Demolitions
b.
I took this photo in the springtime in the South Hebron Hills village of Umm al Kheir. It was warm then, warm enough to sleep outdoors and watch the stars and the meteors and the moon. That’s Mo'atassim in the photo, posing next to the taboun, the communal oven that the people of Umm al Kheir use to bake bread every morning. Behind him you can see Umm al Kheir's neighbors, the red-roofed houses of the Israeli settlement of Karmel. Yesterday Israeli soldiers arrived in the village with bulldozers. They destroyed the oven as well as six homes that together provided shelter for 28 people. Winter is coming and the nights are already cold. Mo'atassim’s house was one of those destroyed. It was a much humbler affair than the settlers' houses in the photo, a simple two-room shelter without a bathroom of its own. Umm al Kheir falls within the 61 percent of the West Bank in which the Israeli military is charged with all aspects of governance. This means that not even an outhouse can be built there without the permission of the Israeli authorities. (I don’t choose that example idly: last year the army came to Umm al Kheir to confiscate a toilet built for a resident who had been disabled years earlier after being severely beaten by a settler.) Such permission is rarely granted, which means that every structure in the village, from houses to storage sheds to animal pens, is subject to demolition. Umm al Kheir’s neighbors in Karmel would prefer that the village was not there, so Umm al Kheir, like most villages in the South Hebron Hills, suffers a slow squeeze—a few acres confiscated here, a shepherd beaten or arrested there, perhaps a house demolished one bright, clear morning. Or six houses. Sometimes the squeeze is not so slow. This morning, I spoke on the phone with Khairy's cousin Eid Suleiman Hadaleeen. It was night in Umm al Kheir. “It’s like a dream,” Eid said. “It came quickly and it was gone.” Now the village looks like an earthquake hit it, he said: “Everything is broken." They have already rebuilt the oven and expect to be baking bread again tomorrow morning.
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Correction: In the original post I misidentified Mo'atassim as Khairy, his brother. Sorry! And their cousin, for whom the toilet was erected, was disabled after being beaten by a settler, not a soldier.