Sheep wars in the West Bank | Alexander Clayman

A​lexander​ Clayman is a Maltese doctor based in Jerusalem 

I am not really an activist. I am a psychiatry doctor who works mostly in public service; I treat pretty much any patient that shows up at the clinic or emergency room that I work at. As such, I have (since 2017, when I graduated MD) seen patients of all genders, races, religions, sexual orientations and beliefs. At the same time, people are unpredictable and they often surprise me. 

A close friend of mine is an activist in Israel and Palestine and lately most of her work is focused on providing a voluntary ‘protective presence’ service to Arabs threatened and hurt by the actions of the Hilltop Youth settler movement in Judea\Samarea\West Bank. Lately, she convinced me to join her in one of her missions in a small Bedouin community near the city of Jericho. A Bedouin village nearby was recently abandoned by its residents after repeated threats, attacks and arson by Jewish extremist settlers—first its women and children left, the men stayed behind in order to protect the remains of their village, until it became a lost cause. 

'The tactics of the settlers in this area are unsophisticated but effective'

The tactics of the settlers in this area are unsophisticated but effective: A teenage male (who probably ought to be in school) rides his donkey into town followed by a herd of sheep or goats. He leads the herd directly into the community, into the gardens, the farmland, and encourages them to graze on the community’s main source of food. He may enter houses, stand two centimetres away from the residents and stare menacingly into their eyes as he trespasses. If this sounds absurd, it is because it is.  

So, one fine Wednesday, I drove down near Jericho on my motorcycle, stopped at a local fruit shop to purchase some bananas and guavas, and made my way to the guest house of this community. The guest house is half-tent, half-metal container, just like many of the dwellings in this community. The road is barely a road—it’s dusty, it’s warm. Instead of border fences there is junk placed in a line around the ‘front gardens’. These people lack abundant material wealth—they are poor. At the guest house, I met with the other volunteers of the night shift, and we went for a drive around the village to familiarise ourselves with the geography of the place before beginning the work. Two Bedouin men received us with handshakes and offered us a seat. 

Soon enough we received a call to say that there is a settler encroaching on the property of a resident. We go. We arrive at a small ranch, a line of small rocks signalling 30m from the property itself. The owner signals to us acknowledgment that we have arrived, his children look curiously at the motorcycle that I have dismounted from. There are sheep, goats, donkeys, chickens and dogs. The Bedouin family’s animals are penned in—the current situation doesn’t permit free grazing. There is a thin, tanned, dishevelled teenager with long peyos, a woollen kippah, and an ambivalent expression on his face leading a flock of goats directly into the front garden of this family. 

Close by, the day shift volunteers (two pensioners from Tel Aviv) stand between the young shepherd and the family’s barn. We take over. Everybody is filming everything with their mobile phones. If someone is lucky enough to get hit on film, the police might actually do something. For some reason, trespassing and harassment alone does not excite the police or the military in this area—certainly not if it’s a Palestinian family reporting it. I am told by the other volunteers not to be provocative towards the settlers because the repercussions of any such provocation will be felt by the families of the community when they are not fortunate enough to have a certain calibre of witnesses surrounding them. 

The road to the Bedouin village winds through arid terrain

Our young shepherd attempts to lead his sheep this way, and then that, and the volunteers stand between the herd and the houses. We do not touch the animals and certainly do not touch him. Occasionally, he comes up to us and stares at us from a distance of 2cm, sometimes he slowly digs his elbow into our chests. This is not enough to warrant a report to the police. He leads his sheep to a different house, tries to enter it, we stand in his way, he stares menacingly at us, and after a few hours he leads the herd back up to the watch-tower which has been built a few-hundred metres above the village.  

At some point, I realised that it is 2025, and I am observing a land-grab and forcible expulsion of a local population, the means of which are cynical use of at-risk youth and farm animals. It is 2025 and I am trying to persuade sheep not to trespass on a Bedouin family’s property. These families need to be left to live, and these young men need urgent social work interventions. 

Later in the evening, we got called to a different part of the village about another settler trespassing on a property without his farm animals. It turned out to be a false alarm, but the elderly couple invited us in for tea. We sat on the concrete veranda, drank sage tea and some of us smoked cigarettes given out by the man of the house.

They’ve lived in this village since they got married 35 years ago. He works with the local Israeli kibbutz, and she told me about the medications she takes (the price you pay for admitting to being a doctor in a social situation). They told us that they have Jewish friends, they know that there are good people and bad people and it isn’t connected to ethnicity. They only want to be left alone. 

We’re speaking a bizarre concoction of Hebrew, Arabic and Maltese (which is close enough to Arabic to come in handy). More tea is offered. These people never wanted any trouble and you can see it in their eyes that they don’t understand why this is happening to them. 

Practically, it’s easier to destroy the anatomy of a community than it is to create it. A few teenagers with behavioural disorders goaded on by an extremist Jewish supremacist political faction and who remain unobstructed by mainstream Israeli institutions manage this destruction with impressive success. It is not so easy to destroy the soul of a community.

These Bedouin families have a strong soul. But here is what I saw—this Hilltop Youth settler movement is destroying the soul of Israeli society and the anatomy of the Palestinian society with equal voracity. It is Israel’s problem and we too pay the price for it—just that the price we pay is far more abstract, at least for the moment. 

It is our responsibility.