CTSD Part III
by Jerry Levin
(Hebron, West Bank Palestine, December 15, 2004). This is another in a series of reports exemplifying CTSD (Current Traumatic Stress Disorder) with a focus on the village of At-Tuwani as a stand-in for all of Palestine's severely occupation-affected village, towns, and cities.
CTSD (also in therapeutic circles better known as Chronic Traumatic Stress Disorder) exists when there is no end (or respite even) to both the actuality and logical expectation of additional debilitating stress at any moment: no appreciable space in which CTSD has even half a chance to become PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and, therefore, presumably more relievable. Here's what I mean.
The parents of our friend, Hassan, were not originally from At- Tuwani, as is the case with some of its other current residents. Hassan is the one who asked CPT and Operation Dove to establish an ongoing presence there. His request for help in the form of hopefully discouraging observations and accompaniments was prompted by stepped up efforts by squatters living in the adjacent Ma'on settlement to hinder and prevent villagers from bettering their meager living conditions. At the same time, of course, Ma'on's sneaky and often violent marauders and vandals with the facetious protection of a series of Labor and Likud led Israeli governments has continued to improve theirs.
They actually have the nerve to want to build a clinic! And they are
actually doing it despite the fact that they don't have official
written permission. The slowly rising structure could be demolished
at any time, as was their brand new Mosque back in 1987, when it too
was built without a permit.
Hassan told us that he has only gone once to see the place where his
parents, their parents, and others in their extended families, lived
as self-sufficient farmers for generations. That was several years
ago, when his mother and father were still alive. The journey was
the first time his parents had been back since running away from
their birthplace--for their lives!!!--one nightmarish day in 1948.
That happened during the tumultuous months after Israel declared
itself an exclusivist Jewish state and began conducting a kind of
modern day Punic War during which the goal was not only to defend
itself from several Arab nations but also to preemptively destroy as
much Palestinian existence and identity as possible. That aspect of
Israel's struggle has had little to do with security but much to do
with conquest (wolfish colonial expansion in defensive sheep's
clothing). Malign colonization rather than benign emigration has
been modern Zionism's elephant in the room ever since Theodore Herzl
created the political concept more than a century ago.
That, of course, is not just my assessment but the assessment of
revisionist Israeli historical scholarship and research that flies
in the face of decades long official Israeli doublethink,
doubletalk, and newspeak: research such as that conducted by
historian Benny Morris. He became a hero for a short time of those
standing against the brutality of the occupation and its
confiscatory intent. But the admiration from the center left to the
far left ended when in an interview in Haaretz earlier this year
Morris condemned, not the brutal ethnic cleansing he had verified,
but instead complained that Israel's leaders made a monumental
blunder in not completing the job of forcing all Palestinians from
their homes, off their land and then clear out of the region when
they theoretically had a chance to do all that starting back in 1948.
The favorite euphemism of "Land of Israel" radicals for this kind of
expulsion is "transfer." Thus the removal from the map and history
of more than four hundred Palestinian villages on the Israeli side
of the armistice line and the dispersal "transfer" of close to a
million Palestinians into Gaza, the West Bank and beyond. The
village in which Hassan's parents lived is one of those; and his
family is one of those who had to move on. The site is just a
handful of miles south of At-Tuwani on the Israeli side of the
armistice line. After the 1967, war that boundary became the so-
called Green Line, which until recently outlined the border between
the West Bank and Israel.
Of course, that border is now fast becoming an irrelevant and
nonexistent line on a map�not the ground. That's because
the "annexation" wall/fence is inexorably being built well inside
the Green Line and, when finished, will encircle less than fifty
percent of the West Bank and put the more than fifty percent of it
they are stealing on the other side inside Israel. When completed,
Israel will have created history's largest ghetto.
All that West Bank land--in the process of being grabbed and folded
into Israel by the "annexation" wall/fence--is one of the fruits
of "unilateralism," the long time Ariel Sharon strategy that
suddenly bloomed when George Bush and his plutocratic cronies
adapted the Sharon "unilateralism" model to their own needs. (D�j�
vu: Fallujah is Sabra and Shatila all over again.)
The extraordinary territorial gains that Sharon has made by simply
taking without negotiation (and with U. S. blessing) are the kind
that such two-faced Labor leaders as Rabin in the past and Peres and
Barak today could only dream about but never achieve. That is why
neither Peres nor Barak are repudiating the over all aim of Sharon's
retreat from Gaza, which is to create a geopolitical climate in
which Israel can finesse colonizing the areas of the West Bank,
which except for four small settlements in the north, for decades
has been considered bottom line for ideological, political,
defensive and environmental purposes. Gazan land has always been
expandable to Israel's radical but real-politic oriented
establishment as contrasted to Israel's radical much more
ideological establishment.
When Hassan, his parents, and siblings got to the village site, he
remembers his mother suddenly beginning to wail and cry bitterly.
The village, of course, they knew before arriving would not be
there. Only the ruins of the simple stone dwellings and blocked up
caves, which had been home to so many, would be seen. However, even
though such a sight was expected, it brought back harshly to his
mother mind the memory of the day--long before Hassan, his brothers
and sisters were born--when a large contingent of mechanized Israeli
soldiers suddenly appeared and began shooting.
It had been a happy prosperous village. There were about two hundred
sheep in each of the flocks belonging to the various families, and
rich land around the village for grazing. (The flocks these days
around At-Tuwani are no more than twenty). But on their way in, the
soldiers killed the sheep, as well as village shepherds on duty in
the fields: two of whom were brothers of Hassan's mother�uncles he
would never know. Once amongst the houses and caves, which some of
the villagers called home, the Israelis gunned down other residents,
who, hearing shots and seeing soldiers firing their guns, had not
fled fast enough�including another uncle Hassan would never know.
There was no time to take much of anything with them. The people
headed north out of what clearly was now going to be Israeli
territory and into what, by the war's end, became Jordan's West
Bank. After several hours, the families of Hassan's future parents
stopped and settled in At-Tuwani.
Ethnic as well as religious survival has never been as certain in At-
Tuwani since Israel wrested control of the Hebron hills from Jordan
in 1967. And the downhill slide in hopes and expectations took a
steep precipitous turn for the worse in 1980, when an ultra
nationalist group from Israel showed up one day and started planting
trees on top of a hill one rise over from At-Tuani. Twenty-four
years later a tall thick evergreen forest shrouds what became Havat
Ma'on, an outpost of the settlement of Ma'on, which was established
two years later, a bit further on-one hill top over--from At-Tuwani.
Havat Ma'on provides perfect cover for settlement toughs and bullies
who have been perpetually swooping down to prey on the villagers in
a variety of menacing ways. In fact a second generation of settler
brats is now following in the mean spirited aggrandizing footsteps
of their fathers and mothers.
For instance, off and on for a generation, settlers from Ma'on have
been attacking defenseless shepherds and small children walking to
and from school, as well as the pregnant and elderly. They have been
uprooting olive trees, preventing village farmers from preparing,
plowing, planting, cultivating and harvesting--or burning--their
crops. Then, they eventually have been following up those
discouraging harassments by extending the fenced in boundaries of
the settlement onto and around those fields and orchards, stealing
them in other words, in order to cheekily and sneeringly retain them
for their own use and profit. Then at night and sometimes during the
day the settlers have formed vigilante posses to descend on outlying
houses to stone and shoot at windows in order to try to frighten
families into leaving.
The scare tactics worked perfectly at two other villages, much
closer to Ma'on than At-Tuwani. In 1997 the frightened residents of
Kharruba and Serora, after fifteen years of constant and often
violent pressure, finally abandoned their homes and their long-
standing way of life. There is a law on the Israeli books that
allows the state to take over agricultural land, which has not been
worked in three years. Recently settlers from Ma'on began plowing
some of Kharruba's abandoned fields.
There's nothing that makes an ardent militant acquisitive Zionist
see red more quickly than to 1) claim that criticism of the manner
in which Israel has pursued the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza
is not anti-Semitic, or 2) that what has been happening in the
occupied territories is a contemporary holocaust. More about the
odious "anti-Semitic" charge in a future report. As for the
holocaust claim, I will not get into that, because I don't want the
argument to center around how many dead Palestinians compared to
dead Jews does it take to make a holocaust. It would dishonor the
murders of both to get involved in that kind of numbers game.
However, I do know a pogrom when I see one.
CTSD!
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This is the forty second in a series of micro-reports, commentaries,
and or analyses that I am sending routinely from the Occupied
Territories and other areas in the Middle East. If the information
or ideas seem helpful, please feel free to forward them to others.
It would be a privilege to add their names to this mailing list, if
so requested. I can be reached at: jlevin0320@yahoo.com. As always I
will be grateful for any feedback-- Jerry Levin .
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