Part of the material in this documentary is from the video archives
of Operazione Colomba and CPT and was filmed between 2006 and 2011.
- Where are you from? - From At-Tuwani.
Ale, there are three soldiers. They are talking with the boys. We are filming.
Where is the knife? Where is the knife?
- It's not a knife… - Ok. Come.
Ale, they are pushing them towards the truck. You should come.
My name is Ameer and I'm 13 years old. I live in the village of At-Tuwani.
What happened to you around two months ago while you were near an army position?
I was going with some friends to gather some wild herbs.
We took two foreigners from the international missions with us
and we went to gather the herbs from our fields.
Afterward a settler arrived and sent the army against us.
The soldiers arrived, they threw the herbs on the ground. Then they ordered us to sit down.
Fortunately there were the two internationals otherwise they might have beaten us.
I told him: “I'm not old, I'm not old” and ran away.
A soldier followed me with his rifle and wanted to shoot me.
So I stopped, got in the jeep and they took us up.
- Up where? - Up in the settlement. They interrogated us: “Age? What's your name?”
Then a police officer came who wanted to beat us.
They told us: “Don't come back here any more. There’s no more land for you here.
This land belongs to the settlers, it's not yours anymore.”
Since then I'm afraid of them. I no longer go on our land.
Go away with the camera. This way you can film.
What we are going to be passing from now on
is the biggest block of settlements. One of the first.
There, that's the wall.
What we can see there where the buses are is the check-point
which as you can see resembles a toll booth.
Here you need to film with discretion.
These are settlers that swear to the Arabs that they will exterminate them.
This is my mother.
They fire on our sheep, because they want to deprive the Palestinians
even of that which they can nourish themselves with.
They have burned pieces of land. After a Palestinian works for weeks
on his land the settlers arrive and set in on fire.
This is only a small part of what the settlers do.
I am Saber Huraini, mayor of At-Tuwani.
The township of At-Tuwani was founded with the birth
of the Palestinian government in 1997, and in that year I was elected mayor.
During the 30 years of colonization the area of At-Tuwani has always been on the fringe.
The village was without water, electricity, roads: without anything necessary for survival.
The village of At-Tuwani is in Area C. Therefore it is an area of the West Bank
that under total Israeli military and administrative authority.
The soldiers frequently patrol the villages. Frequently they enter the villages.
At night they raid houses, looking for weapons or just trying to intimidate people.
It's a particularly disadvantaged area, like there are many of, and it's particularly militarized.
The citizens of the town have to use a generator for electricity,
that as you can see lights up this lamp.
This stays on for around 3 or 4 hours a day, after sunset, til ten when it is turned off.
We have made agreement with the Palestinian government in order to obtain electricity.
But when the project was already finished, there was an Israeli raid.
They confiscated the pylons and all the tools and machinery present in the area.
So we have gotten used to using the generator.
As a township we act to provide any service, even simple things,
to the people of this area and also to the people of nearby areas.
The problem is that Israel prevents us from doing anything, even from building a road.
What are the differences between the settlements and the situation you live in?
What a question! When you talk about situation there are differences.
To the settlements Israel supplies all services: roads, electricity, buildings.
The settlers already have everything they want and everything they need to live.
For example, they have irrigation for trees.
One of their trees consumes more water than all what the inhabitants of At-Tuwani consume.
There’s an enormous difference.
It is a well-studied policy of colonization that aims at the eviction of areas like this,
reduced to ruins, to empty them of their real citizens.
This is the Israeli's goal.
We presented some documentation of the village, but four years ago Israel were rejected.
Currently there are Israeli lawyers, left-wing non-violent movements
that support us the non-violent popular resistance.
But our requests have not been approved: they don't want to give more space to the people,
so that they might spread out and build houses for their children on this land.
Since 1995 we have been subjected to a bloody assault by the extremist Israeli settlers.
All Israelis are certainly not extremists, but a large part of Israeli
extremists are here in this area, especially to the south and east of Yatta.
This is our land. We are not terrorists. The terrorists are the settlers.
I ask the foreigners that are here: have you ever seen a Palestinian
go to them in the settlements of Ma'on, Karmel or Susiya?
No. It is always them who come to us and the soldiers are always on the settlers side.
This is not a “problematic area” like they say.
The problems are only caused by the settlers with the help of the soldiers.
The soldiers are coming
You just saw the soldiers, equipped with American weapons, that stopped me.
They came to me on a piece of Palestinian land, that the settlers have destroyed.
This shows that they support the settlers.
They told me to go away. I am not near the settlement, I am kilometers away.
These people don't want to leave us in this town.
The occupation
Before the settlements life was hard but there weren’t the settlers and the suffering of today.
Our torture started in 1982 with the construction of settlements in the area, which was
the beginning of the suffering and the mass expulsion:
in 1997 they destroyed these villages and didn't even leave a wall standing.
Afterward, thanks to journalists from Umm el Fahem that drew attention to our problem
we were able to re-enter into Tuba thanks to a court decision that recognized
our right to return. They tried to negotiate with me to get me to live somewhere
else but I refused, preferring to die rather than leave my home.
The settlement of Ma’on
My name is Mahmoud Hamaamda, from the village of Um Fagarah.
I was born here in 1965, before the Israeli occupation.
Until then we lived with dignity, even if in caves and as shepherds,
as our ancestors before us.
This until 1982, when they began building the settlements of Karmel and Ma'on.
From the settlements they would provoke us and around 1985 we were prohibited
from farming our lands, which had been declared a military area.
The 14th of December 1999 the Israeli army
decided to deport 4 villages of the area, including mine.
We went to court, with the lawyer Neta Amar defending us. On March 29th 2000 we won
our case thanks to the support of several associations,
like B' Tselem, Peace Now and “Rabbis against the destruction of houses”
But we understand now that we were deceived.
We re-entered our lands on April 1st 2000 and the settlers are still here.
So far they have confiscated two thirds of our land, if not more.
Havat Ma’on. Illegal settler outpost
House of the Rabai family Havat Ma’on. Illegal settler outpost
In this field of olive trees here, they destroyed the first seven in the middle in February 2008.
And few months ago they destroyed the others. Therefore almost the entire field is destroyed.
It's the most damaged field because it's near the outpost and not visible from the village.
Therefore the Palestinians who own the land can never see what happens to it.
God help us... Where can we go?
We can't leave our houses? God help us...
There are truly many contradictions in this place. And it takes time to understand them.
It's important to make distinctions, one has difficulty understanding what is right or wrong.
Take the the escorting of children to school for example, it is an enormous contradiction.
After years I still have difficulty getting used to the idea that it is normal
that Israeli soldiers have to protect Palestinian children from attacks by other Israelis
who by Israel's own laws couldn't be there because they are living in an illegal outpost.
And every morning it's the same thing: you see children walking on the road from the village,
a road they should walk on normally because it's public,
and instead they are escorted by soldiers.
The school was rebuilt at night, because the Israelis wouldn’t give the license to build.
Thank God the school is still functioning today, even with the
difficulties created by Israel and the violence of the settlers.
The main reason for our presence as internationals
has been that of accompanying the children to and from school.
The shortest route between the villages of Tuba and Maghayir Al-Abeed and At-Tuwani
passes in between the settlement of Ma'on and the outpost of Havat Ma'on.
Children on this route have been attacked and beaten by settlers several times.
For around three years the students were obliged to go the long way. Then the internationals took the task
of accompanying them on the main road, to save time and energy.
The first 2 days everything went well, the children were accompanied without any problems.
The third day however we were ambushed by settlers in ski-masks. They started beating
everyone with sticks and chains. Our children are used to such situations
and managed to escape with slight injuries, but the internationals were savagely beaten.
Because of this single episode there was American and European pressure on Israel
to protect our children from the settlers,
to take them to school and accompany them back safe and sound every day.
And since that day there are soldiers that patrol the road and accompany them
in the morning and in the afternoon, so our children can go to school.
The soldiers often arrive late out of spite, but we go forward just the same.
That day we were going to school with the internationals. The children were in front,
and I was further in back. We didn’t want to pass because of the settlers,
then I saw people coming back: the settlers had beaten a girl and an international.
I had stopped and they were coming towards me: the settlers were chasing them.
The internationals stopped and the settlers started beating them while the children escaped.
That day we didn’t go to school and since then they started sending the soldiers with us.
On one side there were the settlers, on the other as well, we felt doomed.
We come to study and we want go and return safely.
I have dreams about how they are dressed, their masks, them attacking me.
I start to be paranoid about how they will attack. Sometimes dreams are very real.
The popular resistance
If we had used any form of violence you wouldn’t find any of us still on this land.
With the excuse of violence they would transfer all of us from here. It's the excuse they are
looking for. The settler approaches us when we are on our lands: he wants to provoke us.
We ask him why. “I do it so that you'll try to kill me” “But why do I have to kill you?”
Firstly, we are women. Our role is to support the popular resistance.
I'm more interested in you women. You think: we're women and our role is limited to the house.
What else can we do? Our role in the resistance is more important than that of the men.
Here in At-Tuwani the situation of women is difficult.
The role of women in this area is to look after the children and to do housework.
They have no other role in life other than these things.
It came to me to organize something just for the women of the village.
The women that were here hadn’t studied but all had manual skills, needlework, work of wool.
All this to make the role of women in life active, to make the woman understand
that her role is not just having children and doing housework. We can do more.
In the non-violent resistance as well:
when the men and their children go out with the sheep the women are with them.
If there is an attack by settlers or the army the women are on the front line.
They are subjected to the violence of the settlers, they get the men away
from the place of confrontation, because the army will come and take the man to prison.
After being jailed there’s a four to five thousand shekel fine to permit him to return home.
Don't have a role? The woman is half of society. They have a role.
For example, settlers came to house but there weren’t any men. Do we let them in?
Of course we don't let them in.
We must resist as much as we can and if we must die we die.
The woman fights more than the man, the woman exerts herself more than the man.
The settlers are raising the level of conflict and trying to provoke us even more because
we are responding with a weapon even more powerful than a firearm, which is the camera.
Images become a powerful weapon and when they see that they run away,
they don't know what to do, they cover their faces and try to destroy the camera or attack
some activist or some Arab: it's all they can manage to do.
Every day we accompany the shepherds that take their herds out on their own land.
The fact that we have cameras enables us to document everything that occurs here
so that in case of arrest or settler attack we have proof.
Very often the shepherds, especially when attacked by settlers,
press charges through the Israeli police and thanks
to videos manage to win. It is something that would not happen
if they did not have proof of having been attacked.
We ask ourselves what else can be done in addition to being here
and bringing our solidarity to the Palestinian cause. Because it is not enough,
because it is not our objective. We are not here to take someones side.
The action of Operazione Colomba is not an action of an NGO that comes to build.
We do not have money. We are not here to build anything.
What we do is live with the people. It's a relationship that is built step by step.
We are here because there is something that needs
to be defended, and that is a minimum of justice necessary
before being able to attain any eventual peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
Non-violence and the peaceful popular struggle are a very important part of the history
of the Palestinian people in their resistance to colonialism.
Our duty is to make this concept more and more dear, but this is done together.
There are also some Israelis, and we keep them close to us for the good of the Palestinians.
There are supporters from Europe and America that feel the suffering of the Palestinians,
that share their concerns and those moments of popular struggle against Israeli colonization.
The choice we have made today is that of popular resistance.
Many families are built around the work of women because it has become a fixed income,
because the settlers have stolen much of their land and poisoned their herds.
When there is no income coming in from outside, the work of women becomes central.
If they cut off a source we open another, if Israel prohibits something we find another way,
if Israel cuts off the supply to something we produce something else to survive.
We fight the Israeli occupation with non-violence a without the instrument of war.
I always hope that our children will live in a more secure situation than our.
I hope the same things for the children of the Jews: they have no responsibility.
The peoples aren’t involved in what happens.
It is the orders of the governments that unleash conflicts on the people.
In 2010 the inhabitants of At-Tuwani were able to obtain electricity for their village
The 23rd of March 2011 Israeli secret services raided the village, in an attempt to destroy the popular resistance
Operazione Colomba and CPT maintain their presence at At-Tuwani, bringing solidarity and monitoring the events of the area around the hills south of Hebron
In 2010 another 88 young Israelis refused to be drafted into the military
The experience of grassroots resistance of At-Tuwani has spread to other villages, and is slowly making itself known on the entire political scene of the West Bank
The road to school taken every day by the children of Tuba is still insecure
I dream that the army and the settlers leave. That the problems between us and them end, because we have much fear.
What must we do? The have rifles and weapons. What must we do?
We have our hands and our sticks. What must we do?
Thank you, Ameer.
Thank you.