TUBA: another minute, almost invisible point on the map; another village of black tents and wobbly huts and a well and a few caves carved into the barren hillside, almost hovering in space on the edge of the desert that cascades and flows, white yellow and brown, all the way down to the Dead Sea. In the distance you can see the purple mountains of Moab in Jordan. There is, I think to myself, no more beautiful vista in the world. A camel regards us skeptically. What are all these people doing here? Dogs bark. Goats bleat. The wind whips your eyes, your hair. Some hundred souls live in Tuba – a simple, impoverished existence, but poverty is not the problem. They live in terror, and they are terribly alone.

I was far from confident that we’d make it as far as the village. For the last two weeks we were haunted by the thought that the army would block us somewhere along Route 60, the main north-south route from Jerusalem, and the long days of preparation and planning would all be wasted. Many people were by now involved, including famous poets and novelists and scholars who had agreed to join us; in the end the sheer number of volunteers surprised us. This time, for some reason, we touched a chord. The four buses – from Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Beersheva – are packed with people. Many of them, to my delight, are new to me, young faces never seen before in the south Hebron hills.

It’s not every day that several hundred activists, Israelis and Palestinians, march together up the rocky path from Twaneh toward Tuba. In fact, this is the first time. It has the odd sense of blessing, insouciant, angry, oxymoronic. Of course, the soldiers and the police are waiting for us halfway up the hill. They block our path, they inform us that this is – as always – a closed military area, that we are breaking the law, that we must turn around and go home at once or face arrest.

There are lots of them, with their jeeps and command-cars and armoured halftracks, including the particularly ominous one that is designed as a mobile prison, with little slits in the armour plating so the detainees can breathe. Armoured vehicles are never beautiful, but this one – which I know from inside – is ugly beyond belief, a kind of archaic metal monster left over from some desperate, distant struggle. I guess they’re expecting to arrest quite a few of us.

 

We enter into negotiations: we have come to visit our friends in Tuba, to protect them as they plough their fields, we are, after all, in Area C which Israelis can visit legally, so why are they trying to stop us? The sun has broken through the winter clouds, it’s getting hot, the police and soldiers are adamant, menacing, but suddenly we remember to ask them to show us the signed military order closing off this zone, as the law requires.

To our amazement, they have forgotten to bring it along. It will take them a few minutes to prepare it on the spot, and this is our opportunity; without that small piece of paper, they are helpless, weapons and all. So we at once break through the barrier and rush uphill – and soon there is a long, jagged line of our people, together with the Twaneh and Tuba contingent, weaving a path among the thorns and rocks toward the dusty fields. Yehuda, Roee, Raanan and Ehud are leading the way; Moshe is keeping an eye out for stragglers and trying to mould the mass of people into some almost coherent form. The soldiers snarl and threaten and try to hold us back, but they have lost this round. There is no way they will be able to stop all of us, even if the order arrives.

And here it is again, that heady feeling, like no other, of being free, carefree, utterly indifferent to their yells and snarls, happy in this moment, happy to be with these people who are doing something that is good and right in its own terms, who have gone through and beyond the fear and the ingrained habit of obedience and who are probably enjoying this now as much as I am – a little drunk, perhaps, on so much freedom.

 

The soldiers are pushing us to the right and downhill as we round the bend at the periphery of Chavat Maon, home to the most vicious of the Israeli settlers in this region, the crazed enemies of our Palestinian friends. The settlers are waiting for us, as expected, in their white Shabbat clothes and their inflated skullcaps, but they are clearly cowed by our numbers, unable, for once, to attack. They content themselves with screaming curses: ‘I pray that the Hamas will kill you first among the Jews!’ ‘It’s because of you that there is terrorism,’ etc. etc. We’ve heard them all before.

By now I am walking with Menachem Brinker, philosopher, literary historian, a veteran of the Israeli peace movement; he is over 70 and the march is not easy for him. He has slowed to the point that he and I are almost alone, face to face with the settlers – the main body of our people has moved rapidly over the hills toward the Tuba fields – so we have plenty of time to savour the curses that are coming our way. Menachem finds them not uninteresting.

The Jews, he said, had first to learn – decades ago – to overcome their deep passivity, to rediscover how to act in the world, defend themselves, fight back; and this lesson they truly learned. Now they have to overcome the fascism that comes with blind, autistic power: witness the settlers, their primitive malice, their adoration of brute, sadistic compulsion.

I speak of the Combatants for Peace, our partners in today’s action. They are a young, energetic group composed of ex-soldiers, on the Israeli side, and former fighters in the Palestinian organizations (Fatah, the Popular Front, and others). They have renounced violence and are committed to working together for peace. I have seen them, I say to Menachem, here in south Hebron – seen how they have moved from the early, joyful stage of dialogue with one another to the point of actively confronting the settlers and facing off, together, against the police and the soldiers. It’s an inevitable progression, once you have tasted the realities on the ground. Yes, says Menachem, with a bitter smile; you begin down here with action motivated by the love of mankind and end up by hating the settlers.

 

Time passes, we speak of writers and poets – Yizhar, the great rhapsode of the Palestinian landscape; Natan Zach, now too old and unwell to join us on a march like today’s. Legendary figures whom Menachem has known well. We could almost be in a café in Jerusalem, lost as we are in these reminiscences, were it not for the endless thorns and the caked soil and the slippery stones. By the time we rejoin our companions, the Palestinians have managed to plough two fields, one with a rusty tractor, the second with the time-honoured donkey and metal plough.

Police and soldiers are everywhere, and soon a heavy-set settler appears, on cue, to give them their orders which, as always, are obeyed: the ploughing must stop. The police rush to confiscate the keys to the Palestinian tractor, and suddenly they want to know who really owns this field that the settlers, naturally, claim; not another clod must be turned over until maps are brought from headquarters, hours away, and the rival claims adjudicated. As if there were any grounds for doubt: every field on these desiccate hills belongs to the Palestinian villagers, and every such field is potential plunder for the settlers. We argue with the police, there is shouting and fussing and confusion; the activists wander up and down the slope in the afternoon sun, wondering what to do next. As so often, we stand and wait.

 

Word filters in that, in revenge for our successful démarche, settlers have descended upon Twaneh and are assaulting the villagers there. Roee and others rush back to try to help. Another large contingent of Palestinian Combatants for Peace has also arrived in the village, some of them from quite far away – Ramallah, Tulkaram – and this time the police have successfully contained them there. We will have to manage without them, for the time being. We have known all along that all of this is part of the package, and asked our hosts, again and again, if they are sure they want us to come here today – since they are certain to be violently attacked by the settlers as soon as we leave, or even before.

They were unequivocal: they need us to come, they have nothing more to lose. And the newly ploughed fields – what will happen to them tomorrow? The settlers will certainly rampage through them. So why are our friends ploughing them? ‘We have to plough, the land is pleading with us, we cannot leave her to die. We must open her to the benefice of rain.’ Such are the farmer’s instincts. As for us, we know that today is but another skirmish in an endless, dreary, daily war. We are not about to give up. In the end, it is a war that we will win.

We gather up our forces for a few words, spoken defiantly into the wind. Yaron Ezrahi, ever the eloquent teacher, has the megaphone and is addressing our Palestinian hosts. ‘I am an expert in the comparative study of democracies,’ he says, ‘and I have come to the conclusion that Israel’s form of government is less and less a member of this category. What we see here, in Tuba, is inhuman cruelty perpetrated on innocents. We have come to fight it, and to give you hope.’ Raanan tells the long story of Tuba’s sorrows, the grief that stalks the night, the fright of each new day. When the story is over, we wander farther over the hilltop to Tuba, clinging to the last, steep ridge in the late afternoon light that is already turning crystal, freezing into gold. Lonely, vulnerable Tuba – perhaps today, for a few moments, a little less alone.

 

Time to go, retracing our steps. We have done what we came to do. I can see it is a good combination, this alliance of Ta’ayush and the Combatants for Peace; perhaps today is but the first of many shared actions in the field. At times the great human mass, slowly moving back toward Twaneh, laps up against the policemen, and there are brief, angry confrontations. We descend into the wadi, climb back up to the footpath circling Chavat Maon. Young settler girls are now standing there, watching us with hate, hurling imprecations. I can’t say I care. It has been a day of great happiness – whatever happens tomorrow. But just as we reach the buses and are about to climb in, at this very last moment, news arrives. Settlers have attacked the fifteen-year-old son of our friend, Umar Jundiyeh, have beaten him badly; and also stolen the donkey he was riding.

We call the police, who suggest, with cool disdain, that the young boy in question come to the station in Kiryat Arba’, long miles away, in order to fill out forms and submit a complaint. This won’t do. By now all of us are tired and eager to head home, but we can’t leave the matter of the donkey unresolved. If you live in a tent or a cave in Tuba, on the edge of the desert, with no access roads to the outer world and the settlers at your throat day after day, a donkey is no small matter. We will have to force some sort of action. So we send the main body of buses off to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, leaving some forty or fifty of us outside the well-established settlement of Maon. It is here, it seems, that the thieves have hidden the donkey. We prepare to march on Maon.

 

It’s getting dark. A pastel sun appears to shrink deep into itself, diminishing as it dips below the horizon. It’s also quite cold by now. The police are anything but happy at this twist in our tactics. They had thought they were rid of us at last, and here we are at the entrance to the settlement, about to burst through the gate. Tires screeching, they pull up in front of us, jump from the cars, lock arms, and slowly, forcefully push us away from the gate. They scream at us, they threaten to arrest us (do they know any other sentences than these?).

‘And what about the donkey?’ we cry back at them. It is a moment of black parody, and no one fails to see the silliness of it all. But can human evil be silly? By now we are chanting in rhythmic Hebrew: ‘Ha-hamor hayyav lahzor,’ ‘The donkey must go home!’ Which donkey? It’s not clear that we don’t mean the police officer in charge who, by now exhausted and exasperated, is shoving us back toward the road. He wants to clear us away, that much is clear, but we’re not about to give up until something is done about the donkey. Noblesse oblige.

Wearily, they summon another police van from the Kiryat Arba’ station. Ezra has meanwhile located the boy who was beaten and brought him to our encampment at the side of Route 60. Reluctantly, the policemen take down his testimony; they even ask him to identify the settlers who attacked him by showing him photos they happen to have with them in the van. Not that they would act even on a positive identification.

 

Writing down his testimony takes a long time. We scavenge for dry firewood, and soon a fire is blazing. We settle in, drinking in sweet wood-smoke, huddled around the flames. Someone has brought his flute along, and soon the air is light with Bach and Mozart and Hebrew and Arabic folksongs. I know it doesn’t sound likely, this utterly surreal setting in the desert with the bonfire, the shrill notes, the policemen pacing back and forth, the darkness sinking into the stones, the evening chill, the sparks and smoke, the beat-up boy, the missing donkey, the unpunished and unpunishable settler thieves. But this is actually the best hour of the day for me, when the final foolishness of it all has broken through to the surface and there is no longer much need, or space, to think.

We laugh, we tell stories. It turns out that this same Umar Jundiyeh has previously lost two donkeys to the settlers; the first time it happened, he went to Kiryat Arba’ to file a complaint, and the police officers told him they couldn’t act on the case unless he presented them with a photograph of the donkey. Hillel remembers the Arab tale of the great Caliph Harun al-Rashid, who was speaking with his wife one evening in their bedroom as a poor man, who had lost his donkey and was searching for it everywhere, was resting on a tree outside the open bedroom window. ‘Take off all your clothes and walk around the room,’ said the Caliph to his wife. ‘It’s wrong,’ she said. ‘It’s not wrong,’ said the Caliph. So she did as he commanded, as the Caliph watched her. ‘What did you see?’ she asked him afterwards. ‘I saw the world and all that is in it,’ he said. ‘Ah,’ cried the poor man outside, ‘then perhaps you have also seen my donkey.’

Why don’t we set up an ‘illegal outpost’ of our own, someone asks, here around the bonfire, a peace outpost; we can call it, in the settler’s mode, Hamor-El, ‘Donkey of God’. ‘Those settlers of Chavat Maon,’ says my son Edan, ‘why couldn’t they just be eccentric hippies who have chosen to live out here in the forest on the hill? Isn’t that who they’re meant to be? Why do they have to do such terrible things?’ He puts the question sweetly, tongue in cheek; but he has touched on the deepest human mystery.

‘What’s taking so long?’ asks someone else, ‘Why are they keeping that kid in the police van – or are they going to charge him with the crime of losing a donkey and sentence him to jail?’ Believe me, much stranger things happen in that upside-down world. If you’re a Palestinian attacked by settlers, it is always your fault. As for the donkey, there’s probably not much hope.

 

The good news is that we are together again, together with the villagers, the press, the international volunteers, together also with the new Combatants, and we have been through one more adventure. Always there will be one more and another one after that and so it will go on, with the occasional loss of a donkey or, possibly, some more dangerous loss or hurt until one day the furious nightmare of south Hebron comes to an end and the settlers leave and the soldiers also leave and our friends from the caves can go back to their rough and ready lives, without needing us to protect them any more, and the adventures will cease. I don’t think it will happen soon.