HUMSA, West Bank – Until last November, Fadwa Abu Awad’s mornings followed a familiar rhythm: the 42-year-old Palestinian shepherd got up at 4 am, prayed and milked his family’s sheep. Then she added an enzyme to the milk buckets and stirred them for hours to make a salty, rubbery cheese, similar to halloumi.
But that routine changed overnight in November, when the Israeli army demolished its village, Humsa, in the West Bank. When the 13 families who live there resurrected their homes, the army returned in early February to bring them down again. In late February, parts of Humsa were dismantled and rebuilt six times in three months because the Israelis saw them as illegal structures.
“Before, life was waking up, milking and making cheese,” said Abu Awad in a recent interview. “Now we are just waiting for the army.”
The vigor with which the Israeli army tried to demolish Humsa has transformed this small Palestinian camp into an embodiment of the battle for the future of the occupied territories.
Humsa is at the northern end of the Jordan Valley, an eastern portion of the West Bank that the Israeli government planned to formally annex last year. The government suspended the plan in September as part of an agreement to normalize relations with the United Arab Emirates.
Since then, the army has destroyed more than 200 structures there, saying they were built without legal authorization.
“We are not shooting hard here,” said Mark Regev, a senior adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “We are moving forward with the implementation of the court’s decision. There is no doubt that the due process has been fulfilled ”.
But some Israeli politicians still hope that the area will one day be transformed into the state of Israel as a protection against potential attacks from the east.
Human rights activists and some former Israeli officials say they fear that the ferocity of the campaign against Humsa, which they considered exceptional in their fervor, is indicative of a broader desire to expel semi-nomadic Palestinian pastors from the Jordan Valley, reinforcing Israeli claims about the territory.
There are about 11,000 Palestinian pastors in the Jordan Valley and their presence in places like Humsa complicates Israeli ambitions there, said Dov Sedaka, a retired Israeli general who has already headed the government department that manages important parts of the occupation.
“The idea is yes, we are going to keep the Jordan Valley clean,” said Sedaka, who added that he opposed the idea. “This is the word that I am hearing. We will keep you clean from these people. “
The Israeli army demolished 254 structures that it considered illegal in the Jordan Valley in the six months since the annexation plan was suspended, including the houses in Humsa. This is more than almost every other six-month period over the past decade, according to United Nations data.
The Israeli government’s explanation for the demolitions goes back to the Oslo agreements of the 1990s with the Palestinians. The agreement gave Israel administrative control over more than 60 percent of the West Bank, including most of the Jordan Valley, pending further negotiations that should be completed in five years.
But, over two decades of negotiations, the two sides have not reached an agreement, so Israel retains control of the land – known as Area C – and has the right to demolish the houses built there without planning permission.
Israeli authorities began demolishing Humsa after Israeli judges rejected several appeals from residents over the course of nearly a decade. The government offered residents an alternative place to live near a Palestinian city.
Israeli officials say residents need to leave for their own safety because the village is situated within the 18% of the West Bank that Israel has designated as a military training zone. And they argue that the pastors arrived there at least a decade after the military zone was established in 1972, in the early years of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.
Today, Humsa doesn’t look like much, strewn with the wreckage of successive demolitions – a broken pink toy, an upturned stove, a broken solar panel. Even before it was demolished for the first time, it was a community of just 85 people who lived in a few dozen tents, spread over a remote hillside.
Residents say Israeli arguments ignore a broader injustice.
“We are the original inhabitants of this land,” said Ansar Abu Akbash, a 29-year-old pastor from Humsa. “They didn’t have this land originally – they are settlers.”
Israel captured the land in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. The first pastors moved to Humsa in the 1980s because they say they had already been displaced by Israeli activities in other parts of the West Bank.
The slopes where the shepherds live and graze their 10,000 sheep are still owned by Palestinians who live in a nearby town, to whom they pay rent.
For the shepherds, the solution is not as simple as moving to the location suggested by the army: they say that there is not enough land for their sheep to roam.
“This is the only place where we can continue our way of life,” said Ms. Abu Awad. “We live through these sheep and they live through us.”
Israeli officials rejected pastors’ requests to retroactively approve their modest camp, said Tawfiq Jabareen, a lawyer who represents residents.
This is a family dynamic in Area C. Between 2016 and 2018, Israel approved 56 of the 1,485 applications for authorization for Palestinian construction in Area C, according to data obtained by Bimkom, an independent Israeli organization that defends Palestinian planning rights.
And while Israeli officials targeted Humsa, they turned a blind eye to unauthorized Israeli construction in the same military zone as the pastoral community, said Jabareen.
The army left several Israeli structures built within the military zone intact in 2018 and 2019, although those structures were also under demolition orders, he said.
“These parallel paths to deal with Palestinian and settler communities are a clear illustration of discrimination,” he said.
The government agency that oversees the demolitions declined to comment.
The neighboring Israeli settlement of Roi, a 200-person village built in the 1970s, was designed to fit into a narrow gap between two Israeli military training zones, in accordance with Israeli law.
Roi’s residents seem to have little sympathy for their neighbors. Some said that it was the Palestinians who were intruders on the land and the Israelis who rescued it from an arid desert.
“Look at what we have done here in 40 years and you will understand,” said Uri Schlomi von Strauss, 70, one of Roi’s first settlers. “We built the land, plowed the land and that gives us the right to the land,” he added. “Why should I have sympathy?”
Across the valley, Humsa’s shepherds were calculating the cost of the most recent demolition. The army confiscated its water tanks, which the military considers unsanctioned structures. This reduced the amount of water they had to drink and wash, let alone to give the sheep or to prepare cheese.
One woman had lost all the embroidery, another the valuable coat.
Aid groups gave them new tents, but not enough to house their sheep. Therefore, the sheep slept in the cold, which, shepherds said, meant they were producing less milk – which in turn meant less cheese to sell on the market.
“I became a very angry and anxious person,” said Abu Akbash. “I am overcome by stress.”
As a car registered in Israel slowly approached the Abu Akbash family tent, the children ran to collect their toys, fearing that another demolition was imminent.
“All the cars they see,” said Abu Akbash, “they think it’s the army.”