and transporting of cattle." Attorney Michael Sfard, who represents Hilwa, last week sent a sharply worded letter to council head Alhayani, asserting that the council's acts of seizing the cattle were illegal, were executed without even minimal explanation, stem from a policy of grave discrimination toward the Palestinian herders who have lived in the area for generations, are accompanied by extraneous considerations that are intended to displace the communities from the region, and are part of systematic and deliberate harassment on the part of the local council and other governmental authorities.
If the money and the animals are not returned immediately, Sfard is threatening, he will instigate legal proceedings against the regional council. Sfard too relates that in at least the case mentioned above, the cows were stolen by settlers and taken to other areas, where they were seized by inspectors from the regional council as strays. In another case, a trap was laid for the Palestinian herders, Sfard says. A settler called them the evening before and told them that their animals could graze in a certain area the next day. When the herders arrived there the next day, inspectors were waiting for them there and seized the cattle.
Council head Alhayani made do this week with a curt response to Haaretz's query: "The inspectors operated according to the council's bylaws." To the question of what justified the draconian punishment, Alhayani didn't bother to reply.