Everyday Occupation 1 - Farming and School

In the first of a series of Eyewitness articles about how everyday activities are affected by the occupation, Jan (an Ecumenical Accompanier in Yanoun, a village near Nablus) meets the farmers and schoolchildren of the remote community of Tawayyel.

Tawayyel isn’t a gathered village, like nearby Yanoun. There are homes and sheep-pens dotted about, in a wide shallow valley in the last hills before the Jordan Valley. There’s a temporary look to the whole place. That’s because most of these buildings are under demolition orders.

Many of the shepherds have some kind of base in the large village of Aqraba (sharing a house with another part of the extended family). But they spend ten months of the year here, where there’s land that they can plant, orchards of olive and almond to tend, and space to graze their sheep. It’s a beautiful place, but Israeli forces have designated it as a military zone. In the past it was used at times for military training, and our taxi driver remembered this from his childhood. He remembers the soldiers coming to warn his family that they should move out, and then the shelling, which did not target them, but which was frightening enough for their mother to move them all into the caves used for centuries as sheepfolds: ‘We lived in the caves – it was safer!’

Most of the valley lies in Area C (the areas of the West Bank that are under full Israeli control), and while there’s no shelling now, there’s the impending threat of house demolitions. Orders have been served on the households one by one, and recently renewed. Their case is being contested as a group action in the High Court. Meanwhile, for the farmers, life is provisional, although every day there are the regular tasks of taking the sheep out to graze, milking, making jibne (cheese) which give a structure to life for adults.

In parallel, we glimpsed the structured day of Tawayyel School. This well-planned building, only a couple of years old and built with EU money, is just inside Area B (under Palestinian civil control) so, unlike the other buildings in the valley, it isn’t under threat. However, it is not close to them: the children have to walk at least a kilometre there in the morning, and the same homewards. It’s several more km from Aqraba so, during the two months that the families spend in town, the children have a long walk, or are given lifts in taxis (expensive), in trucks or on donkeys. One of the children showed us a meticulous drawing of a school bus – parents and teachers are hoping one can be provided - somehow. Of course, school buses also need fares, and parents who send their children to school are already committed to pay 50 shekels a year – plus the cost of books and (for the girls) the optional uniform of a striped smock.

On an earlier visit to the valley we’d seen a family where none of the children, between five and fifteen, were at school. ‘So “compulsory” education isn’t enforced?’ We asked. ‘Some children don’t like school,’ said the teacher, frankly, ‘And some parents choose not to send them.’ Even the small cost of schooling seems big in a family with no income. Children can help with tasks like care of younger siblings and herding sheep. Closeness to the Jordan valley also means that teenage boys can earn money for their family by working in the settlements there – which are not scrupulous about child labour and can organise permits.

However, this time we were in the school and saw what they were missing: the children of Tawayyel in school seemed lively and motivated to learn, not intimidated by their teachers, who are a cheerful group of men, not above bouncing a football in the classroom. Small children were writing words in Arabic on the blackboard, and reading them aloud; another group were learning about refraction of light, with a pen in a glass of water, the oldest ones had an English lesson, and were reading an Arabic folktale from their English for Palestine textbooks. The English teacher, who divides his time between two schools, talked about the occupation and its effect on children, particularly in a situation like Tawayyel. These children are fortunate - they have not seen their houses demolished. But they see the anxiety of their parents. They have difficulty sleeping, or have bad dreams – about soldiers and settlers. They see military jeeps and settlers on quad-bikes passing through the valley, for its tracks offer a short-cut from the settlements to the Jordan Valley. The threatened demolitions may be preparing the way for a road – or for settlement expansion.

Meanwhile, on the wall of their classroom, the children see their best work displayed: carefully coloured pictures of Al Aqsa Mosque, which few of them have ever seen.