Destroyed dwellings in Livjim

We came to Livjim on a fast road which runs past two well-established settlements on the edge of the Jordan valley: Gittit and Maale Efrayim. We had to pass through one checkpoint along a practically deserted road where the two soldiers on duty looked at our passports in some puzzlement and asked us why we were in Israel? I bit my tongue and, since I did want to pass through, refrained from saying that I was not in Israel. We would never have found what we were looking for without Ghassan, our driver, who is a constant presence in my travel letters. Ghassan showed us the 40 dunums (a dunum is the size of a football pitch) of land near Livjim which his father left him in his will. They lie in a fertile basin among the hills: the land is now farmed by settlers.

A mile or so from Ghassan's land we turned off the road on to a track. The track wound up a slope and then stopped. We could see the marks of a bulldozer in the soft, sandy soil. Beyond the tyre marks were the signs of the gouging into the earth. Around the marks left by the demolition bulldozer were the scattered possessions and destroyed dwellings of the people of Livjim. They had not built stone houses because they come to this place only in the spring to graze their sheep, but this has been their home and we found torn plastic and broken sheets of cast iron which had formed the walls and roofs of the dwellings. There were abandoned pots and pans and some fruit lying in the dust, near the remains of a fire. There were clearly three clusters of demolished structures, including sheep pens, at a little distance from one another.

We were, of course, too late to help the people of Livjim. Had we been present when the bulldozer arrived we could not have prevented the destruction of their homes. And we can only imagine what it must have been like for them. Did the women weep? Were the children frightened? Did the men protest? It is likely that the army came in the early morning when the men were already away with the sheep, but they would quickly have known what was happening and returned. We have not yet met any of these people to ask them what exactly happened. We do know that the people of Livjim are fortunate in that members of their families have houses in the town of Aqraba. We have also been told that they are at present grazing their sheep near a town twenty-five miles from Livjim, in a less fruitful but less threatening area of the West Bank. The vulnerability of Livjim lay in its position on the edge of a "closed military" area where exercises take place constantly, and also where settlers are gradually moving in to the fertile valleys.

The people of Livjim are exiles from land on which they have grazed their sheep for generations. We wonder whether they will try to return. We have visited another 'village' not far from Livjim, Khirbet Tana, whose dwellings were demolished, but rebuilt with the help of volunteers. The people of Khirbet Tana say that they will never leave: that if their homes are again destroyed they will again rebuild them. But Livjim is closer to the fields where the settlers have moved onto the land of Palestinians such as Ghassan, and have planted their crops. It is likely that these slopes will remain empty of sheep and lost to the people of Livjim.