Palestinian cave dwellers defy creeping occupation
from AFP
by Joseph Krauss Wed Sep 26, 9:39 AM ET
Mahmud Hamamda still lives in the cave his grandfather chiselled out of a rocky hillside in the remote hills of the southern West Bank more than 100 years ago.
But above ground Jewish settlements now huddle on nearby hills, his grazing land has become a special military zone, and Hamamda, a poor shepherd, has had to defy the Israeli occupation so he can remain in his underground home.
His nine children -- who grew up watching television wired to an outdoor generator -- say that given the chance they would prefer to leave the dark and humid cavern and live in real houses.
"It's a new generation, they have a different way of thinking. They want to get married and have a better life," Hamamda's wife Rasmia says.
"But the land is all we have, and if we move the Israelis will take it from us. This is what they want."
The Hamamdas do not know when exactly their forebears moved into the caves, but Mahmud says his grandfather dug out the first of the 25 caves sometime around the turn of the last century. Today they house more than 150 people.
"At that time they didn't think of building houses. They preferred to dig caves because they were cool in the summer, warm in the winter and they cost no money," Hamamda says. "Most of the year they were without work."
The Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem says that Palestinian shepherds have lived in the caves south of the ancient West Bank city of Hebron since the 1830s in a community that now includes upwards of 1,000 people.
The remote region remained largely unchanged until 1967, two years after Hamamda was born, when Israel occupied the West Bank. The economy took a turn for the better and people began to move into the villages.
Then in the early 1980s, a few kilometres (miles) away from Hamamda's cave, the Israelis broke ground on the Ma'on settlement, and what started as "300 square metres (yards) with a fence around it," in his words, soon began to spread.
The Hamamdas began building too. Between 1987 and 1990 they raised small buildings above and around their caves, but the Israeli army, which had declared the area a closed military zone in the 1970s, demolished them.
Today the hilltop settlement of Ma'on appears as a cluster of large red-roofed homes with a green forest flowing down the hillside in an otherwise barren, dun-coloured wilderness.
But Hamamda's neighbourhood looks like a gypsy camp, a clutch of tents pitched on a barren outcrop, a handful of small stone buildings and sheep pens blending into the rocky terraces.
"We can't plant trees in this area because our sheep depend on the wells, and the trees will dry them up. But when the Israelis took over the hill they planted trees. They don't raise sheep," Hamamda explains.
For several years they coexisted peacefully -- with settlers shopping in the villages and Palestinians working on the settlements -- until one day in 1995 when a settler left Ma'on, walked for five kilometres, and then pitched a tent.
"Everyone thought he was camping,' Hamamda says.
The army closed the road to the tent. More tents appeared. And then the new arrivals planted trees, and the outpost began to look more and more like the gated enclave from which it had sprung.
As the trees took root tensions rose, and in 1998 a local farmer who had lost land to the new outpost shot dead a settler -- in self-defence, Hamamda says -- and a string of violent confrontations followed.
The army eventually intervened, and the illegal outpost -- known as Ma'on Farm -- was closed and dismantled on November 10, 1999 as part of the Oslo peace process.
But less than a week later the army returned for the cave dwellers.
The military claimed that the entire area was a closed military zone needed for training -- a 7,500-acre firing range -- and evicted 700 people, including the Hamamdas, from the caves they had inhabited for decades.
"The army sealed the caves used as residences, destroyed water cisterns, scattered the flocks of sheep and goats and confiscated tents and other property," B'Tselem said in a 2005 report.
Hamamda was given a Red Cross tent and a one-room concrete shack in a nearby village.
His family and others were able to return to their ancestral homes six months later, when Israel's Supreme Court said they could do so while it deliberates on the area's final status.
Two years later, the high court has yet to issue its ruling and the Hamamdas and their neighbours live in a constant state of uncertainty.
Since their return the Hamamdas have built a small mosque, a stone house for Mahmud's brother and a one-room reception area. The army has warned Hamamda that all three are illegal.
"You never know when they give you a warning. They could leave the buildings for several years or they could come tomorrow," Hamamda says.
They also live in fear of their ever-encroaching neighbours. According to B'Tselem settlers in the area have set dogs upon children on their way to school, shot at shepherds and poisoned grazing lands.
In 2005 the group reported that 83 percent of the area's Palestinians said they had experienced settler violence. The Hamamda children say attacks -- especially those involving dogs -- are still common.
Nevertheless the Hamamdas vow to remain on their land in the comfort of their subterranean abode, where the cool limestone walls have been darkened by decades of hearth fires and the patient breath of generations.
Now, during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, on a recent evening Mahmud Hamamda leaned against a cushion in his new reception room and broke the fast with a glass of sweet tamarind juice before performing his evening prayers.
Then he sat down to a sumptuous dinner of chicken and rice, vegetable soup, and thick flat bread cooked in an outdoor oven. Nearly everything on the table was grown or raised outside on the rocky hillside.
"We have a lot of problems here, but we always eat well, and not just during Ramadan," Hamamda says, before leaning back and lighting a handrolled cigarette packed with homegrown tobacco.
At night the electric constellations of settlements illuminate the surrounding hilltops. But the few white lights of Al-Mufaqara hover over a darkened valley, and vanish when the Hamamdas shut down their generator.
Hamamda says there is no place he would rather be.
"My house is so much better than the village. The sheep go out, the sheep come in. They come to my place and they drink from my well... Here everything belongs to me, my whole life."
