CPTnet
May 19, 1999
HEBRON: TIME FOR A LITTLE CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
By Jamey Bouwmeester

When Dianne, Bourke, and I arrived in the Beqa'a at 8:15 this morning, we
saw a front-end loader and what people here call a "bagger," a large
hydraulic chisel used to break up rocks. They were parked next to the house
of Ramadan Rajabi and were there to demolish the reservoir that he uses to
irrigate his fields. Several dozen soldiers and police were spread out
throughout the area.

The heavy machinery began to dig out the soil from in front of the reservoir
so that it could then knock in the wall. The three of us caucused quickly
and decided that one of us should "get in the way." I handed my camera to
Bourke and walked towards the front-end loader. I sat down between it and
the reservoir, in the hole that it had made.

Almost immediately five or six soldiers were standing around me. Just
behind them stood an old man, the father of the reservoir's owner. He was
smiling at me and saying, "Tamaam, Tamaam. (Perfect, Perfect.)" One of the
soldiers motioned with his baton and said, "Get up. Go. Leave here."

"I'll leave after you, okay," I replied.
"No! Go now. Get up!"
"I'm sorry, but I can't do that. Do you see
that man over there? I get my orders from him."

It was then that they decided the discussion was over. Four of them took me
by the arms and legs while a fifth yanked me up by the ears. As they hauled
me away, one of them knocked Dianne over. I watched her fall in slow motion
and thought, "Ooh, that looked nasty. I hope
she's all right."

I saw some of the local journalists filming me and I almost said good
morning to them before I realized how silly it would seem on film. The
soldiers deposited me on the street in front of the house. When they left,
I walked back towards the scene.

The army deemed the demolition finished when two walls of the reservoir were
destroyed and it was filled in with topsoil from the family's land. They
loaded up the machinery and moved in convoy to the home of Kaied Jabber.
There they began again. It was then that Jeff Halper, head of the Israeli
Committee Against House Demolitions, arrived.

After surveying the scene and speaking to the officer in
charge, Jeff handed me his camera. "Jamey, I think it's time for a little
civil disobedience."

I had a strange sense of deja vu as I watched Jeff walk up to the loader and
sit down in front of it. It was only seconds before he was surrounded by
soldiers. After a short argument in Hebrew, he was handcuffed, dragged back
up the hill, and dropped in the dirt. I asked the military spokesperson if
Jeff could have some water, but none ever appeared.

Eventually, the soldiers decided that it was time to take him away. Again,
he refused to move and they dragged him down
to a waiting jeep. I followed. They picked him up and stuffed him into the
jeep on the floor, his hands still cuffed. When I reached through the
soldiers to try to help him up onto a seat, one of the soldiers elbowed me
in the gut and two others pushed me to the ground. When I got up, they were
locking the back of the jeep, Jeff wedged in, still on the floor.

Several scuffles broke out between soldiers and members of the local
Palestinian community who had come to witness and protest the demolitions,
but no one was hurt or arrested. The bagger and loader finished working,
pushing the walls of the reservoir inward.

With two reservoirs demolished, the army and machinery moved on to begin a
third belonging to Ismail Jabber. Again, the loader knocked the walls
inward and then filled in the rest with soil and gravel.

Although all three reservoirs were empty, Peter Lerner, spokesperson for the
Israeli military civil administration, said that they were demolished
because the owners were stealing water by tapping into a nearby water main.
Mister Lerner was unable to show us where these illegal pipes were.