Nabi Saleh, The Toughest Little Village You Probably Have Never Heard Of

Terry and I stepped off the bus and walked to the small gathering area beneath a few shade trees.  It was still morning but you could already feel that it was going to be another hot day.

We sat on one of the village’s shaded benches and waited for others to arrive.  It did not take long.  Soon we were joined by a handful of international supporters who came, like us, to link arms with the residents of Nabi Saleh, a small Palestinian village in the central-western portion of the West Bank.  (A great deal has been written about Nabi Saleh, much of it malicious and false.  For some introduction, check out here, here and here).

Every Friday morning a small group of villagers, together with whoever else wants to come along, attempt to walk down the narrow, one-lane road

offering the only access to their homes.  It is also the only paved access to the nearby spring that historically served as the village’s primary water supply.

The spring is owned by the Tamimi family, an extended network of men, women and children who compose a sizeable portion of the village. The spring at the foot of the hill has been in their family for generations.

Not anymore.

A Jewish settlement now “occupies” the Nabi Saleh spring, making it inaccessible to their Palestinian neighbors across the road.

The settlement is called Halamish.  It now occupies the neighboring hillside, easily overshadowing the  village of Nabi Saleh only a stone’s throw away.

According to international law, settlements like Halamish should not exist.  They are prohibited by the international convention on apartheid.  But people who build such illegal, fortified settlements and then live in them

while stealing the neighbors’ only water supply obviously do not care about such niceties as international law or anti-apartheid conventions.

Israeli-Jewish settlers often don’t even care about Israeli law, since the Israeli supreme court has, on rare occasions, also ruled against these West Bank settlements.  In fact, Jewish settlers in the West Bank are notorious for committing the most egregious, violent acts against Palestinians with total impunity.

On this particular Friday morning, our march began with 30 to 40 people, mostly villagers, including many children and young people.  Our only armaments were flags and banners, though a few teenage boys eventually pulled out their sling-shots and began throwing rocks after the Israeli soldiers arrived and began pelting us with tear gas.

This march has happened every Friday for years.  The goal is very simple.  The villagers want to walk down to their spring, affirming their right of access.  The village leaders want to talk with the people of Halamish and ask them by what right they not only took over their water supply but now exclude Palestinians from using it.

That goal has never been achieved, to my knowledge.  What happened to us happens every week.  In fact, we got off easy.  We hadn’t walked more than

20 yards before several military vehicles appeared from nowhere, sped onto the village road and blocked the intersection about 75 yards away.  Dozens of soldiers armed with automatic rifles and tear gas launchers jumped from armored personnel carriers and fanned out in a long line.  Troops not only blocked the road but watched us from the nearby hills ensuring that we all were targets wherever we went.

Soon the tear gas canisters began to fall among the unarmed, peaceful

demonstrators who only wanted to walk to a spring.  In Israel it is a crime for Palestinian villagers to visit and take a drink from their only source of drinking water, a spring that refreshed their parents, grandparents and great grandparents as far back as anyone can remember.

For Zionist Israel, Palestinians pose a threat by their mere existence.  Israeli’s commonly refer to them as the “demographic” or the “existential” threat to Israel.  For political Zionists, Israel can only exist as a purely Jewish state.  Thus, all Palestinians must go, one way or another.  Allowing them to drink from a traditional pool of water is, apparently, a slippery slope to another Holocaust.  Or so it would seem.

The march came to a halt.  I suspect that we got just about as far as it has ever gotten.  We were barely out of the village.  Yet, we had been quarantined as if we were a dangerous band of Typhoid Marys threatening to unleash an unstoppable epidemic among the Jewish population beyond.

I decided to walk forward in order to talk to the soldiers.  Behind me teenage boys began to swing their slingshots at the soldiers in the same way that David felled Goliath.  The villagers knew how to protect themselves against the gas.  Most of the younger children returned to their homes.  There were no guns or weapons of any kind, except those carried by the Israelis.

When I was close enough I shouted out to the soldiers, “Why?  Why are you doing this?  They only want to walk to their spring!”

After first shouting at me to go back, they all decide to ignore me.  No one so much as turned his head to look when I yelled.  I suspected that these soldiers had plenty of experience in ignoring western visitors coming to protest the grotesque inhumanity they show towards their fellow human beings.  It was my own up close and personal experience of the stone-cold poker face Israel has cultivated over the years as it consistently ignores the numerous protests, boycotts and complaints lodged against it by members of the international community still possessing a conscience.

I am certain that had I not been such an obvious western visitor, one of these soldiers would have shot me in the head or chest without a second thought.  The families of Nabi Saleh have grieved many times over the dead and wounded loved ones who have been shot on that single-track

road leading to Halamish.

Chest and head shots are the soldiers’ favorites.

It wasn’t long before a few young men had set tires on fire in front of the marchers, masking them from the line of fire.  The black smoke obscures the soldiers’ vision so that, hopefully, fewer tear gas canisters hit their target.

Slowly the marchers began to disperse.  I turned back to the village.  The soldiers eventually climbed into their armored vehicles and drove

away, though the small installation with its sniper tower at the end of the road remained occupied, guns always pointed at the people of Nabi Saleh.

I also knew that the villagers who marched that day would steel themselves against the threat of after-dark raids by these very same soldiers.  Who might be arrested or shot or thrown into the back of a truck conveying them to the local military prison for interrogation?

(Below is a film showing a military night-raid in Nabi Saleh.  Protesters are arrested and removed from their homes while a skunk wagon sprays skunk water into their homes).

It happens regularly.

While waiting for our bus Terry and I met Bassem Tamimi, one of the village leaders and the father of (now internationally known) Ahed Tamimi, whom I will write about another day.  Mr. Tamimi kindly invited us into his home for tea where he talked about his life, his wife and children, his village, and his commitment to continued peaceful resistance against Israel’s military occupation and continued theft of his property.

I wondered how many of the residents of Halamish kept their binoculars near the window sill in order to watch Mr. Tamimi’s weekly efforts to visit his family spring.  I suspect that the struggles of Nabi Saleh makes for interesting sport among these settlers.

Do they cheer when the soldiers arrive, screeching to a halt in their massive gray machines?

Did they root for the men shooting at us?

Do they shout when someone is hit and injured, as so many have been in the past?

Does anyone in Halamish ever stop to ask themselves, Why did we take their water away from them?  Why can’t we share it with Nabi Saleh, or even give it back to the villagers outright?

Does anyone in Halamish have conscience enough to see their neighboring Palestinians as people no different than themselves?

These are some of the questions I pondered as I sat with Terry on Bassem Tamimi’s couch, waiting for his wife to finish making our tea.  We enjoyed a friendly conversation that day with a generous man and his wife whose primary concern in life is ensuring that his children and grandchildren will have a safe, peaceful future to look forward to in the family village.

Why does that make him a criminal in his own land?

Why should asking for a safe, peaceful future in his own home put his family at risk every Friday morning in the Occupied Territory of the West Bank?

Take a moment to watch Ahed Tamimi describe her life in Nabi Saleh, a tiny Palestinian village under Israeli military occupation: