Burin burning

I think I had become somewhat relaxed about 'the situation,' living in this idyllic setting where we occasionally sight a local settler but where the focus is on bringing in the hay and, for the children, celebrating the end of the school term and the beginning of three months holiday. We had some warning: when last week we visited the Sofa family in Burin, which, like Madama and Urif, is one of the circle of villages round the settlement of Yizhar, we were told that the settlers regularly burned their crops and their trees. Hearing that this was the case was, of course, quite different from seeing it done.

We were alerted in an e-mail to the news that settlers had set alight fields near Burin. We first rang Ahmad, our contact in the Sofa family, and he told us he was on the hillside with other people from Burin, putting out a fire. When we contacted our taxi-driver, Ghassan, we heard that he was in the village of Huwarra which is also one of the villages which encircle Yizhar, and could see the burning on the hillside towards Burin. He came to fetch us and drove us past the first group of burning fields towards the house of the Sofa family. We could see that the fields of olive trees and other fruit trees above the house were on fire in more than one area. We drove to the house and met Ahmad and his mother, a feisty lady who was both upset and angry, her anger no less because the burning of their trees and crops is something the family experience every year at this time. The trees which were now being destroyed were still small ones, planted since the last arson attack by soldiers. The fire Ahmad had been fighting earlier had been put out, but smoke was pouring from the one above his house. On the hillside between the house and the fire we could see a group of Palestinians arguing with three IDF soldiers. The Palestinians were trying to persuade the soldiers to let them go further up to fight the fire, clearly to no avail. The group came up to the house, closely followed by the officer in command of the soldiers who came at first alone which impressed us, as did the fact that he was speaking Arabic to the Palestinians. Ahmad’s mother asked us to ask him to let her sons – five of them – and the neighbours go up to fight the fire, which we did. His response was that it was in the interests of the safety of the Palestinians that they should stay away from the fire as there were settlers near where the fire was burning. He also told us that a fire engine from the settlement would be coming to put out the fire: this was a promise he had apparently made more than once that morning. When we asked Ahmad if there was a Palestinian fire engine available, he said there was, but that it was busy with other fires and also that he doubted if it would be able to get up the hill where the fire was burning.

We all milled around in a hopeless fashion, the IDF officer, now joined by three soldiers and a humvee, on and off the phone, and the Palestinians taking turns at trying to make the officer change his mind. At one stage he said that five of them could go up the hillside, but then decided that they could not, perhaps because of an order from above. There was also a journalist from Nablus, together with a human rights worker from the Israeli Human Rights organisation B'Tselem, who tried unsuccessfully to persuade the officer to let him go up the hill to video the fire.

We were insistently invited to come into the house to drink tea. In this household, the younger women appear to live a life akin to the members of a harem. We have seen a daughter-in-law arrive in a car with her children and disappear into the house while we were given tea and coffee outside. Nevertheless, the daughters of the household are lively and intensely interested in us. One of them speaks some English, and my Arabic is making some small progress, so we were able to communicate sufficiently for us to have a conversation of sorts. They told us that the household had been woken by about 50 settlers arriving in the olive groves near the house at two o’clock in the morning. They were unable to set light to the undergrowth at that time because of the dew, but had no difficulty later on as the sun dried the grass. Since then, these young women with their children had been watching events from the window, so our arrival was in the way of a stimulus and a relief. We drank tea and were offered food which we refused. We went outside again to join Ahmad’s mother and the small group of men who had stayed, including the Sofa’s neighbour Yasser Eid whose olive trees were also burning. We saw that the fire had moved down and across the hillside and was burning fiercely, driven by a strengthening wind. The humvee was guarding the path up the hillside and we could see more soldiers on the road which leads to the settlement, together with about 25 settlers. Some of these looked about 12 years old. At one stage an argument took place and we could see the soldiers shoving the settlers.

Meanwhile the fire which looked as if it might come towards the house had changed its path with a shift in the wind. Settlers were moving around near the fire and we wondered if they might be concerned that it was heading in the direction of the road and the settlement beyond. If that happened after we left it would be a satisfying form of poetic justice for an act of arbitrary destruction which has the trees and thus the livelihood of more than one Burin family.