The Children of God
by John Ross
The Children of God charged down the bare brown hillside swinging thick clubs and hurling large lethal stones, war-whooping in Hebrew their harsh curses upon the people of this lacerated land. I was standing with a Palestinian farmer and his family under a freshly-picked olive tree when they came for us and thus, I suppose, guilty of being a race traitor in their perverted vision.
The old farmer had just showed me the scars on his scalp from the beating the settler youth had inflicted upon him in last year's olive harvest when he heard them running towards us. Hurriedly, his wife gathered up the tarpaulins and his son shouldered the heavy sack of new olives. Yala, they warned. Time to go.
I was following the old man down the terraced terrain when the savages broke out of the trees and before I had time to turn towards them, they were upon me — six, maybe seven, young men in yarmulkes and long, lank hair. The first blow glanced off the small of my back and I tumbled to the red-brown earth, trying to cover my head with my forearm. The second smashed into my wrist and the blood began to spurt — the wound only excited the settlers' thirst for more of it. Now they were pulping my lower legs with sharp blows from their sticks. One Nazi youth picked up a large, jagged rock and advanced upon me with malice glowing in his evil, rabid eyes, hurling it from five feet away. I felt the painful crack against my knee and winced visibly, and then they were pulling me to my feet, tearing my clothes and booting me down the hill like a punctured soccer ball.
Just as I felt my legs collapsing under me all over again, my new friend Arik Ascherman, the head mavin of the Rabbis for Human Rights, dove into the fray, momentarily diverting the attackers' attentions. Soon, they had ripped Arik's own yarmulke from his bushy head and yelled at him that he was a betrayer of the Jews. Meanwhile, young Palestinian men took hold of both my bloody arms and led me down the narrow goat path to safety in the valley below.
The rabbis had come to Ein Abus, a village north of Jerusalem, to verify reports that these self-appointed children of god had chainsawed hundreds of olive trees the week previous, a crime against both the people and the land. Yitzhar, an illegal, barebones settlement which had spawned these crazies, stretches across 18 kilometers of naked hilltops but is really not much more than a string of tincan mobile homes that followers of the late and unlamented Meir Kahane seized from Palestinian villagers a decade ago.
Under the so-called "road map" peace plan, so hypercritically touted by George W. Bush and Israeli strongman Ariel Sharon, Yitzhar was supposed to have been dismantled because it lacks the proper permits to be a settlement at all but when the Israeli Army sent its troops to accomplish this simple task last spring, the heavily-armed soldiers were pelted with rocks and eggs and retreated in shame.
Although the Israeli press and even the U.S. consulate would half-heartedly condemn the attack on Rabbi Ascherman and this old Jewish reporter, minimal energy would be expended on bringing the muggers to justice (I have been mugged by better people) — much as little effort was assigned to investigate the murders of Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall, and the maiming of Brian Avery, young International Solidarity Movement activists last spring under the guns and bulldozers of the Israeli "Defense" Force (IDF). Bringing homicidal settlers and soldiers to justice does not have much political scratch here in this Promised Land.
Two days after the attack in Ein Abus October 27th, Rabbi Ascherman and I traveled to the white-washed modern settlement of Ariel where district police headquarters are located, to file complaints against god's children. Ariel, a fenced city of 20,000, is, of course, named after current prime minister Ariel Sharon, once the nation's housing secretary who had sponsored its construction when he took over that ministry after being replaced as defense chief in the wake of the terrible massacre of 1700 Palestinian refugees in Beirut at Sabra and Chatila in 1982. As such a malevolent context implies, justice would not be served at Ariel.
For five hours, we paced the hallways of the fortress-like police headquarters there waiting to identify our attackers. With obvious disinterest, the cops showed us a handful of ill-defined mug shots and seemed to suggest that we were responsible for our own beatings. The idea, I suspect, was to drive us away unsatisfied with Israeli justice which is not unlike that meted out in Mexico City or San Francisco's Mission District, venues in which I have been similarly assaulted, so that never again would we have the chutzpah to demand redress. Although Arik, the first peace activist to stand up to an Israeli bulldozer after Rachel Corrie was crushed last March during a home demolition in Rafah camp, Gaza (for which he will soon stand trial — the settler community has published a "wanted for incitement to murder" poster with his likeness attached), is a persistent man, at the end of the day he had to concede he owed me 50 shekels which I had wagered on the hunch that justice would never be done.
The Israeli settlement movement first took wing after the 1967 war that defined the occupied territories when the children of god established a beachhead in Hebron where the Brooklyn-born racist fanatic Baruch Goldstein would later murder 29 Palestinians to become a martyr to their movement. Today, there are 195 settlements in Israel proper and the occupied territories, with a total population of 200,000 (twice that if east Jerusalem is factored in).
Although they account for only a small fraction of the Israeli population, financed by U.S. tycoons, White House loan guarantees, and the all-powerful Israeli lobby, the settlements gobble up vast and disproportionate government resource, depleting education, health, and other social service outlays for the majority of Israeli citizens — not to mention hundreds of thousands of acres of Palestinian farm land.
As I stumbled bleeding and bruised (x-rays showed no bones broken) down the hillside in Ein Abus after the beating at the hands of god's children, my Palestinian hosts were eager to underscore how they had suffered such wounds during a half century of Israeli despotism. "Perhaps it is not nice to say this when you are in such pain," Moussa (not his real name), a village official said gravely, "but now you will know in your own body how we have suffered here."
(John Ross invites his readers to know the reality of Palestinian life by participating on the annual olive harvest in this hard and dangerous land.) |
