by Eileen Hanson

The South Hebron Hills are a place of great beauty.  Gazelles roam the hillsides; birds are abundant in the sky.  When you look out over the hills, you can see ancient Palestinian villages where people are still living a subsistence lifestyle.  They have flocks of sheep and goats.  They market lambs, and the women make delicious cheese and butter.  In springtime, the valleys are brilliant green with crops of wheat and barley.

But this beauty is marked with pain.  As you look out across the horizon now, you also see the Israeli settlements, looking like modern suburban developments dropped down on the hilltops in this rugged terrain.  Settlement outposts extend the reach of these settlements, and confiscate increasingly more Palestinian land for exclusive Israeli use.  Religiously zealous settlers threaten and attack anyone who dares draw near.

As we accompany these shepherds, they often tell the stories this landscape holds for them.  They speak of the land they knew as children, the places they used to roam, the valleys where their fathers and grandfathers grazed their flocks.  

It feels like we are walking the stations of the cross with one shepherd, Shaadi, as he points out various landmarks along our journey.

From a hilltop, we can see the nearby settlement and outpost.  Although he does not mention it, we are looking at a place where settlers have repeatedly attacked his children while they walked to school.

As we pause at the cistern to water the flocks, he recounts the time when three masked settlers from the outpost attacked him and his young son while they were watering the sheep.  The settlers arrived in a truck and began firing stones at them with a slingshot.  They broke the legs of two of his sheep.  His nine-year-old son was also hit by the rocks, and refused to speak after the attack.

When he called the Israeli police to report the assault, the police told him, "We are only two police.  We need a whole army to go in there.  The settlers will break our windows."  Shaadi replied, "If you are afraid of the settlers, how do you think I feel?"

A short walk later, we pass by the place where three years ago a settler from the Hill 833 settlement outpost stole fifteen sheep from his flock.  Despite filing a police report, including video evidence of the entire incident and eyewitness testimony from an international observer, no charges were filed against the settler.

As we approach his home, he talks about the forced removal of several hundred people from this area.  On April 7, 1998, the Israeli military served orders to over one hundred families in the area to abandon their homes by April 12.  After the families refused to leave, the military confiscated their meager belongings, offering to return them if they agreed to leave.  They refused.

Shaadi's home is a simple place, closely connected with the homes of his extended family.  Settlers have come and attacked his family here.  Shaadi tells us about the time that armed settlers came to the village and started shooting, wounding his mother and brother.  They once had a toilet out-building adjacent to the house.  In May of 2006, the Israeli Civil Administration issued a demolition order for the toilet and a few days later destroyed it.  The Israeli authorities have not given him permission to rebuild it.

In January of this year, while Shaadi was out grazing his flocks with other local shepherds, settlers from the outpost fired six shots at them.  The flocks scattered, and the shepherds fled.  The Israeli police refused to respond, saying they "had better things to do."

This spring, Shaadi was one of several shepherds who grazed their flocks in a valley called Mashakha, south of the Hill 833 settlement outpost.  Israeli soldiers demanded that the shepherds leave.  The shepherds said they owned the land that they wanted to appeal to the soldiers' commander.  The soldiers ran toward the flocks and kicked several sheep, trying to drive them away.  Many of these shepherds reported injuries to their sheep, including broken teeth, and internal bleeding.  Shaadi lost two lambs later that week from injured ewes.

As we were finishing up this long walk, we paused along the way as a young lamb was born.  Shaadi tended gently and expertly to the newborn, and invited us back to his house for a meal.  We rejoiced in the new birth, hopeful that this might be finally a sign of new life for him and his family.