Yanoun: One village, two descriptions
Olive tree in Yanoun.
View of Itamar settlement.
The village of Yanoun, where I'm placed in as an Ecumenical Accompanier, is a place that could be described from two different perspectives, one pastoral and one less pastoral.
The pastoral description is of a small village with a few houses clinging on to a hillside on the upper edge of the Jordan valley, in a landscape that makes every biblical picture from Sunday school look like a cheap and kitschy poster. Yanoun is located about 700m above sea level and has a breath-taking view over a landscape where the hills and the valleys follow on each other like a rolling sea, down towards the Jordan River. It is like time has been standing still forever. On the hillsides you can see shepherds grazing their sheep amongst the almond and olive trees. In the valley are fields for crops and more ancient olive trees, bearing witness that there have been farmers on this land for centuries. The trees are like living creatures as they stand there bent by the wind. The whole landscape gives you a deep sense of tranquillity and history.
Later, when you get the opportunity to meet the people that live here, you fall totally in love with this place and its inhabitants. Their hospitality has no limits and the warmth of the farmers that live here under very simple conditions overwhelms you. You are constantly invited to tea and coffee served in the traditional Arabic way. Just to pass by and say "hi" to one of the villagers can take you at least one hour if not two, a healing treatment for overstressed souls from the West.
But you can also tell another story about this village, a story about a community whose whole existence is threatened. If you just look up on the hilltops, you will see an expanding settlement on three of the surrounding hills. More correctly, these are outposts of one of the Israeli settlements on the West Bank established in contravention of the 4th Geneva Convention. The Convention says that an occupying power is not allowed to transfer any of the original inhabitants from the occupied territory, or to move its own population into it. The Israeli government does not care about this Convention even though it has ratified it. The government has instead implemented its own vocabulary, defining the settlements as two kinds: "settlements" and "illegal settlements," the implication being that one kind of settlement is legal.
Itamar, the settlement closest to Yanoun, was established in 1984 by religious settlers. During the years, the settlement expanded by grabbing the hilltops and the surrounding land east of the main settlement. These expansions, called outposts, have been declared as illegal settlements by the Israeli government. At the same time, the outposts have been upgraded and provided with power lines and transformation stations, water piping and towers. This has enabled people to build houses, patrol roads and watchtowers manned by the Israeli Defence Forces. To allow the settlers to do all this investment with such obvious support from the government is a very odd way to deal with something the Israeli government itself officially considers being illegal.
The expansion of the settlement has had huge implications for the surrounding Palestinian villages. Farmers have been forced to watch their land being swallowed, bit by bit, by the settlement. This expansion has resulted in clashes between settlers and villagers. The settlers' tactic has been to force the farmers off their land by harassment and destruction of their properties. The clashes have led to bloodsheds on both sides.
In 2002, the harassment towards the village of Yanoun had reached the point that the villagers felt that they had to move from the village to protect their lives. Until then the international community had not reacted, but now Yanoun became the big story of the day. This was the first time since 1967 that a whole village of Palestinians had been forcibly evicted. The Israeli peace movement reacted immediately and sent people to the houses to protect them from being overtaken by the settlers. In 2003, an international presence in the village was established by the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI).
The international presence enabled the villagers to return to their homes. Yanoun was now a village that had lost most of the land formerly used for grazing their sheep and their fields with olive trees. According to the mayor of the village, at least 80% of Yanoun's land is now in the hands of the settlers. And even if the harassment has decreased over the years, the settlers are always there.
"If the internationals weren't here we couldn't be here," says Rashid, the village Mayor. He is a man of great integrity and wants to find a non-violent solution to the situation. "We are not afraid of the settlers but our children feel much safer when the internationals are in the village. Without their presence we would have to move."
The future of the village is unsure, but the villagers try to keep their hope up and live their lives as normally as possible. The only thing the villagers want is to be able to live in peace, feed their sheep and harvest their crops for the benefit of themselves and others.
Sadly, Yanoun is not the only village on the West Bank that lives under these conditions. You could add Asira, Burin, Beit Furik, just to mention a few. The list could be much longer, but the story is the same. A cry for help: "we need internationals to protect us."
