On the back seat of Ruth Kedar's car is a concert program for the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. The program gives off a well-organized, bourgeois, settled scent, a scent of the Mann Auditorium and a well-padded concert with Zubin Mehta. Alongside it is a folded map of the West Bank, 1:50,000, updated to the very last outpost.
Kedar, 79, insists on driving in her own car. She maneuvers quickly on the narrow road that leads from Azoun, a town east of Kalkilya, to the village of Thulth, a bit south of there. Aren't your children worried? I asked. "They admire me," she said. She saw the skepticism on my face in the mirror. "One time I was delayed and came back at night," she said. "Driving here at night was not the most pleasant thing".
Kedar is one of the founders of Yesh Din, a left-wing voluntary organization that works to enforce the state's laws upon the settlers. Yesh Din was established a year and a half ago. Before that, Kedar and her colleagues worked with Machsom Watch, an organization of women who go out every day to observe the behavior of soldiers at the roadblocks (and take a lot of humiliation from the ones whom they observe.)
In these groups one finds mainly well-established women, native-born Israelis, from Tzahala to Ramat Hasharon, from the heart of the establishment in power (Paul Kedar, Ruth's husband, was a high-ranking official of the Mossad. Today he serves as the chairman of Yesh Din's public council). Throughout these years, all these women and their husbands have worked so hard to nurture the country and identified with it and its successes so much that they did not see what was going on in its back yard. They day after they retire, the country no longer calls on them and neither do their children, and so they discover the injustices of the occupation. This is not the country we intended to leave to our children, they say. Usually, such a statement is accompanied by a heavy sigh after which nothing happens, only a consensus of sighs, but these women are made of sterner stuff. They decide to do what they have known how to do all their lives: fight.
Kedar and her friend, Judit Avidor (without an H in her name, because she does not believe in God), fight to correct the injustice done to Ibrahim Aalam. There is no blood in this story. Just sadness. Aalam, 58, worked for 27 years in an iron warehouse in [Israeli town of] Bnei Brak. In 2001 the warehouse was shut down and the Intifada wiped out work in Israel. Like many others, he went back to farming. He cultivates 31 dunams, an inheritance from his father. He has olives and figs and among them he sows wheat and lentils.
Until Elmatan was established. Elmatan is an outpost, ten mobile homes crowded upon a small hill above the wadi, opposite Maale Shomron. In addition, the settlers made themselves a dirt road that passes through the fields of Aalam and of his neighbors. Hundreds of olive trees were cut down, until the road was closed by court order.
"Anyone who cuts down an olive tree has no heart," Aalam says. "What have you done to us, that you have left your best people inside Israel and brought the bad ones out here? These are not people."
Aalam speaks in a flowing, well-worded Hebrew that knows how to reach Israelis.
The disputes between the outpost and the Palestinian inhabitants of Thulth were not long in coming. The local landowners claimed that the inhabitants of the outpost had invaded their land. The inhabitants of the outpost claimed that the locals were stealing from them. Hamad Udeh, 73, who owns land adjacent to the outpost, was pushed off his wagon, fell on a rock and cut his head open. He needed five stitches, but the settlers complained that he had attacked them.
A pipe carrying water to the outpost has been laid all along the road. At the beginning of September, electricity arrived: a black cable was laid on the ground all along the road. They did not ask permission from the Civil Administration, from the electric company or from the landowners. They laid a cable and connected it to the Karnei Shomron grid. And there was light.
Yesh Din's attorney, Michael Sfard, contacted the police, the Civil Administration, the electric company. We found nothing, we have no authority, we are not responsible, the bylaws are wrong, each official said in turn. In the end, Sfard turned to the High Court of Justice.
The rain falls without stopping, the first real rain of the winter, a good rain. Aalam stands near the cable. What do you care about the cable? I asked. He said, "if I work in the field and my tractor hits the pipe, they will blame me. If children damage the pipe, if they cut it to steal metal, they will blame me. If someone gets electrocuted, they will blame me.
"Several days ago, I got up in the morning. I went to the field. I saw fire in the pipe. I put it out. I brought a branch from a carob tree and put it out. After that, I ran away".
Why did you run away? I asked.
"Because I knew that the settlers would say: You did it".
Ruthie Kedar says that the police suggested to Aalam that he remove the cable himself. He was afraid to. "We little people have a strong respect for the law," he says, "these settlers put the law behind their backs."
As were talking and a handsome and bespectacled young man walks up from the outpost. What's happening between you and them, I asked.
He refused to answer. "It's enough that I see who you came with," he said to me. "Tell me who your friends are and I'll tell you who you are."
He pointed at Aalam. Did these people harm you, I asked.
"Of course," he said. "They burnt our cable."
He claims that he tried to put the fire out, I said.
"A special kind of firefighting," he said derisively.
Aside from the feuding, the disturbing fact is that an electric cable and a water main were laid to an 'outpost of nothing' using this community's private lands, while the community members themselves do not have access to electricity or running water. A water main to the village was laid only five months ago and paid for by the PA. The village council has a generator, which supplies five hours of electricity during the day and five hours during the night, sometimes less.
"You know what," says Ibrahim Aalam. "Give us electricity, give us water, let us live like your settlers."
The state promised the High Court of Justice that it would remove the cable by last Thursday. Afterwards, it asked for an extension. The extension ran out yesterday.
