David Shulman

Palestine: Can a Handful of Adolescent Criminals Destroy an Entire Village?

In Dir Jarir, demented teenage settlers can turn up at any moment, in the Palestinian fields, in their makeshift tents, and even in their homes. They threaten and bully the residents and often they beat them.

Dawn at Dir Jarir. One herd of sheep is already out on the hills with Khairi’s son. They’re grazing not so far from the noxious outpost of Maaleh Ahuvia, but for now, things are quiet. No settlers in sight. That sentence reveals the story of Dir Jarir. Dawn, noon, dusk, midnight, and all the hours in between – demented teenage settlers can turn up at any moment, in the Palestinian fields, in their makeshift tents, and even in their homes. They threaten and bully them, often they beat them, and always they invade their fields, vineyards, olive groves, and grazing grounds, wreaking havoc. The shepherds and farmers live in a state of terror, and the apparatus of the state is unwilling to intervene. There are good reasons to think that the army in the area stands with the settlers. The police are reluctant to come to Dir Jarir without an army escort.

Can a handful of adolescent criminals destroy an entire village? Yes, easily. Sadiq and Faris tell us the stories of the last few days. Arik knows the situation, he’s in the village almost every day. But not even Arik Ascherman can stand guard day and night for weeks and months on end. To put things simply: these shepherds and farmers are being relentlessly pushed farther and farther westward, away from their lands. We are talking about privately-owned Palestinian land, with documents of ownership going back as far as Ottoman times – which means, Abu Rafa’ tells me, that they go back to the beginning of time. He shows me on his cellphone the kushan, the deed of possession, from the days of the Turks, verified and stamped by the Israeli occupation authorities at Beit-El in the mid-90s.

At 9:30, we get a frantic phone call from Abu Rafa’, who is out in the fields. A settler herd with two shepherds is at the edge of what was once his vineyard. (On April 2, 2019, these settlers destroyed the vineyard, cutting down the vines at their roots. The damage was immense, a loss of tens of thousands of shekels. Since then, the settlers have visited the vineyard many more times, recently uprooting the iron poles that once held the vines in place; they litter the ground, some twisted into grotesque shapes.) Abu Rafa’ says there are also settlers on the hill just above him. We race over the dirt paths – hardly more than goat trails – to join him. He is in danger. Soon we see two settler cars blocking the path, two settlers in one of them, a third standing outside, his face masked – attack mode. Neriya Ben-Pazi, the dark presence who reigns over the outposts in this area, is in the driver’s seat. After a few moments, he drives off. The masked would-be attacker describes an arc on the hill, ending up a few meters from Arik’s car. I’m expecting him to start throwing rocks at us, or worse. Arik gets out of the car and stands his ground, facing him, staring him down. After some tense minutes, the settler crosses the path and moves on.

We find Abu Rafa’ in the remains of his vineyard. Then, a surprise: a police car and an army jeep turn up in answer to Arik’s emergency call. I know the policeman, Dudy, from a good day we had (no thanks to Dudy) in Taybeh, just down the road. This time, Dudy urges Abu Rafa’ to file a complaint. The army officer hears our story and takes off. He seems to know Dir Jarir.

Abu Rafa’ speaking to Dudy.

Abu Rafa’ says he’s prepared to come to the Binyamin police station and file a complaint against the settlers for trespassing, violence, and damages. He’s already done that twice. This might seem to you a rather ordinary business, but in fact it’s a big step. In general, the landowners, both at Taybeh and in Dir Jarir, are reluctant to go anywhere near the police station. For good reason: I myself know of several cases where Palestinians who had the audacity to submit a complaint to the police ended up being arrested, sometimes for long periods. A Palestinian who walks into a police station is guilty a priori of the crime of being a Palestinian. But Abu Rafa’ and Muhammad Hasan and others in Dir Jarir can see that the only hope for their survival is to use the mechanisms still available to them and to us, including the police. Arik worked hard, over months, to convince them of this.

Maybe – it is at least possible – if the criminal complaints pile up, and the press, including the international press, shows interest, the police and the army can be pressured into doing something. And it’s not too far-fetched to imagine that our best hope is to sue the settlers in the civil courts for massive compensation. Abu Rafa’ says they destroyed ten years’ work – not only the grapes but also apricots, almonds, whatever this sometimes-fertile land can produce. Some 1,500 trees. He points to the outpost on the ridge above us: it has a water tower looming over a few dismal shacks. Abu Rafa’ says that tower was his. He had twelve like it; eleven were destroyed by the settlers, one – the one they stole – is left.

Everything is documented fully; we have dozens, maybe hundreds, of videos and stills from Dir Jarir. It’s no secret that the outpost at Maaleh Ahuvia is illegal; the army actually demolished it some months back, but the settlers, as always, rebuilt it that same night. Nothing in these parts is as long-lived, indeed as permanent, as an illegal outpost. Except for these shepherds who have been sleeping outside near their grazing lands to protect their sheep, even though they no longer dare to pitch tents.

So we accompany Abu Rafa’ and Muhammad to the Binyamin police station. There are five of us to testify for the complaint: Arik, the two landowners, Henry Szor, and me. It takes some four to five hours; the wheels grind very slowly. The police officer who takes down our reports is business-like, attentive, professional. I like him. Maybe, I think, it’s not all for nothing, this long day – my most boring day ever in Ta’ayush, though not by any means my first in the police station. Henry’s wife hears the story from him and says, “They’ll never act on that complaint. It’s like Don Quixote.” Henry says: “Don Quixote – now that’s something great.”

There’s the matter of doing the right thing without keeping accounts. Abu Rafa’ is full of despair, possibly the good kind of despair. He came back to Dir Jarir after many years in the US, only to find himself facing the settlers and in danger of losing his lands. He has 24 grandchildren but no real hope for the future. Still, he persists. He speaks of the days, over 20 years ago, when there was hope. And now? Like everyone I meet in Dir Jarir, he is full of admiration for Arik, who is fighting the good fight, who will never give up. I remember the words of the ancient Chinese historian, Sima Qian: “The refusal of one decent man outweighs the acquiescence of the multitude.”

On the way home, late afternoon, Arik says: “Acts of oppression exact a price from the oppressor.” “How so?” I ask him, though I know he is right. Arik says: “The price is in the deadness of the heart.”

All photographs by David Shulman.

David Shulman is an Indologist and an authority on the languages of India. A professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he is an activist in Ta’ayush, Arab-Jewish Partnership. His latest book is More Than Real: A History of the Imagination in South India, published in April 2015.

This article was originally published on Touching Photographs. Read it here.

Photo Essay | West Bank: How Many Times Can the Army Destroy a Village?

Israeli settler cruelty continues unabated at the Bedouin villages of Ras at-Tin and Humsa, leaving local Palestinians stretched for resources amid ruins and despair.

West Bank: For miles around Ras at-Tin, there is little but rocks, empty hills, yellow grass, and a few passing clouds, except for a dusty rock quarry about two miles to the west named for the settlement Kochav Hashahar. The closest settler outpost is the ironically named Malachei Hashalom, “Angels of Peace”, the tormenters of Ein Rashshash. Sometimes, in their spare time, they also harass the people of Ras at-Tin – a small community of Bedouin shepherds, about 120 souls, leading their lives, hurting no one. Lots of children. Lots of sheep. Lots of fiery sun.

Soldiers arriving with trucks and cranes at Ras at-Tin, July 14, 2021. Photo: Fares Kaabneh

Some days ago, they received a visit from the army or the Civil Administration (it’s the same thing). The officer told them there were no problems, they had nothing to worry about. Then, at dawn on July 14, soldiers came with their cranes and trucks and other devilish devices and confiscated everything these people had.

There were seven large water tanks (they have to buy water and bring it in tankers); all were taken away. First, however, the soldiers poured out the water onto the rocks and sand. The children, watching this, were crying. Long thirsty hours went by before the shepherds were able to fetch more water. Tents and sheep-pens were also destroyed. Each water tank costs 7,000 shekels, a huge sum for a community of subsistence shepherds.

The Civil Administration in action at Ras at-Tin, July 14, 2021. Photo: Fares Kaabneh

Here’s what Ahmad al-Rashidat, the mukhtar of Ras at-Tin, said to us today:

“They told us we were safe, and then they came and took everything away. The water tanks. A tractor. Solar panels. Our only power source. Our stocks of food. Several carts and wagons. All that we have. Have you ever heard of a government denying water to people? It’s inhuman, a crime. Who could imagine such a thing? Some of the young men protested and were injured, and the soldiers prevented them from being taken to hospital. They tried to do a body search on one young man, and he wouldn’t let them, so they beat him up and held him in detention for four hours.

“We are living on private Palestinian lands; we have an agreement with the landowners in the village of Malik. We are peaceful people. See the school over there. We built it for our children. Now they are afraid whenever they hear a car coming. Tomorrow is our holiday, Id al-Adha, a time of celebration. Every year the children ask for presents, they ask us for whatever they want. You know what they asked for this year? Water. And what do we want? Only a little water, and our dignity, nothing more.

“We don’t understand it. Not all the Jews are bad. There are only a few, maybe only one or two, who are bad. They’re the ones who sent the soldiers here last week.”

Each water tank costs 7,000 shekels, a huge sum for a community of subsistence shepherds. Ras at-Tin, July 14, 2021. Photo: Fares Kaabneh

I’m afraid I don’t agree with the mukhtar. There are more than one or two. Some of them very high up. The Civil Administration, which issued the orders, claims, as usual, that it is “only” demolishing illegal buildings – as if it were possible for a Palestinian to build anything at all, legally, in Area C.

Behind the Civil Administration is the fanatical settlers’ organisation called Regavim, which first targeted the school. Of course, the school has a demolition order hanging over it, stayed for the moment by the Supreme Court. But all talk of legality here is no more than a cloud of dust. What we saw today is, in my view, or in my heart, remarkably pure, unmitigated cruelty for the sake of the pleasure that cruelty provides.

How many times can the army destroy a village? In the case of Humsa: eight.. Photo: David Shulman

Then on to Humsa, which you may remember from earlier reports. How many times can the army destroy a village? In the case of Humsa: eight.

The eighth, a week ago, was terminal. This time, the soldiers took everything, including clothes and children’s toys and mattresses and tents and coffee pots and tools and all the other things people need to live. They loaded all of it onto trucks, drove off, and eventually dumped it at a place called Ein Shibli, some kilometres away from Humsa. It’s not a habitable place for these people for various reasons, including, first and foremost, the presence there of predatory Israeli settlers.

Humsa is officially in a firing zone used for army exercises. July 18, 2021. Photo: David Shulman

But in this case, the army has a pretext. We’ve written about it before. Humsa is officially in a firing zone used for army exercises. In the past, the army would give advance notice to the shepherds, and they would shift to a site called Humsa Foqa for a few days, until the exercises were finished. It wasn’t fun, the timing was often terrible, but they could live, more or less, with these forced evacuations, ikhla. Not anymore. There’s nothing left of Humsa except heaps of ruins and a small enclave just outside the firing zone where 85 people in deep despair are still hanging on. Nowhere to go.

But keep in mind that 46% of the land in the Jordan Valley is classed as closed military zones, including 11 firing zones. The army has plenty of room for its exercises. And why did they establish these zones on privately owned Palestinian land? And why is 85% of the land in the Valley off limits to Palestinians?

As it happens, a former colonel, now Brigadier General, Einav Shalev, gave forthright answers to these questions in an appearance before the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee of the Knesset in 2014. He was asked about Palestinian “illegal” building in Area C, and he said: “Wherever we have reduced our training exercises [in the Jordan Valley], wild grasses (yabaliyot) have sprung up.” Guess who he means by wild grasses. Even worse: “When you confiscate ten big, white, expensive tents, it’s not easy [for them] to recover.” [The translation is from Amira Hass’s Hebrew report; the English version is here].

Like at Humsa and Ras at-Tin. One wouldn’t want them to recover; that’s the whole point. The plan, on the table at that same committee meeting, was, and probably still is, to forcibly remove these people and concentrate them in permanent sites outside Area C, which Israel wants to annex. Shalev reportedly noted that because of the confiscation policy, the Red Cross decided to stop providing tents to shepherd communities whose huts and barns were destroyed by the Civil Administration. We should be grateful that the then colonel spoke the truth: confiscations, demolitions, training exercises are useful mechanisms of expulsion, in one form or another.

Ras at-Tin, July 18, 2021. Photo: David Shulman

Today is the ninth of the Hebrew month of Av, the day the Jews have, for centuries, mourned the catastrophes they have supposedly suffered on this same day – the destruction of both first and second temples, the end of the Bar Kochba revolt against the Romans, the expulsion from England in 1290 and from Spain in 1492, and a few others. It’s a long list and, for many, our most prized possession.

Now, the tables are turned. Every Tish’a Be’Av Arik Ascherman brings a group to sites of destruction, sites like Ras at-Tin and Humsa and Taybeh, also places scheduled for imminent destruction, like Sheikh Jarrah in east Jerusalem. I joined him today with our son and grandson. At each site, after a Palestinian speaker has described what has happened, we recite a chapter of the Book of Lamentations in the haunting melody that is traditional on the ninth of Av.

“How lonely sits the city of many people, now widowed; once great among nations, a princess, now enslaved…. For the Lord has destroyed without pity (haras velo chamal)…”

But it’s no longer He but we, Israeli Jews, who are pitiless, and it is our own selves that we destroy.

This article was originally published on Touching Photographs. Read it here.

From the 14th Century, a Sanskrit Political Satire for All Times

Jyotirmaya Sharma’s interpretation and translation of Jagadesvara Bhattacharya’s Hasyarnava Prahasanam makes the 14th century play accessible to modern readers.

It is uncommon for political scientists in India to study or reflect upon political life in pre-colonial times. In the few instances of its kind that we know of, the end result has been far from satisfactory. What we come across generally are anecdotal treatments of limited databases and impressionistic generalisations based upon them. This is due as much to lack of familiarity with sources and the languages in which they are produced, as to limited engagements with scholarly literatures concerning them.

Jyotirmaya Sharma’s new book is a delightful departure from this state of affairs. Sharma is known for his unconventional treatment of Indian political life in the twentieth century. His works on the RSS differ from most run-on-the-mill diatribes against the Sangh parivar by recognising the tensions and fissures within the parivar. And few writers have placed in relief the ambiguities in Mahatma Gandhi’s thought or the refashioning that Hinduism underwent at the hands of Swami Vivekananda as forcefully as Sharma has done. His irreverence towards received wisdom is evident in the book under review, which is a slim volume containing a translation and a penetrating study of one of the most lurid political satires in Sanskrit, Jagadesvara Bhattacharya’s Hasyarnava Prahasanam.

The Hasyarnava is the celebration of political disorder in the reign of a weak ruler. The play is set in the residence of an ageing prostitute. The names of the characters in the play tell us what the playwright has in store for us. The king is called Anayasindhu (Ocean-of-Disorder), his minister is Kumativarma (Protector-of-Folly), the courtesan is Badhura (Inclined-Vulva), the king’s family priest Vishvabhanda (World-Buffoon) and the latter’s student, Kalahankura (Tumour-of-Strife). There are, among others, a physician called Vyadhisindhu (Ocean-of-Diseases) who is the son of Aturantaka (Death-of-the-Afflicted), a barber called Raktakallola (Joy-in-Blood), a magistrate, Sadhuhimsaka (Tormentor-of-Righteous) a brahmin, Mithyarnava (Ocean-of-Deceit), a preceptor Madanandhamishra (Blind-with-Passion) and his disciple, Kulala (Wild-Cock).

The nature of the satire becomes evident at the very beginning of the play, when a servant spy briefs the king of the decline in law in the kingdom. He says, all men have left the wives of other men and embrace only their wives; despite presence of clusters of well-born and learned brahmins, it is the cobbler who mends shoes. Shameless people worship brahmins despite the secure existence of the lower castes (p. 31). The rest of the play lives up to the expectations that these words generate.

The Ocean of Mirth: Reading Hāsyārṇava Prahasanaṁ of Jagadēśvara Bhaṭṭāchārya,
A Political Satire for All Times,
Translated with an Introduction by Jyotirmaya Sharma,
Routledge: London, New York, New Delhi 2020, Rs 695/-

The Hasyarnava is a short play in two acts. It begins with the arrival of the king and his minister at the prostitute’s house, where the prostitute’s daughter, Mrigankalekha (Streak-of-the-Young-Moon’s-Crescent) is the centre of attraction. The king is drawn towards the girl, but World-Buffoon arrives there as a preceptor to instruct the girl in the art of lovemaking. Attention from the girl deviates with the coming of a few others into the house, but presently World-Buffoon and Tumour-of-Strife come to quarrel over the girl. With the arrival of Blind-with-Passion in the company of Wild-Cock to tutor the girl, things take a different turn. Blind-with-Passion deceives World-Buffoon and makes love with the girl. It is then decided that both World-Buffoon and Blind-with-Passion marry the girl, while Tumour-of-Strife and Wild-Cock are forced to accept Inclined-Vulva. Eventually, Mahanindaka (Mighty-Censurer), who is summoned to officiate over the marriage rites, plays a trick on them and takes the girl away.

The play revels in the disorder of the world without offering an apology for this state of affair. It holds out no promise for a restoration of order. “Is this,” Sharma asks in his Introduction, “a case of inversion of reality? Or is it, as (David) Shulman suggests, an instance of a ‘kind of order that disorder can represent’?” Sharma identifies the situation as “disorder at its best” and goes on to describe it as an expression of freedom: “hierarchies weaken or collapse, insecurity thrives, the powerful torment the weak, the weak retaliate when given a chance, boundaries disappear, wealth gets freed from the dharma-framework and so does erotic love, well-worn pieties dissolve, derisive laughter resounds, mediocrity triumphs, creativity finds release, fidelity to customs and traditions dissipates, rituals become meaningless, judgement flounders. It is this breach in the dharma-fortress that constitutes an instance of freedom” (p. 12-13). Freedom, Sharma argues, “is artha and kāma freed from the stranglehold of dharma” (p. 13).

Jyotirmaya Sharma. Photo toynbeeprize.org

The discussion in the Introduction places the Hasyarnava in the context of treatises on statecraft contained in Sanskrit texts such as the Dharmasutras, the Dharmashastras (especially, the Manusmriti), the Arthashastra, the Mahabharata and the Dandaviveka. The reflections made in the light of political precepts contained in these texts urge us to read the play as a spirited commentary on the political life of the times in which it was composed.

Sharma’s conclusion that the Hasyarnava subverts the political ideal espoused in texts such as the Manusmriti and the Dandaviveka is reasonable. This is a widely popular line of thinking, and had Sharma brought his analysis to a close at this point, the book would have been far less appealing than it is now. The great merit of his Introduction lies in its problematisation of the dimensions of erotic desire in the play.

Sharma observes that the king and his entourage violate all norms of erotic love recommended in texts such as the Arthashastra and the Kamasutra. There is another important angle to this violation. In his evaluation of the opening verses in which the playwright depicts Shiva and Parvati in amorous sport, Sharma draws parallels with analogous passages in the Shivapurana, Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhavam and Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda. He highlights the tantric influences on the Hasyarnava, especially of Sahajiya Vaishnavism in Bengal, but at the same time, acknowledges the possibility of alternative influences too, which include a few comparable descriptions in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad and the Aitareya Brahmana. This makes the Hasyarnava a text of “fascinating complexity,” one that “encourages us to look at the past with new eyes, if only because our sense of the past is increasingly inadequate, our sense of reality simplistic and we lack sense of the innumerable ironies, tensions, contradictions and paradoxes that fabricated our imperfect but colourful world” (p. 18).

If the Introduction is instructive in more ways than one, the translation that follows is no less marked by erudition. The satire comes out with great force and vibrance in Sharma’s rendering. The ease with which he brings verbose Sanskrit lines to English shows his great sensitivity towards the poetic heart of both languages. It will not be an exaggeration to state that future translators rendering literary works from Sanskrit to English will find a formidable challenge in the standards that this work has set.

Jyotirmaya Sharma has given us a wonderful little book to relish and reflect upon. In the disorderliness that characterises our times, The Ocean of Mirth provides an invaluable moment to ruminate over the limits and possibilities of desire, power, fear and freedom.

Manu V. Devadevan is Assistant Professor of History at the Indian Institute of Technology Mandi, Himachal Pradesh and J. Gonda Fellow in Residence, International Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden

Illegal Outposts and Struggles for Water: A Day in Palestine

David Shulman describes the actions of Israeli soldiers when dealing with Palestine water connections and Israeli illegal outposts.

‘Aziza proudly shows us the faucet. It’s a miracle: you just turn it, and water flows. She’s never had running water in her home. Comet Middle East put in the water tower and the pump to draw water from the well.

The water tower near Aziza’s home. Credit: David Shulman

The problem is that the well is running dry. It has to be replenished with water brought in by tanker, but the road is mostly impassable for a tanker. It’s not clear how this can be solved. It’s hot and dry today, 36 degrees or more, a hot Ramadan, hard on those who are fasting.

‘Aziza begs us to allow her to make us tea. Not today, we say, we have other places to visit, and work to do. We promise we’ll come back for tea after ‘Id. Kul sana wa-intum bi-khair, May you will be well year after year.

Happiness is spending two quiet hours with the shepherds in the wadi of Umm al-Amad, despite the presence of the soldiers watching us and them from the top of the hill.

An outpost next to the settlment of Asahel. Credit: Michal Hai

There’s another new illegal outpost next to the settlement of Asahel. We climb the hill to see how’s it’s doing. They have a big sheep-barn with New Zealand sheep, recently sheared. Four young settlers are feeding them, their long tzizit flapping as they move. They ignore us and our cameras. Their problem, I say to Jonathan, is that they think God is a fact. Yes, says Jonathan, a scholar of Buddhist philosophy, a fact rather than a view or a point of view.

A man sleeps in a tractor. Credit: Michal Hai

On the road between Asahel and Susya, we see a crowd of soldiers, some ten Palestinians milling around, a tractor. Hovering over them is one of the black army drones; it has been surveilling our movements all morning. We stop to find out what is wrong. Apparently, the drone discovered a water pipe running over the hills.

Soldiers follow a drone. Credit: Michal Hai

This, the soldiers say, is a problem. How dare Palestinians lay down a water pipe on their own land, just like that? The Palestinians tell them the water comes from Samu’a in Area A. The Samu’a municipality is in charge. No, say the soldiers, including the officer from the Civil Administration, the senior person in this mid-day fracas, Palestinians can’t just bring water as they see fit. In fact, it seems, they are not supposed to be thirsty at all—it’s a kind of crime. They’re like camels and can go for days or weeks without drinking. Especially during Ramadan.

“We’re not using water to grow anything, we’re not cultivating oranges, we need to drink in this heavy heat, shob.” What, Palestinians feel heat?

Also Read: Personal Stories of Everyday Violence Under Israeli Occupation of Palestine

So what happens now? The soldiers hesitate. They occupy themselves with the standard routine, that is, taking the Palestinians’ identity cards and registering them in their computers. Time passes like slow flame. The driver of the tractor sits on the tractor. Our presence – nine activists with cameras – is confusing the soldiers. Otherwise, maybe they would simply cut the pipe and go away. And the Palestinians would fix it. And the soldiers would cut it again. And so on. It’s a South Hebron ritual.

The drone, black, angular, grotesque, descends with a faint buzz and is put away.

The drone descends. Credit: Michal Hai

We wait in the white light of noon. We chat with the young boys. More soldiers arrive. A dignified gentleman appears from somewhere and patiently explains to them that the water is coming from Samu’a and they need it badly and it’s not really any of the soldiers’ business. This doesn’t help. The soldiers appropriate one of the identity cards and the keys to the tractor. Don’t worry, they say, we’ll be back.

Somehow, the keyless driver gets the tractor to start anyway and drives off. The soldiers leave in a dusty flurry. “While you’re at it,” Michal calls out to them, “why not do something about that new illegal outpost? It’s on your way.” Peace and silence descend on the hills. We also take our leave. An hour later we hear that the army did indeed come back; they confiscated the tractor.

For a Palestinian farmer, a tractor is like water. Maybe they’ll eventually get it back, after much running around and paying some exorbitant fine, thousands of shekels.

Credit: Guy Butavia

Last stop today: the new illegal settlement we visited 3 weeks ago, at Susya, where three activists were arrested with unusual violence. Water is on our minds. Let’s see where the settlers are getting theirs. Near the Susya cemetery we see the pipes attached to a source in the settlers’ hothouse, a flourishing business partly owned by Hishtil with other branches in Israel. There are two long pipes snaking up the hill—one for water, the other for electric power. We follow them up through the trees, past a noble white horse, past a temporary swimming pool, until we reach the big tent where the settlers are living. They’ve added a brick structure, maybe an outhouse. Anyway, no dearth of water here.

Credit: Michal Hai

Now comes another ritual, or perhaps it’s a game, self-parodic and futile. Guy phones the battalion headquarters and also the headquarters of the Civil Administration to report that settlers from the illegal outpost have put in water pipes. The conversations go like this.

Hello, my name is Guy. We’re standing near the new illegal outpost at Susya, just past the trees and the cemetery.

Do you live in Susya?

No.

So who are you?

I’m a citizen, my name is Guy.

Oh, OK.

We’ve just discovered that the outpost has new water pipes and power lines. And they’ve also taken over more land, plowed it and planted something, probably tomatoes. And they’ve built something new and solid. I suggest you send someone to see it.

I’m sending some soldiers now.

Good, we’re waiting for you.

The army telephone operator is polite, even concerned, the one from the Civil Administration impatient:

Hello, this is Guy. I’m a citizen. We’re at the new illegal outpost at Susya.

We know about the outpost.

They have put down water pipes and electric cables and taken over more land.

We know about the outpost.

So what are you doing about it?

Are you calling about a matter of life and death?

Yes. Water is about life and death.

Let me check.

Silence.

It’s the tone, and the unspoken premise, that matter. As if we are living in a state ruled by law, and a citizen can call up to report a crime, and the authorities will follow up and even act, and the criminal might be called to account. As if the army and the state were not themselves the criminals.

Waiting for the soldiers, we have lots to discuss. There’s the white horse tethered to a tree, owned by the settlers. We don’t want to judge the horse. Who knows what he’s thinking? Amiel recalls a dog that once crossed the lines. Settlers tried to sic him on the activists, and the dog came at them and then changed his mind and came back with them in the bus. I recall the soldier at Bil’in who couldn’t bear it any longer and similarly crossed the lines. Such things happen.

Also Read: Nas Daily: How the Palestinian Blogger’s Message of Positivity Stems From Privilege

Michal says she wishes the settlers would choose more accurate names for their new outposts. Instead of “Angels of Peace,” for example, or “The Song of the Grass”, both flourishing in the Jordan Valley. Why not something like “Outpost of Racial Purity”? We could even put up a signpost with the name near the turn in the road and an arrow pointing the way. Even better would be “Poor Man’s Lamb”, Kivsat Harash. You will remember the parable the prophet Nathan cites to King David in Samuel II, 12. There was a rich man with many flocks, and a poor man who had only a single ewe lamb, which lived together with the man’s children, ate and drank and slept with them. The rich man had a guest; not wanting to kill one of his own sheep, he stole the poor man’s lamb and killed and cooked it for his guest. King David, hearing this from the lips of the prophet, is incensed and says the rich man must die. The prophet says, à propos of Bathsheva and her husband whom David sent to his death: “You are that man.”

Timeless words, a little spooky. You can hear them, in a modern variant, from Guy and Michal almost every day. So: Outpost of the Poor Man’s Lamb. Amiel remembers that once when he was being taken before a judge to extend his arrest, the policeman said to him: “Why are you fussing over one little Palestinian field? It’s negligible, batel be-shishim. Amiel said to him, “What to you is negligible is to the Palestinian the Poor Man’s Lamb.”

As we are about to give up, the soldiers arrive – the same fearless bunch that stole the tractor at noon – and they have a colored map, which they unfurl and study with Amiel, who makes some necessary corrections, and then we treat them to a tour of the outpost, the water pipes, the swimming pool, the newly plowed field. They take notes, they even thank us, they go away.

Then I remember that I’m thirsty.

‘Aziza makes tea in 2018. Credit: Margaret Olin

All photographs arranged by Margaret Olin.

David Shulman is an Indologist and an authority on the languages of India. A Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he is an activist in Ta’ayush, Arab-Jewish Partnership.

This article was originally published on Touching Photographs. Read the original article here.

Meet the Scholar Who Reads Sanskrit by Night and Confronts Israeli Army by Day

A conversation around classical scholarship and contemporary activism in Israel and Palestine between David Shulman, Professor Emeritus at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and artist Shuddhabrata Sengupta.

The Wall in Bethlehem That Segregates and Subjugates Palestinians

The wall is a constrictor that crushes Palestinian space, mind and body. The wall is a prison. To feel blessed to visit Bethlehem is a spiritual crime.

The wall that divides the West Bank and Jerusalem. Credit: Praveen Sparsh

The ‘othering’ of people is a human trait displayed by powerful societies for time immemorial. Separating ourselves from those we deem inferior on the grounds of religious belief, colour, ethnicity, caste, gender and language has always been an operating tool in the hands of society and government. But today, this is happening far more insidiously, at times beyond the public eye. Even the most democratic and secular of nations have been unable to break free of this human craving to establish the primacy of the ‘superior’ over the chosen ‘inferior’.

Ordinary citizens are morally coerced or forced to take sides and, in the process, strengthen those who survive by maintaining the status quo. Authority to implement and execute such discrimination is derived by instilling fear and hubris among the people – fear among the oppressed and hubris in the dominant community. The fear of imminent danger combined with aggressive marginalisation triggers attack, counter-attack and deaths in an unending cycle. One such nation that has mastered this grotesque art in the name of mythical and prophetic land inheritance is Israel. And the world has allowed it and continues to abet its annexation and infiltration of Palestinian land and the persecution of the Palestinian people.

As we got into the taxi on January 20 at Tel Aviv airport, we were greeted by a boisterous, Israeli-Jewish taxi driver. He was keen on sharing myths with us and as we rode the highway, many fables unfolded. God, he said, gifted the Jews the most beautiful, fertile land, rich in honey and water, with enough to fulfill the needs of all Jews. It was almost as if God had given the Jews, a perfect people, the perfect place – Israel. So, said our driver, God was asked how he could be so partial. For which he said “Partial? Just look at the kind of neighbours I have given them.”

A telling story that unveiled the inner mind of conservative Jews across Israel. On the ride to our hotel in Jaffa (Yaffa), he never once mentioned Palestine, even in passing. Only when I enquired about Bethlehem did he say, “Oh! that is in Palestine,” in a tone laced with disregard and implying concern for our safety. Israel, for conservative Jews, is not an arbitrary and unequal creation of the 20th century, it is the ‘promised land’ that has from time immemorial belonged to them, only them. Ironically, the people of the land, the Palestinians, have become usurpers.

Credit: Praveen Sparsh

The first thing that strikes you about Israel and Palestine is the tininess of the land. But the religious centrality of Jerusalem that brings together Christianity, Judaism and Islam, the Holocaust, the magnitude of the Palestinian struggle, the financial and political clout wielded by Jews across the globe and the simultaneous political hijacking of the Palestinian cause by terrorists from other nations has resulted in this small piece of land looming large over the rest of the world.

Over an unforgettable week in January of 2017, on the invitation of David Shulman, one of the world’s foremost scholars of Indology, Indian languages, culture and music, and the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, I travelled across the geographical and political landscape of Jaffa and West Jerusalem in Israel, Jericho, Jordan Valley, Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem and Bethlehem in Palestine. It was a week of sharing music and listening to Palestinian and Israeli voices – thinking voices, feeling voices, speaking voices and singing voices.

There are many complex stories of lives coming out of those voices that I could narrate, but in this piece, I would like to speak about one simple pilgrimage to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Palestine. And I want to write about this because many tourists would have travelled this path and come back touched by the sanctity of the church itself. For those deeply engaged in the Israel-Palestine conflict, this is just a touristic trip that touches the surface, missing the hidden ugliness that the Israeli establishment perpetrates. Bethlehem was for me a disturbing experience that made me question some basic assumptions about my own equanimity.

The place is just about 40 minutes by road from Jerusalem. But travel to and from Bethlehem is not exactly straightforward. We need to take two taxis, one on the Israeli side that will drop us at an intimidating cement coloured check post. And once we pass the check post, we need to transfer to a Palestinian taxi to get to the Church of the Nativity believed to be the birth place of Jesus Christ. As per the Oslo agreement, the West Bank was divided into three sectors: Area A – entirely controlled by Palestinian Authority, Area B – civil administration comes under the Palestinian Authority while security is under the Israeli authority and Area C – entirely controlled by the Israeli army.

Graffiti on the wall that divides West bank and Jerusalem. Credit: Praveen Sparsh

Israeli Jews cannot enter Bethlehem which comes under Area A and hence (there is) this need for a taxi transfer. We were lucky to get into a taxi that was driven by an Arab Israeli citizen who could drive us directly to the church. We need to understand that about 20% of the Israeli population is Arab or Palestinian – and they are treated as second-class citizens. Any traveller who visits just Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem with a short trip to the Dead Sea would wonder what this entire ruckus was all about. Israel comes across like a western democracy, rich and capitalistic, luring us like another country. But all we need to do is keep our eyes open as we cross in and out of the West Bank and the bubble bursts.

Every time we cross into the West Bank, the economic and cultural differences are evident, even in and around the touristy shops that dot the ancient by-lanes around the Church of the Nativity. The landscape, layout and the spread of the homes in the West Bank, Palestine are very different from the regularised and orderly facade of Israel. For a person from Asia, the West Bank is closer to home and so much more real. But this feeling of bonhomie disappears the moment we pay more attention to all that is around. On the way back from the church, my colleague, the mridangam artist Praveen Sparsh and I decided to walk to the Israeli check post which was about three kilometres away.

Initially, it was just a lovely stroll down main roads that housed curio shops, archeological sites, mini-malls and restaurants that obviously catered to the constant influx of Christian tourists who make their way to Bethlehem every year. And on one side was a valley dotted with under-construction buildings, apartment blocks and roads that wound their way through the greenish-brown, undulated landscape. But very soon we were walking down small dusty back roads. We enquired about the check post with some locals and their directions led us directly to ‘the wall’ – the Israeli West Bank barrier. A massive structure that takes control over your mind and body. Long and mighty grey vertical slabs of cement, tightly packed alongside one another and topped with barbed fences. It might have been about 25 feet high, I am actually not sure because it seemed much larger. I was dwarfed and crushed in its presence and it swallowed my space and vision. Soon my heartbeat was racing and I was hoping to cross the checkpoint as fast as possible.

Graffiti on the wall that divides West bank and Jerusalem. Credit: Praveen Sparsh

At regular intervals there were watchtowers for Israeli army personnel to watch over us from their commanding position. I had seen this very same wall as we drove in and out of West Bank but I never realised the magnitude of its presence until I took the long walk alongside it. The wall is decorated with wartime graffiti that demands a free Palestine, more love, peace, small memoirs for martyrs and anger targeted at Israel and the US, including one that said “Obama Sucks”. On our left were shops, homes, a petrol station and cars and taxis went back and forth from the check post. It was obvious that for people on the ground, anger, laughter, resentment and resignation co-exist in a way that we cannot imagine.

It is not just the size of the wall that terrorises. It is what it means, what it says. It is a statement that divides, segregates and subjugates those within its confines. Every time you see the wall, it shows you your limits, stops you from dreaming. Life is bound by how you behave within and those outside are always watching and pointing guns at you from way above. It constantly informs Palestinians that they are all terrorists, untrustworthy, people who need to be controlled, limited, under observation. Even as a transitory visitor I felt every one of these emotions – it was as if my freedom had been taken away, I was a suspect and wondered whether I would be allowed through the check post. The wall does that to you – it makes those sitting on top and the other side omnipotent and supremely powerful. What does this wall mean to a person who is born and has grown up watching the permanence of this monstrosity, demands its demolition and is crying hoarse for her own legitimacy and dignity. The wall is a constrictor that crushes Palestinian space, mind and body. The wall is a prison.

Graffiti on the wall that divides West bank and Jerusalem. Credit: Praveen Sparsh

The check post is no less intimidating, a tunnel like dark entry, nothing of culture or sharing adorn the walls. It is dry and lifeless. We pass through many corridors and take a few turns to once again find ourselves facing an expressionless Israeli officer. Palestinians who make this trip everyday may be used to the drill but there is always that possibility, especially during times of conflict, that you may suddenly become a terrorist. When I emerged on the other side, I breathed easy, I felt free and all of a sudden, I was back in control. The ugliness of this kind of freedom must disturb anyone who visits Bethlehem. We go there to visit the supposed birth site of a man of peace, love and compassion. But the divine child is suffocated in this prison. Pilgrims come from across the globe to pray for their own happiness while their very arrival and departure from that spot of spirituality is ridden in hurt, oppression, violence, hate and death and we just don’t see it. To feel blessed to visit Bethlehem is a spiritual crime.

The Israeli government and its sympathisers will of course have numerous reasons to justify the presence of the wall. But this is an unusual wall. It is only meant to keep the Palestinians within. Jews with the active support of the Israeli government and army appropriate lands, build settlements in Area C and occupied East Jerusalem, and the world just whines about it for a few days. Attacks on each other are a norm in this part of the world but there is no doubt that the official machinery used by the Israeli establishment is at a scale that can never be matched by a few freedom fighters. Yes, I have used the term freedom fighters and not terrorists. As much as I condemn any kind of violence, after travelling to Palestine I am unable to say with confidence that I would remain a quiet non-violent activist if I was one among them. If I was physically, functionally, culturally and spiritually pushed like the Palestinians have been for decades, can I be sure that I will never take to arms? The truth be told, none of us really knows if reduced to the position of a suppressed ‘other’, we will not do that.

T.M. Krishna in Israel: Criticism, and a Response by David Shulman

Even well-meaning Israelis are guilty of ‘normalising’ the Israeli occupation of Palestine, says Marcy Newman. Not true, says Shulman, Israeli scholar and activist for Palestinian rights, and the organiser of Krishna’s recent concerts.

Even well-meaning Israelis are guilty of ‘normalising’ the Israeli occupation of Palestine, says Marcy Newman. Not true, says Shulman, Israeli scholar and activist for Palestinian rights, and the organiser of Krishna’s recent concerts.

Israeli settlers and guards in Hebron: The site of an illegal occupation of a Palestinian house in Hebron. Note: the “minder” guards and the young Israeli settler at the front – taking pictures of the photographer – with stone in hand. Credit: Peter Mulligan/Flickr CC 2.0

Marcy Newman, author of The Politics of Teaching Palestine to Americans and a founding member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, writes:

In David Shulman’s “Carnatic Balm for an Aching Land of Fences and Walls”, he presents the idea that a travelling concert by T.M. Krishna in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and in Israel has the potential to be an “instrument of peace”.

While certainly one can find a peaceful balm in the beauty of Carnatic music, one can not say the same about the idea of holding concerts for unequal people in a land plagued by an ever-encroaching colonial regime. Doing so glosses over the asymmetrical relationship between Palestinians and Israelis. Indeed, Shulman mentions Palestinian people only once in his article. The rest of it is entirely focused on how such concerts will benefit Israelis.

This is typical of those engaged in what Palestinians call “normalisation”. It is the idea that there are two equal groups of people living on the same strip of land whose relationships can and should be dealt with the same way. But that’s not possible when one group of people is colonised by the other in a brutal, military regime that encompasses all of historic Palestine, not merely the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Marcy Newman. Credit: Twitter

Far too many people are invested in normalising the abnormal relationships between Palestinians and Israelis, especially since the signing of the Oslo Accords twenty-four years ago. Whether it’s organisations like Seeds of Peace or musical programmes like Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (WEDO), these projects elide the differences between the two peoples, often feigning that it is merely a conflict between two equal parties. Such projects tend to elevate and heighten the voice and concerns of Israelis over Palestinians (much like Shulman did in his piece) and rarely, if ever, do we learn about the root causes of the 69-year-old colonial occupation.

For the past twelve years, Palestinians began to alter their tactics by launching an international Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, in part inspired by India’s push for independence and modelled on South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement. While the BDS movement has various strains, one of its most powerful and important aspects is its cultural boycott, which asks musicians, like T.N. Krishna, to refrain from playing concerts in Israel, even if they also agree to play in a Palestinian venue. There is no equality in such gestures. But there is solidarity in listening to what the colonised are asking of us and honouring that request.

Musical artists from around the world have heeded this call, making BDS a formidable movement in an extraordinarily short amount of time. Artists ranging from Roger Waters to Gil Scott-Heron to Elvis Costello have cancelled their performances in Israel in recent years. In recent years, too, the Indian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel has led to a number of Indian academics and cultural figures to support Palestinians by not travelling to Israel for performances.

As for Shulman’s work, I can see how from an Indian perspective it looks like he is a peacenik, but from my point of view, and from the point of view of most Palestinians active in the BDS movement, that sort of normalising abnormal relationships between Palestinians and Israelis is precisely what keeps things the status quo. If we are to respect India’s own history for independence as well as others around the globe still engaged in that battle, it would behoove us to pay attention to what Palestinians are asking of us.

David Shulman replies:

No one who knows the situation in the occupied Palestine territories can forget, even for a moment, the noxious asymmetry between Israelis and Palestinians in terms of sheer power and basic human rights. I agree that there is a ‘brutal military regime’ in place in the Occupied Territories, though I think it is simply wrong to claim that such a regime also holds power inside Israel, that is, the state within its pre-1967 boundaries.

David Shulman. Credit: Wikimedia

This is not the place to enter into a serious discussion of the BDS campaign, although I might allow myself to say that the strident, virulently moralistic tone of Marcy Newman’s response to my piece in The Wire gives me pause. Neither I nor my fellow activists need to be lectured about asymmetry.

I am, however, even more troubled by the following statement:

‘As for Shulman’s work, I can see how from an Indian perspective it looks like he’s a peacenik, but from my point of view, and from the point of view of most Palestinians active in the BDS movement, that sort of normalising abnormal relationships between Palestinians and Israelis is precisely what keeps things the status quo.’

What exactly would Marcy like us to do? Should we abandon our Palestinian friends in South Hebron and elsewhere in the territories as they struggle to survive against impossible odds under conditions of state terror? Should we stand by passively and watch their lands being stolen by settlers and the state, their houses and villages destroyed by the army, their rights and freedom taken away without any real legal recourse, their very lives put in danger from violent Israeli settlers who act with virtual impunity or by soldiers following illegal orders? I, for one, cannot leave these people to their fate. I am certain that the same applies to all the activists I know.

We have had some success in restoring stolen Palestinian lands to their rightful owners, and we are sometimes able to protect innocent farmers and shepherds from serious attack, or even to save whole villages from destruction and expulsion, but we act not only because of these results but primarily because of the intrinsic value that lies in doing the right thing, as best one can, taking the risks involved, in situations of extreme systemic wickedness. To call this kind of action, successful or not, a mode of “normalising abnormal relationships” is itself a profound distortion of what we, and the courageous grass-roots Palestinian activists we encounter in the territories, stand for in the world, at this time.

Carnatic Balm for an Aching Land of Fences and Walls

Israeli aficionados of Indian classical music have invited T.M. Krishna to perform in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

T M Krishna. Credit: TMK.com

In darkening times such as those we inhabit, each ray of light counts. Perhaps most sustaining of all is the light that comes from visible sound, one of the traditional principles at work in the classical system of Carnatic music. Truly moving and meaningful sound is something to be seen as well as heard. When my colleague, Prof. Yigal Bronner, and I took a group of our students and colleagues on a 10-day tour of Tamil Nadu and Kerala in 2014, we were privileged to hear a private concert by T. M. Krishna in Chennai, in the home of our friend Ranvir Shah (with the virtuoso Akkarai Subbalaksmi accompanying on the violin).

As is invariably the case in my experience of Krishna’s performances, this one was at or perhaps beyond the edge of what is humanly possible. For colleagues who were new to South India, this intimate concert was a revelation, an overwhelming artistic introduction to the riches of Carnatic music. Note that, in contrast to the normative performance spaces today – the usually large and often alienating sabhas requiring many microphones to enhance the sound – Carnatic kritis were, and still are, meant to be sung and absorbed in far more intimate surroundings, where the full play of nuance and modulation can be grasped. Even today we can sometimes find musicians trained in the old Thanjavur style that requires precisely that kind of subtle listening.

On that evening in Chennai we conceived the idea of a visit by Krishna to Israel and the Palestinian territories. Our initial thought was that we could try to set up a “peace concert”, bringing together people of good heart and will from both sides of the agonising conflict, an Israeli-Palestinian Woodstock. Such people are still, by far, the majority, though their voices are mostly unheard. In the end, the political situation made such a joint venture impractical. But thanks to an initiative by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and its president, Professor Nili Cohen, T. M. Krishna will be coming to give several concerts in Jerusalem (both western and eastern parts of the city) as well as in Yafo or Jaffa on the Mediterranean coast. He is being accompanied by H.N. Bhaskar on the violin and Praveen Sparsh on the mridangam.

Krishna will also be giving a four-hour master class for students and musicians at the Academy on January 22. The Academy of Sciences and Humanities – the premier academic institution in Israel – is eager to host this master artist and public personality, the recipient this year of the prestigious Magsaysay Award, given to honour, among other categories, exceptional service in creative communication arts, and peace and international understanding.

Probably few in India realise the intensity of interest in classical Indian music in Israel. It is possible that, after India itself, Israel has the most passionate audiences for Indian music, especially in the Hindustani tradition. In part, this hunger derives from direct experience by young Israelis in India; they come by the tens of thousands every year, some seeking relief from the grim realities of the Middle East, others looking for what we might call spiritual fulfilment, which definitely includes the study of music, whether vocal or instrumental.

There are by now hundreds of young musicians in Israel who can sing dhrupad or khayal, or perform on flute or tabla or mridangam or Indian violin; some of them come to our department at the Hebrew University to study Indian languages such as Sanskrit, Hindi, Tamil, or Telugu. We also teach introductory courses on classical Indian music every two or three years, to large classes.

Israelis, like the Jews in general, are a restless and curious people, and Indian music is one conspicuous area where their restlessness can temporarily come to rest. Among them is the outstanding dhrupad performer and teacher, Osnat Elkabir, a student of the Dagar brothers and of Pandit Ritwik Sannyal in Varanasi, among others; she studied at the feet of these maestros for some 14 years and now has taught generations of students in Israel, including myself.

This musical love affair between two ancient cultures with strong but subterranean historical links is unfolding beneath the political radar and outside the often narrow and fanatical public space. It is a story still waiting to be told, and rich in promise, not only among Israelis but now, also, among Palestinian audiences.

A day may yet come when the very names of today’s narrow-minded politicians will be long forgotten, but the first visit to Jerusalem by the greatest of the modern Carnatic singers will live on in people’s minds.

In these days of violent political enmity and destructive (self-destructive) prejudice, it is the artists, musicians, and poets who may be able to bring communities together, bridging the abyss between them.

Music communicates on a level deeper than slogans, deeper than words, magically passing through barriers and walls directly into human hearts. Israel-Palestine today is a warren of mostly useless, and ugly, walls and fences, indeed an endless series of fences within fences; we urgently need to appeal for help in removing them from the goddesses and gods invoked by Muttusvami Dikshitar and Tyagaraja in their compositions, which we know from empirical experience can melt even a heart of stone.

If anyone can achieve that, it is T. M. Krishna, for whom music is a medium for public moral statement and an instrument for making peace.

In Palestinian Villages, Illegal Outposts, Hebrew Inscriptions and Sewage-Filled Fields

These are violent days in South Hebron and in the Jordan Valley.

A Palestinian flag and tents in Susya village, south of the West Bank city of Hebron. Credit: Reuters/Mussa Qawasma

Asael, possibly the ugliest of all the illegal outposts in the southern West Bank – and the competition is fierce – is rapidly expanding. Yellow bulldozers, parked at the perimetre fence of the settlement, have carved out a huge swathe of intermeshed, crisscrossing gashes in the hill and valley just below.

This wide, deep wound in the soil has been sliced, needless to say, through privately owned Palestinian land. We know the families. We’ve plowed here, on the edge of the outpost. There have been many bad moments with the Asael settlers, the ones who we can see this Shabbat morning walking their dogs over the hill or praying to their rapacious god or swinging their children on the swings in the painted park just under their pre-fab caravans.

Winter morning, sunny, ice-cold. Guy is photographing the earthen gashes metre by metre. The families who own the land will submit a complaint to the police, not that it will do much good. The civil administration stopped the bulldozers earlier this week, but the fact that they’re still parked here bodes ill. Each one of them is hugely expensive and they’re still here. Actually, everything bodes ill here at Asael on this sun-drenched day.

The soldiers appear on cue. Three of them clamber down the hill to put a stop to our intrusion. They’re in winter uniforms, black on top, with ski masks and heavy weapons. Their officer, affable enough, asks for my identity card. I hand it over. He studies it. “You live near my grandmother’s house. What are you doing here, and why are you photographing me? You’re old enough to be my grandfather, aren’t you ashamed?”

“Why should I be ashamed?”

“I don’t like it when you photograph me. It’s impolite.”

I can see what’s coming. Harmless chatter, nothing worse. I turn off the camera. Peg is still photographing, despite the officer’s repeated demands that she stop. It seems this business of the cameras is all we have to talk about today. Over and over again he tells us that we’re not being nice.

He consults his superiors on the phone. “There are four Israeli citizens here,” he reports, “they have the right to come here and photograph the bulldozers and the digging, they haven’t invaded the settlement and they won’t stop photographing me.” By now this is becoming an obsession. I’m tired of it. Moreover, the cognitive dissonance is eating away at me, so wearily I say to him, “Look, forget this stupid thing about the cameras, I’m not photographing you now, just look around you at what is happening here. You know as well as I do that this outpost is illegal, and you can see that they’re now stealing more Palestinian land.”

“That’s none of my business. If you have a problem with the settlers, work it out in the courts. I have my job to do.”

Later, thinking back on it, I find the conversation insane and I’m sorry I got into it. A monumental crime is taking place, here and everywhere in the occupied territories. It’s picking up speed. The soldiers are complicit in it, though it’s coming from far above them – from the prime minister’s office on down. And on this bright winter morning, the officer on the spot thinks we’re being impolite.

Last week something unusual happened at Susya. A group of fanatical settlers had produced an inscription made of stones on what we call Flag Hill – Palestinian land, of course (newly plowed). The stones were stacked up to read ‘revenge’ in Hebrew. There was also a big stone-piled star of David. Our people came upon these rocks, and the settlers came at them. The soldiers turned up, and the settlers attacked them, too. This was too much even for the soldiers, who wrestled them to the ground and arrested three of them. They let them go in the evening, but for a brief moment, the tables were turned.

These are violent days in South Hebron and in the Jordan Valley. We reach Twaneh around 2:00 and find a Ta’ayush detachment still shaken after being attacked by masked settlers from Chavat Maon. The Ta’ayush volunteers were there to protect Palestinian farmers who had come to plow. The plowing was successfully completed, and the volunteers were on their way back to Twaneh when 15 settler thugs attacked, hurling big rocks, lots of them, and assaulting our people with their fists.

Dudy was hit in the head by a rock. Danny was beaten. One of the Italian volunteers living in Twaneh was hit and her (expensive) camera stolen. By sheer good fortune, no one was badly wounded or worse.

Guy calls the police, who eventually respond. We head uphill toward the site of the attack. The settlers are still flitting through the trees at the end of the path. We have good video footage, but it rapidly becomes apparent that there’s little point in submitting a complaint. The police will do nothing; the settlers were masked. To fill out the police forms is hardly more than a ritual gesture. We move on. Fifteen years ago, almost to the day, I was attacked, beaten, stone, and shot at by the settlers of Chavat Maon at this same point. I know what it feels like. I know for sure that they are celebrating their splendid raid and reveling in their spoils. Maybe I shouldn’t care.

‘Id is waiting to welcome us to Umm al-Khair. He’s become almost famous, with recent exhibitions of his sculptures and installations in Berlin and New York. It’s been many months since I’ve seen him. We embrace. We run through the dismal litany of house demolitions from the past few months. For the moment – always only for the moment – the courts have put a freeze on further demolitions at Umm al-Khair. ‘Id says, “No matter what we do, the Israelis will never let us live here; sooner or later, they will take these lands too.”

The settlement of Carmel abuts the shanties of Umm al-Khair, and recently the settlers have invented a new form of torment for their neighbours. Their sewage now flows through pipes that open onto the fertile fields in the wadi and the Palestinian grazing grounds. We pick our way over the rocks to study the large open pipe.

It’s one of those crystal winter afternoons. Every thorn stands out on the hills. Sheep cluster around the well on the next ridge. Ruins from the last four demolition raids are neatly stacked beside what used to be tents and homes. We’ve rebuilt a little, for the umpteenth time. The hills across the Jordan River turn to limpid mauve. It’s cold; one of the young girls, maybe four-years-old, in a ponytail and a blue sweater, stands barefoot at the entrance to her home. Goats bleat toward sunset, they get hungry. Tea appears. A wild parabola of pigeons swirls over the golden slope. Beauty is made from pain, great beauty from greater pain.

(January 7, 2017. Asael, Susya, Twaneh, Umm al-Khair)

These notes aim to bear witness at what we, in Ta’ayush – Arab-Jewish Partnership – see and experience week after week in the Occupied Territories, mostly in the south Hebron hills where we have long-standing ties with the Palestinian herders and farmers. They provide a fairly typical picture of life under the Occupation and of the efforts of Israeli-Palestinian peace groups to protest, to protect the innocent civilian population in the territories, and to keep alive hope for a peace that someday must come. The entries are personal and somewhat introspective, an attempt to make sense for myself of what I see.

A Treasure Chest of Scholarship on Kavis and Kavya

Innovations and Turning Points: Toward a History of Kavya Literature is a joyous, exuberant and passionate celebration of the Sanskrit language and its most ornate literary form – kavya.

A panel depicting a section of the Lalitavistara Sutra in Borobudur, Indonesia. Credit: Anandajoti/Wikimedia Common CC BY-SA 3.0

A book of eight hundred pages of essays about kavis and kavya is not something that can be read from end to end in a single sitting. Nor is it a book that one lolls around with. This is a book that demands that you sit upright and concentrate as you marvel at the treasures it contains. Its jewels are often blinding and the reader may want to rest her eyes and her mind before reaching into the chest for another ornament to admire.

In plotting this history of kavya, the editors, as the title states, have chosen to look at turning points in this complex and surprisingly diverse genre, to examine who made a difference and when, to ponder what that difference was and how it affected the trajectory of a living language whose literature grew and responded to historical, political, aesthetic and emotional moments. Coming as they do from a conference of very scholarly birds, the essays are dense and mostly very specific – to particular texts, to sub-genres, to poets.

Traditions – oral, written and Buddhist

Yigal Bronner, David Shulman, Gary Tubb (eds)
Innovations and Turning Points: Toward a History of Kavya Literature
Oxford University Press.

A volume so vast can hardly be summed up pithily, so I’ll take a couple of general ideas that caught my fancy and reflect on those. First of all, the book reminds us that there is far more to our literary constructions than the oh-so-fetishised oral tradition. Of course, much early literature was composed, shared and disseminated orally. Much folk literature still is. But in our pride and joy in these spontaneous outbursts of literary grace, we must not overlook the fact that the metric and imagistic complexity of kavya demands that it be composed in writing. It is likely that some shorter verses were composed orally at competitions and festivals, but that should not take us away from the larger idea that, as a culture, we venerate the written word as much as we do the spoken one. We take as much pleasure in reading as we do in listening.

Further, what we know as Hindu literatures are often preceded by Buddhist texts in Sanskrit. For example, Asvaghosa’s Buddhacarita and Saundarananda are as much mahakavyas as Kalidasa’s Raghuvamsa, which follows much later. The Lalitavistara Sutra is probably the first of the great prose poems, the gadyas, which were refined by Subandhu and Bana. Bana, (also known as Banabhatta), the court poet of the emperor Harsha, is best known for his Harsacarita (‘The Acts of King Harsha,’ a royal biography) and for Kadambari which is sometimes called the first Indian “novel”. This volume chooses Bana and seventh century Kanauj as a pivotal moment in the development of gadya. These were sprawling narratives written in poetic prose, replete with puns, ornamented speech, sentences that run for a whole page, passages that can be read backwards and forwards, compounds that boggle the mind with their length and complexity. More than that, gadya introduced “new topics (such as everyday poverty) that had been previously considered unpoetic, new metrical patterns and new techniques of connecting individual verses together in extended groups, and a new willingness to use striking phonetic and compositional tools…” (p.234).

One of my favourite essays in the book, “The Nail Mark that Lit the Bedroom” by Yigal Bronner, is in this section. With equal amounts of humour, affection and erudition, Bronner unpacks the particular compound noun from Subandhu’s Vasavadatta that forms the title of the essay, displaying the linguistic tricks of which Sanskrit is capable.

From breezy confidence to humility

The title of this volume calls attention to itself, Toward a History of Kavya Literature. It is a clear indication of the long distance that has been travelled in the scholarship about and historiographies of literature(s). In fact, it brought to my mind a similar volume (also located in the specific scholarly positions at the University of Chicago’s South Asia program), The Literatures of India, edited by Gordon Rodarmel (1974) with essays by such men as J.A.B. van Buitenen, Ed Dimock, C.M. Naim and A.K. Ramanujan, all of whom went on to frame the discourse about literatures in the languages they worked with.

I find the contrast in the titles of these books worth mentioning, the older book so secure in its remit to indicate a canon as it chronicled a history, the newer book (no less star-studded in terms of its contributors), so circumspect about the position it takes in terms of how its contents are presented and how delicately scholars place themselves in relation to that material. The Rodarmel book, too, in its time, was seminal. It challenged some foundational ideas of how we thought about literature by choosing to talk of the “literatures of India”, rather than of “Indian literature”. By using the plural, the book and its contributors forced us to consider that there are many literary inspirations and aspirations in the subcontinent, that Sanskrit was not the only classical (and literary) language worth considering, that the stories we tell and the books we write have, more accurately, many sources. And many ends.

Also worth noting is that the new book, despite its many hundreds of pages (it is almost four times the size of the Rodarmel volume), focuses on one genre of writing from the subcontinent, unlike the older one which breezes through about 2,000 years with confidence and ease. Despite its heft, the editors of the Kavya volume modestly say, “This book, however, is not a history of Sanskrit kavya. We may be generations away from such a work… What we hope to offer is a series of pilot studies, sometimes the first serious interpretive essays on major kavya works…arranged in a rough chronological sequence that highlights structural, stylistic, thematic, and generic breakthroughs.” (p.26)

The joy and love of foreign researchers

The breadth and depth presented by the Kavya volume is simply astounding. Most importantly, Toward a History of Kavya Literature places the ball firmly back in the courts of those who challenge the right of non-Indian scholars to write about Indian literatures and culture. I have not encountered such an intelligent, passionate and erudite collection of essays that treat their material with so much respect. And love. And joy.

This is an exuberant but entirely serious celebration of the Sanskrit language as expressed in its most ornate literary form, kavya. For example, Bronner, when he speaks of his favourite compound, says, “Seen through Subandhu’s self-reflexive subjects, when reminded of the night’s events, and with the aid of a self-reflexive language that calls attention to its own musical, iconic and other para-linguistic aspects, love emerges as a special blend of pain and pleasure or, indeed, intensity and sweetness. Pleasure surely outweighs the pain, but the ultimate smile is nonetheless inseparable from the ache that produced it. The sit sound is thus the nexus of an internal, creative transformation on several levels – of pain to pleasure, presence to memory, and sound to meaning – powerful enough to transform the external world and sufficiently savory to bring about a new day of love.” (p.259)

Match that, ye locals.

Arshia Sattar is a translator and teaches classical Indian literatures at various institutes across the country. Her most recent book is The Mouse Merchant: Money in Ancient India.