Caves and Cranes: Development and Self-Determination

Just over a couple hills here in the southern West Bank and the landscape quickly turns to the desert. Nights get even colder and even clearer. As we slept on a rock facing the south we had to be told just how far we could see. Lights line the mountain tops almost looking like shelves of white Christmas lights. "No, that's Jordan, and in between one of the mountain gaps is the Dead Sea." Turn slightly to the right and you can see lights from a '48 town. Military bases and buildings dot the skyline. A view of borders, displacement, violence, and development. And a couple of houses from families trying to remain on their land.

When we went on the tour with ICAHD a few weeks ago they made a stark point that the construction crane was a symbol of Israel and its economic/development prowess. "The crane symbolizes and says, 'look what we can build, look how Western we can be, can the Palestinians do that?' No, but what they don't say is the laws, zonings, and regulations that the occupational forces use to prevent Palestinians from doing just that if they wanted to."

The more time we spend in the Southern hills it starts to feel like a struggle between caves and cranes. Between tents and internet towers. Between two different kinds of developments. One of self-determination, autonomous-cooperative communities, and listening to the land, and the other built on subjugation, apartheid, and imperialist development.

On drives around town we have begun to hear historical stories about how shepherds used to shepherd for three or so months sleeping in caves with their sheep before returning to a village center. Here a group of families or just one could take care of about 1,400 sheep (the cluster of villages totaled about 700 people to 18,000 sheep). These nomadic or quasi-nomadic communities did not utilize cities in the same way we do, and they did not also utilize borders and property lines in the same way America and Israel have enforced. For Bedouin and other nomadic communities they didn't utilize borders at all. In fact it was the Zionist, with agreement from the British mandate, that changed how land was bought and sold in historical Palestine. During the Ottoman rule if a landlord bought or sold land they were not necessarily able to evict the villagers living on that land. If you bought a village the villagers came with it. There was not a complete separation of the land and who cultivated it (taken from Illian Pappe). Until the Zionist insisted that that change and property laws became more exclusive and total. It is clear that in the South Hebron Hills there is a struggle over property lines and resistance against the settlement process of stealing land, and over time you begin to see that it is also a struggle over a way of life. Like most indigenous struggles throughout the world, what is being fought over is not simply land, but also an economic way of life, subsistence, and thus a method of development.

A family member predicted that this season of Olive Harvesting would be the worst ever on record. Not simply because of settler violence during times of harvest, but also because of the consistent refusal of Israeli soldiers to allow Palestinians to care for the trees before harvest.

Climate change and drought get added to the mix, and the trees need more care, but illegal settlers and the army stops the Palestinians for providing that care. He predicted only a five to ten percent yield from what harvests usually average. "Expect a $100 a bottle," someone else quipped. When you put together the battle over borders and land in the context of the battle over olive trees and sheep (one serving as food and the other gives back fertilizer) it reveals a battle over ways of life and a struggle over which economies people are forced to interact with.

Mohammed El-Kurd asks us to stare the Palestinian resistance fighter in the eye. He demands that we don't "de-fang" them by insisting they be "perfect victims." Meaning that they we insist they be fully cooperative, nonviolent, and timid. What does it look like to refuse to de-fang families and communities that insist on holding onto not only their land but also their way of life? And, thus also their economic being that, without violence, could offer alternatives of self sufficiency, autonomy, and cooperation with the land that settler colonialism needs to destroy?

The ICAHD tour made the point that the most important part of Israeli social development is utilities. Staring at settlements all day you can see this. Through their houses without water tanks on top (proof they have waterlines), through their radio/cell phone towers, through the non-indigenous trees, through the sidewalks, paved roads, and garbage pick up. The hoarding and exclusivity of utilities not only serves to make life more appealing to people that want subsidized lives, but also as a way to make life harder on Palestinians in a hope that they leave. Utilities can be viewed as the social dispersal of vital resources. Utilities then can be a weapon against ways of life and an insistence on living under different economic models. In the US water bills (and debt), energy bills (and debt), having to have a cell phone to work, public transportation (and lack thereof), and many others are used as tools to further displacement, gentrification, and imperialist development. Same is true here in Palestine and enforced with more militarized and gruesome ways. And thus, surviving and insisting on your own methods of social resource dispersal is not just an act of resistance, but a threat to the occupation.

This refection is based partly on thinking about the people we meet through the lens of Clyde Woods and his book Development Arrested, especially how he highlights the struggle against imperialist/capitalist enclosure and methods of development for people in the Mississippi Delta throughout all of history. It is also an attempt to reflect further on the question of, "Why?" That one word question bounces around your head so often when visiting families and cities in Palestine. "Why are people picking olive trees so threatening?" "Why would they attack shepherds?" "Why?" Because settler colonialism always needs complete and total economic control, and all alternatives must be squashed. It also must be perfect yet its process never ends. This perhaps is also where the "Why?" that gets asked in Palestine also echoes the "Why?" that gets asked about when bulldozers come to violently evict and clear encampments, when twelve agencies show up to raid an apartment building in the middle of the night, and when the United States federal government makes it legal to drill on the spiritual lands of Oak Flat. One part of the "Why?" is simply because the generous and gracious people that live and insist on staying here are a threat to the violent settler colonialist social order. I don't want to not understand them as such.