Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation. Colm Toibin

bound in coexistence: summer and winter, drought and rain, people and land.

      Nasser Najawa’s grandfather was born in the village of Qaryatayn, a few kilometres on the other side of the Green Line. Unable to return to his home after the founding of Israel, his grandfather took the family to Susiya al-Qadim (“Old Susiya,” or Khirbet Susiya), where he continued a life of herding and agriculture. People relied on rainwater caught from the sky via a network of ancient and modern cisterns. They lived below ground, in caverns hollowed out beneath the rocks. These caves stayed remarkably cool in the summer and dry in the winter, and in the harsher months, the herd stayed underground as well.

      In 1986, the Israeli government expropriated the land of Susiya al-Qadim, expelling the twenty-five families and demolishing most of the caverns, citing the presence of the ruins of a synagogue, dating from between AD 400 to 700. The government asserted, “There was no historic Palestinian village at the archaeological site there; that the village consists of only a few seasonal residences for a few families; and the land is necessary for the continuation of the archaeological work.” Yet only four years earlier, Plia Albeck, a key Israeli settlement planner who referred to the settlements as “my children,” had surveyed the area and concluded, “There is a formal registration on the land of Khirbet Susiya with the Land Registry, according to which this land, amounting to approximately 3,000 dunam [741 acres] is privately held by many Arab owners. Therefore the area proximal to the synagogue is in all regards privately owned.”

      Asked if he believed that the archaeologists were telling the truth, Nasser said, “I am not an expert but yes, I believe it.” He did not mention other discoveries as well: the ruins of an AD 900 mosque and an AD 1100 Byzantine church. These details I learned only later.

      Three years before the excavation, in 1983, the Israeli government had given the green light to the settlement of Susya, part of three new settlements in the region. The government pledged 20 million shekels to support fifty to sixty Jewish families. In three months in 1990 alone, Israel restricted Palestinian access to 32,545 acres of land in the West Bank by declaring it miri (“state land”) or part of closed military zones.^fn5 (Kiryat Arba, now home to almost eight thousand Jewish settlers, began on land that was confiscated from Palestinians for military use.) In 1991, a Jewish settler shot twelve sheep before turning his M16 on a Palestinian shepherd, Mahmoud al-Nawaja, killing him. Al-Nawaja’s son told a journalist, “The settlement has no border. Every year it spreads, each year it is larger than before.” Two years later, Musa Suliman Abu Sabha, who, according to conflicting reports may or may not have been carrying a grenade, but whom the Israeli army confirmed was “bound hand and foot” at the time of his death, was shot eight times at close range by a settler, Yoram Skolnick.

      In 1986, with the arrival of the archaeological park in Susiya, the villagers relocated to their grazing lands. Four years later, in 1990, a second expulsion took place. David Shulman, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship and the Israel Prize, reported that the villagers were loaded onto trucks by the IDF and deposited fifteen kilometres south, at the edge of the desert. Of the villagers, Shulman wrote, “They have hurt nobody … They led peaceful, if somewhat impoverished lives until the settlers came. Since then, there has been no peace. They are tormented, terrified, incredulous. As am I.” Amnesty International reported that 113 tents in Palestinian Susiya were demolished in 1993; and, in 1996, ten inhabited caves were blown up by the IDF.

      Nasser grew up in this precarious Susiya. He walked many kilometres, depending on road closures or restricted paths, to attend school each day in the town of Yatta. “I hoped to be like other children,” he recalled, “to have a home and go to school easily.”

      After each removal, the villagers of Susiya rebuilt. Their stubbornness must have driven the settlers mad. But the villagers believed they were on the side of right. What did they possess but their own intimacy with the hills in summer and winter, and those seemingly crucial Ottoman land deeds? Those who have precious little will hold fast to what little they have. Israel did not dispute their ownership; rather, the government argued that building on this land, registered for grazing, required permits. That the Palestinians of Susiya had been evicted from their village without compensation, and were in need of shelter, was immaterial.

      On the night of July 2, 2001, Yair Har-Sinai, a Jewish guard, described both as a “pacifist” and as a man who “terrorized the Palestinians” was killed in a fight. The killer did not come from Susiya, but the Israeli military carried out a retaliatory action. That night, forty-five or more people from the area, including Nasser, were rounded up. He was a teenager at the time, utterly terrified. After being interrogated all night, he was released in the morning and walked home.

      “I could not see anything,” he says. “Everything was demolished. All of my home. Everything. To the ground. The caves. Water cisterns. Everything.” With only women and children present, the men having been detained, bulldozers had drilled through the roofs of the caverns and filled them with rubble; cisterns and wells, livestock pens, and tents were gone.

      The loss was unbearable, so too the ensuing anger.

      THE PATH NASSER CHOSE WOULD HAVE A LASTING IMPACT ON THE FUTURE of Susiya. After the demolitions of 2001, he decided to work with Israeli activists.

       CITIES AND NAMES (2)

      In 1983, Susya, the Israeli settlement, was established next door to the Palestinian village of Susiya. Under international law, the settlement is in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, in which an occupying power cannot transfer civilian population to an occupied territory, and is considered illegal. The Israeli government is the only government in the world that disputes this illegality, despite a ruling of the International Court of Justice. In a 2015 report submitted to the Netanyahu government, the settlers’ NGO, Regavim (“Patches of Soil”), a right-wing organization whose stated mission is to “preserve Israel’s national lands,” calculated that Jewish settlers had built 2,026 structures on private Palestinian property. Back in February 2012, Regavim had petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court to expedite the demolition of Palestinian Susiya, claiming that it was an illegal outpost, a petition that is, as of this writing, very much ongoing.

      The Israeli government contends that all structures in Palestinian Susiya have been built without permits and are therefore illegal and subject to demolition. The settlers believe that the South Hebron Hills are part of the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria, a currently “empty area” that belongs to the Jewish state. Yochai Damri, the chairman of the Har Hevron Regional Council, told the UK Independent that it was not the settlers who were newcomers; rather the villagers of Palestinian Susiya had arrived only fifteen years ago. He concluded, “These are criminals who invaded an area that doesn’t belong to them.” The surrounding land allocated to Israeli Susya by the government is now ten times the size of the settlement itself.

      Driving in the West Bank, along a Route 60 altered to provide a highly modern and convenient highway between the settlements, and along which, for long stretches, Palestinians were once forbidden to travel (funneled instead to a network of narrow roads slowed by detours, checkpoints, and barriers, a system the Israeli government named “the fabric of life”), I find it frankly impossible to remember that I’m in Palestine. When we visited the settlement of Kiryat Arba and were confronted by hostile settlers, a man, who proudly told us he had relocated from France five years ago, cried out to his companion, “Ask her where she thinks she’s standing! Is she in Israel or Palestine? Then you’ll know whose side she’s on.” I did feel then that perhaps I shouldn’t be standing in his park, which contained a memorial celebrating Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994 walked into a place sacred to both Judaism and Islam, the Cave of the Patriarchs (Hebrew), also known as the Sanctuary of Abraham (Arabic), and opened fire in a room that was being used as a mosque, killing 29 Palestinians and wounding 125. I was relieved to depart. The police station here in the settlement of Kiryat Arba is where a Palestinian from the South Hebron Hills must come if she or he wishes to report a crime.

      From Route 60, there are two signs, one for Susiya, the archaeological park; and one for Susya, the settlement. There are almost no