What Do Israelis Do During a Drought? Destroy the Cisterns in Which Palestinians Store Rainfall

By Jamey Bouwmeester

When Dianne, Bourke and I arrived in the Beqa’a at 8:15 this morning, we saw a front-end loader and what people here call a “bagger,” a large hydraulic chisel used to break up rocks. They were parked next to the house of Ramadan Rajabi and were there to demolish the reservoir that he uses to irrigate his fields. Several dozen soldiers and police were spread throughout the area.

The heavy machinery began to dig out the soil from in front of the reservoir so that it could then knock in the wall. The three of us caucused quickly and decided that one of us should “get in the way.” I handed my camera to Bourke and walked toward the front-end loader. I sat down between it and the reservoir, in the hole that it had made. Almost immediately five or six soldiers were standing around me. Just behind them stood an old man, the father of the reservoir’s owner. He was smiling at me and saying, “ Tamaam, tamaam (perfect, perfect).” One of the soldiers motioned with his baton and said, “Get up. Go. Leave here.”

“I’ll leave after you, okay,” I replied.

“No! Go now. Get up!”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t do that. Do you see that man over there? I get my orders from him.”

It was then that they decided the discussion was over. Four of them took me by the arms and legs while a fifth yanked me up by the ears. As they hauled me away, one of them knocked Dianne over. I watched her fall in slow motion and thought, “Ooh, that looked nasty. I hope she’s all right.” It’s funny, the things that go through your head in situations like that. I saw some of the local journalists filming me and I almost said good morning to them before I realized how silly it would seem on film. The soldiers deposited me on the street in front of the house. When they left, I walked back toward the scene.

The army deemed the demolition finished when two walls of the reservoir were destroyed and it was filled with topsoil from the family’s land. They loaded up the machinery and moved in convoy to the home of Khaled Jabber. There they began again. It was then that Jeff Halper, head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, arrived. After surveying the scene and speaking to the officer in charge, Jeff handed me his camera. “Jamey, I think it’s time for a little civil disobedience.”

I had a strange sense of déjà vu as I watched Jeff walk up to the loader and sit down in front of it. It was only seconds before he was surrounded by soldiers. After a short argument in Hebrew, he was handcuffed, dragged back up the hill, and dropped in the dirt. I asked the military spokesperson if Jeff could have some water, but none ever appeared. Eventually, the soldiers decided that it was time to take him away. Again he refused to move, and they dragged him down to a waiting jeep. I followed. They picked him up and stuffed him into the jeep on the floor, his hands still cuffed. When I reached through the soldiers to try to help him up onto a seat, one of the soldiers elbowed me in the gut and two others pushed me to the ground. When I got up, they were locking the back of the jeep, Jeff wedged in, still on the floor.

Several scuffles broke out between soldiers and members of the local Palestinian community who had come to witness and protest the demolitions, but no one was hurt or arrested. The bagger and loader finished working, pushing the walls of the reservoir inward.

With two reservoirs demolished, the army and machinery moved on to begin a third, belonging to Ismail Jabber. Again, the loader knocked the walls inward and then filled in the rest with soil and gravel.

Although all three reservoirs were empty, Peter Lerner, spokesperson for the Israeli military civil administration, said that they were demolished because the owners were stealing water by tapping into a nearby water main. Mr. Lerner was unable to show us where these illegal pipes were.

Jamey Bouwmeester is a member of the Christian Peacemaker Team in Hebron, which has maintained a violence reduction presence there since June 1995 at the invitation of the Hebron Municipality.