Who exactly is terrorizing whom?
“When we think of terror, rarely does our “common sense” consider the daily terror of settlements looming over Palestinian villages. It does not think of the indignities of poisoned water or demolished homes. For common sense to do so would highlight the very horror that’s hidden behind these everyday operations of violence — whether in Palestine or back in the States. Instead it thinks of the aberrant Palestinian terrorist.”
What does it mean to be a terrorist? Today’s trip through the West Bank, and what I witnessed, made me think about this age-old epithet against Palestinians. Who exactly is terrorizing whom?
For the state of Israel, they point at organizations like the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC). Last year and this year, this organization of Palestinian farmers had their offices raided in Ramallah, West Bank. The Israeli military claimed UAWC and five other community organizations were connected to terrorism. They supposedly had a dossier to prove it.
Instead, we met an organization just like UAWC, Al-Ard (The Land), during the olive harvest. The olive tree has a particular cultural significance to Palestinians and so too does its annual harvest. Entire communities come together to pick olive trees to use for food and oil. But with UAWC shuttered, Al-Ard filled the gap. They, like UAWC, support Palestinian farmers as they defend land, protect water, and grow food to feed their communities.
These weren’t terrorists. These were grandmothers in their seventies. These were agronomists just-graduated from university. No matter their age, they climbed olives trees and raked branches with hand tools, sending green and purple fruits to fall like fat raindrops onto tarps below. Far from threatening anyone with death (as supposed “terrorists” would), Al-Ard like UAWC before them was cultivating life in those trees. I thought of my own grandfather, gingerly tending to his asparagus and cucumbers in his back garden over the decades I knew him. I couldn’t help but think he’d be right at home here.
Wadi Foquin
The village of Wadi Foquin, however, knows intimately what true terror looks like.
Later in the day, we visited this small village that straddles both Area B and Area C — two areas of Israeli military occupation. As we walked with our guide Adam, we saw what that colonization means. Massive concrete high-rises typical of Israeli settlers loom on every hillside over the rocky valley where Wadi Foquin survives. Where the Palestinian village has 1,500 residents, the Israeli settlement houses 60,000 — a series of complexes that were all built and filled to capacity in just three short years.
It’s not just the buildings or the numbers that intimidate, that never fade from the background as children play or as families till their fields. The Israeli military has chased village children out of their own playground. At night, settlers sneak down to scrawl racist graffiti like “death to Arabs” on the walls of the youth soccer field. In daylight, dozens of them march down fully armed from their fortresses-on-the-hills to terrorize the villagers — as they did just days before our arrival. As if this wasn’t enough, the settlement occasionally releases the sewage from all 60,000 residents down to Wadi Foquin’s fields below. This literal bile of occupation and dispossession kills crops and poisons animals and villagers.
Even as the Israeli state seized the land, built and filled this settlement in just three short years, Palestinians here have nowhere to grow. The Israeli state has shrunk Wadi Foquin’s original 17,000 acres down to just 3,000 — and only allows Palestinians to live on 300 of those. And even that number is still shrinking. As Adam’s friend started building his house, the Israeli state redrew the map of “acceptable” living area. In typical fashion, an Israeli court ruled if Adam’s friend made any further alteration to his house the military would demolish it entirely.
With seized lands come military checkpoints and the violence they entail. The Israeli military murdered Adam’s cousin, Ahmad, in 2020. As Ahmad and their friends approached a checkpoint near Wadi Foquin they found a woman screaming in the street. Her husband had been shot in the stomach.
Rushing to their aid, Ahmad’s friends drove the husband to a doctor while Ahmad stayed with the wife and her children in her car. A soldier, likely fearing a car stopped by the checkpoint, shot at it and hit Ahmad in the leg. Ahmad got out to flee the gunfire and the soldier followed him — ultimately killing him with six rifle shots to his heart.
When we think of terror, rarely does our “common sense” consider the daily terror of settlements looming over Palestinian villages. It does not think of the indignities of poisoned water or demolished homes. For common sense to do so would highlight the very horror that’s hidden behind these everyday operations of violence — whether in Palestine or back in the States. Instead it thinks of the aberrant Palestinian terrorist.
But when terror becomes mundane, hopelessness does not always sit alone. When asked if Adam had to be careful about whom he’s meeting with, since the Israeli military was likely watching all the time, he shrugged, a twinge of pain hidden in his voice.
“We’ve lost everything already. What else could they take?”