A group of settler youths assaulted a group of 13- and 14-year-old boys and girls from Sakhnin last week, spraying them with pepper spray while they were on a school trip in the Valley of the Springs, near the town of Bet She'an.
Students and teachers were evacuated to the hospital, with burning eyes and difficulty breathing. This did not take place in an area we've grown accustomed to associating with violence perpetrated by "wild weeds," or with the settlers' Wild West prevailing in the West Bank, but in official Israel, during an innocent school excursion by middle school students from the Galilee.
The first thought that immediately came to my mind upon reading the news was the springs in the West Bank, those nature sites Palestinians have stopped visiting, not because they don't feel like it, but because it has become too dangerous for Palestinians to go to a spring beside their home. That's because it has been prohibited or prevented due to settler violence. This includes places like Masafer Yatta, Ras Ein al-Auja, Sebastia, Mukhmas, Singil, the Nablus district, and numerous other nature spots that have become areas of Israeli domination and Palestinian exclusion.
In official Israel too, this was not the first or last brawl between Jews and Arabs. Attesting to this are the hundreds of plastic chairs thrown by the two nations at each other over the years. It was also not the first assault involving settlers. In the mixed Jewish-Arab cities of Lod and Jaffa too one can already see how the settlers' violence is seeping in, taking over the space while creating chaos and undermining any sense of civil order.
But this time there was something else, more acute. Perhaps because it involved children on a school trip in an area that is supposed to be safe, or because these were Palestinian citizens of Israel, not Palestinians for whom violence directed at them has long been legitimized, turning into the natural order of things in our minds.
The big question for me is whether the violence that usually breaks out unbridled behind the "mountains of darkness", in the occupied territories, will continue and move inward. Will settlers reach us too, after they've finished expelling the Palestinians living in the West Bank? Or are they already here? Are Palestinians wherever they may be, from the river to the sea, from the Galilee to the Gaza Strip, doomed to be uprooted and kicked out?
Will going to a spring become a luxury for us, with a school trip becoming something risky? Will breathing in open spaces become a prohibited crossing of boundaries? Will the day come when Palestinian children learn not only "core" subjects such as math and English, but also civics classes in which they are shown maps indicating which locations are out of bounds, which paths cannot be walked and which scenery is no longer ours?
There is an online genre of video called "Life in Palestine." They usually present scenery and Palestinian social life, usually in the West Bank and Jerusalem. These films document the simple beauty of Palestinian life: farmers, olive trees, wild herbs, grandmothers preparing traditional foods, small farms, tranquility, serenity. Jews are not part of the picture, to the point at which one can forget that there is an ongoing occupation.
Every time I encounter such videos, my first reaction is not "how beautiful," but anxiety: just don't let the settlers reach those spots. Just don't let some pepper-spray-carrying youths arrive suddenly, stones in hand, with a sense of ownership over the scenery and the air itself. Is this the life awaiting us? A modern version of the persecuted Jews of Spain transplanted to Israel? How exactly does Israel imagine Palestinian lives under its Biblical-oriented rule?