Israeli Settlers Accused of Poisoning Livestock Of Poor Cave Dwellers

Trying to destroy a people’s food source to drive them away is not a minor matter or a prank; it’s a disgusting, hideous crime, and if it happened to Americans or Israelis it would be labeled terrorism. I hope folks will read Avishai Margalit’s review of Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine by David Shulman. From Shulman’s book:

It began some two weeks ago when Palestinians from [the village of] Twaneh noticed a settler —almost certainly from Chavat Maon, the most virulent of the settlements in the area—walking deliberately through their fields in the early morning. Shortly afterward the animals got sick and the first sheep died. Then the shepherds found the poison scattered over the hills, tiny blue-green pellets of barley coated with… deadly rat poison from the fluoroacetate family…. The aim was clear: to kill the herds of goats and sheep, the backbone of the cave dwellers’ subsistence economy in this harsh terrain, and thus to force them off the land.

Schulman travelled to Twaneh and verified that the poisoned barley was there. Margalit provides more background:

In the southern West Bank, Assaf tells us, southeast of Yata, the main township in the area, more than a thousand Palestinians dwell in caves, in an area of some 7,500 acres. Some of the cave dwellers live in this area only during the seasons for planting and harvesting; some live there throughout the year. Water is scarce and the cave dwellers are dependent to a large degree on local cisterns.

In the 1970s, Israel declared part of the Yata region a “closed military area.” In 1980, next to the closed area, Israel established four settlements, which now have about two thousand settlers. Between 1996 and 2001, these settlers erected four additional outposts—small, armed encampments, said to be needed to protect the larger settlements. A fifth outpost, Maon Farm, was set up inside the area that the occupation forces had said was closed to settlement, and the settlers at Maon Farm were evacuated by the army for a few months; but they soon returned. Before they did so, the army had already expelled the Palestinian cave dwellers by force from the closed area, destroying their wells, blocking their caves, and confiscating their meager property of blankets and food. The army justified the expulsion on grounds of “a necessary military need,” specifically, its need for a training ground that would use live ammunition, endangering anyone who lived there. But the settlers of Maon Farm returned to the closed area unopposed by the Israeli authorities, and there was no mention of live ammunition endangering them. […]

There seems no chance that these young people will understand what Shulman is trying to do. On a cold, wet, and muddy January day, Shulman and his friends are on their way to bring blankets to the cave people. The settlers try to stop them. “One of the men shouts that we are on the side of Bin Laden…. They are determined to keep the blankets away from the cave dwellers.”

The review (and the book it’s reviewing) covers a lot more ground than just the poisoning; I encourage folks to click over and read the whole thing.