Lord, I will lift mine eyes to the hills...

For the past four months, I have been living in Yanoun, a little village outside of Nablus, a large Palestinian city in the northern West Bank. Yanoun is surrounded by outposts belonging to the illegal Israeli Settlement of Itamar.

These outposts are part of a tactic to slowly expand the territorial size of the settlement by setting up make-shift houses in the areas surrounding it – as the makeshift houses are slowly transformed into actual homes, more shacks & trailers are set-up around the new borders of the settlement, so as to continue to claim more land.

My main task as an Ecumenical Accompanier in Yanoun has been to maintain an international presence in the village at all times, and during my walks in and around the village, I have seen the beauty of the landscape change throughout the seasons; the colourful spring, the summer with its yellowish outfit and late summer, with brownish and burnt colours. Yet, throughout all these changes, the landscape’s olive trees have remained a silvery green.

One morning, as I walked through the olive groves on the south side of Upper Yanoun, I saw three herds of sheep and goats grazing on the fields in the valley below. At that point I realised that they are always in the valley. In fact, I have seen the sheep on a foothill in Yanoun only once. I found this strange because sheep are meant to graze on the hillsides. They blend-in so beautifully with the rocky hills that from a distance one can hardly differentiate the sheep from large stones.

Yet in Yanoun, the sheep cannot climb the hills, because the hilltops are occupied by settlers and the hillsides are no-man’s-land.

Yanoun may appear to be a very quiet place, which it is, at least on the surface. However, things are happening all of the time; since I arrived: large swaths of land have been confiscated for settlement growth, settler vehicles move more frequently through the village, the Israeli Military enters the village on an almost weekly basis, and residents are increasingly growing accustomed to the crackle of gunfire as settlers undergo security training.

I believe that these activities are all small steps towards shrinking Yanoun.

Lord, I will lift mine eyes to the hills,
Knowing my strength is coming from You
Your peace You give me...

But when I lift my eyes to the hills, I cannot sing that song because I only see the ever-growing settlement outposts. I only hope that the people of Yanoun can remain as enduring as their olive trees.