Elhanan Miller – Tablet Magazine

Eyal Shani arrived at Sumud Freedom Camp at midday, just as Fadhel Aamar was waking up, emerging from the shadowy cave he now inhabits. It was a hot and dusty Ramadan day, and Aamar had been up all night, chatting and eating with the Jewish American volunteers.

Two days earlier, the IDF raided the camp for the third time, confiscating five dozen mattresses, two tents, food, and water. They also slashed the camps banners with knives. Earlier raids ended with the detention of Mohammad Aamar, Fadhels son, and the confiscation of his car.

Aamar, a 55-year-old farmer, was born in the caves of Sarura, a depopulated Palestinian hamlet located 10 miles south of Hebron. But in 1997, he said, the violence of settlers from the nearby outpost of Havat Maon forced him and his family to relocate to the Palestinian village of Twaneh.

They would burn our crops and our tents, and threw animal corpses and chemical substances into our wells to destroy them, he said.

Fadhel Ammar sits in one of the caves located on his land in Sarura. (Photo: Elhanan Miller)

Sarura is one of 12 Palestinian communities in the South Hebron Hills evicted in late 1999 when the IDF declared the lands they sit on Firing Zone 918. Residents of the communitiesestimated by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel to number 1,300have been fighting the decision in court since 2000. Meanwhile, the army considers them seasonal farmers unworthy of compensation.

Six months ago, a coalition of Palestinian organizations and left-wing Jewish American groups decided to take up Aamars cause. On May 19, 300 activists arrived on the site and set up the Sumud Freedom Camp, Arabic for steadfastness. The group, which included 130 volunteers with the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, erected tents and began clearing rubble from the abandoned caves, preparing them for repopulation.

Organizers say about 200 international volunteers have worked in the camp, mostly from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Western Europe. Many of them are temporarily based in Israel as students, international aid-agency workers, or members of All Thats Left collective. Some 80 Israelis have also come to Sarura, representing groups like Combatants for Peace, Taayoush, Haqel, and Free Jerusalem.

Shani, a tai chi teacher with bright blue eyes and a thin gray ponytail, had loaded his jeep with a slightly lopsided pingpong table and a rusting basketball hoop he found discarded in the dumpster of his BeShevasuburb. Im a kind of garbage collector, but one persons garbage is another persons treasure, he said. Over the past four years, Shanis visits to the Palestinian mountain community have been almost daily.

He cheered the camp dwellers up with a large box of vegetables, as well as rosemary and fig saplings, donations from the Bedouins of Laqiya.

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The Israeli 49-year-old was an odd man out in the camp. Its mostly English-speaking residents arrive regularly from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem for daytime and nighttime shifts, struggling at times to communicate with the local Palestinians. Three female volunteers, from the United States, Switzerland, and the U.K., began their day at Sarura cleaning up discarded water bottles and cigarette butts, trying to mend Sumuds slashed paper banner. They lifted two handwritten placards reading Occupation is not my Judaism and Trump is a Shmuck off the ground, leaning them against the outer wall of one of the caves.

Tamar Lissy of Basel, Switzerland, 23, helped set up the Sumud Camp on May 19 as part of the international delegation of the Center for Jewish Nonviolence. That night, a Friday, members held a traditional Kabalat Shabbat service at the site. Her parents, Jerusalem residents who sent her to Bnei Akiva as a child, supported her decision to lend a hand to the Palestinians. After graduating from sociology and Islamic studies at Brandeis University, she volunteered to help integrate Syrian and Eritrean refugees into Swiss society for a nonprofit based in Zurich. It feels really nice to be part of this community of Palestinians, Jews, and Israelis together, she said. I was told this wasnt possible, but it is, and its really meaningful for me to be here and see it happen.

(Photo: Elhanan Miller)

Natasha Westheimer was born in Melbourne, Australia, but educated in Maryland and Oxford, specializing in water management. A resident of Tel Aviv for the past three years, Westheimer came to Sarura as a member of All Thats Left. I saw this sort of nonviolent resistance as a critical opportunity to uplift the Palestinian nonviolent movement, she said. As the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, theres no doubt in my mind that the Jewish values of justice, freedom, and equality are sacred.

Asked why All Thats Left has to state that occupation does not reflect Judaism, Westheimer said that the State of Israel often speaks on behalf of the Jewish people and is perceived as their representative. Living in Tel Aviv, you see the 18-year-olds getting on the train, eating McDonalds hamburgers, changing into their bathing suits to go to the beach. These are the same people who are showing up here in uniform, destroying, demolishing, confiscating, and disrupting life, she continued. Its critical for me to make the distinction between the individual soldiers and the system of military occupation.

Dealing with Israeli soldiers as a left-wing activist has been a particularly difficult emotional process, Westheimer added. She said that acknowledging her privilege as an American Jew able to travel freely throughout the landas opposed to the situation of the Palestinians she came to supportwas a process wrought with confusion, shame, and embarrassment.

For Anna Roiser, who took a break from her career as a divorce lawyer in London to volunteer in Jerusalem for six months, meeting Israeli soldiers in conflictual situations has also caused some cognitive dissonance. Growing up in the Zionist religious youth movement Bnei Akiva, she never remembered discussing Israels policies in the West Bank and Gaza.

Part of the problem with the discussion about Israel in the U.K. is that youre not even supposed to talk about the occupation. The maps of Israel we had didnt have any dotted lines; it was presented as a miracle God gave us the entire land, she said.

The idea of being a Zionist and supporting Israel is conflated with supporting the occupation. Theyre not separable. I think thats very problematic because then many people reject the occupation and reject Israel. Its a great shame because I think theres a great case to be made for Israel that is also honest.

More worrying, perhaps, she said, was the growing detachment of Jewish students at Cambridge University, which she attended in the early 2000s, from Jewish organizations on campus. Following the Second Intifada, there were Jewish people who didnt like what was going on in Israel, and for that reason chose not to go to Jewish Society, she noted. Numbers of people attending Jewish Society would go up and down depending on what was happening in Israel.

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The distinction between Jews and Israelis seemed lost on Mahdi, Fadhel Aamars 15-year-old grandson, who was hammering away on a guitar one of the volunteers had lent him, and speaks only Arabic. We want to get our land back from the Jews, he said. They move step by step to get us off the land.

Members of the Aamar family awake from a nap during Ramadan. (Photo: Elhanan Miller)

But Fadhel Aamar, who spent his entire life working as a home renovator for Jewish contractors, said his struggle to remain in the cave would surely fail without the support of the Jewish volunteers from abroad. Netanyahu and the settlers lie to the media as though its a matter of Arabs attacking Jews, but God will show the truth, he said. These people showed my truth to the entire world. My endurance here is thanks to them.

According to architect Alon Cohen-Lifshitz of Bimkom, an Israeli nonprofit specializing in planning rights, some 180 Bedouin and agricultural communities across the Israeli-controlled portions of the West Bank face a similar threat of eviction and relocation to Palestinian cities and suburbs.

The shepherds of Sarura have no real alternative since this is the only land they have for sheep herding, Cohen-Lifshitz said. All of the states proposals to move shepherd communities to populated areas far from herding areas are not taken from the point of view of the shepherds but from the Israeli perspective, and are therefore doomed to fail.

He noted that nearby Havat Maon, an illegal Israeli outpost supposedly dismantled by the government of Ehud Barak in 1999, continues to thrive untouched.

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Elhanan Miller is a Jerusalem-based reporter specializing in the Arab world. His Twitter feed is @ElhananMiller.

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Elhanan Miller - Tablet Magazine