Gideon Levy, Haaretz, Jul 18, 2008
This article was originally published by Haaretz and is republished with permission.
It was kidnapping, there is no other way to describe it. When you put two young shepherds into a jeep and imprison them for no reason on an IDF base for a night, while their families are out of their minds with fear, that's kidnapping. When nobody in the IDF knows about the kidnapping, and the army even sends a jeep to help the parents look for their children, it's also sadly grotesque. When the kidnappers tell the two brothers: "We know that your parents and the IDF are searching for you, but we won't tell them you're here," that's already very serious.
Each soldier makes the law in the territories. Two Bedouin shepherd children who were grazing their sheep in areas that belong to their parents and their neighbors - but where the IDF does not allow them to graze - were detained and carried off without any justification, without any legal proceeding, apparently without anyone knowing about the brutal deed. The soldiers who carried out the kidnapping saw no need to report the detention and imprisonment to their superiors.
All night long, shepherd Salah Basharat searched for his children. Not until late morning did Saliman, 15, and Mashhur, 14, arrive home on foot. The family's miserable encampment is imprisoned between the Jordan Valley settlements of Bekaot and Ro'i. This was not the first time soldiers had detained his sons, but usually they were released after an hour or two of being held at the checkpoint.
A huge cloud of dust rises from behind the flock; Saliman and Mashhur are returning from the morning grazing. The sight is ancient, biblical, beautiful: About 200 sheep trail along on the yellow ground behind two young shepherds riding on a donkey, while the shepherds' dogs bark all around. The members of the Bashirat family, parents and eight children, earn a living here only from their sheep. Two months a year they sell cheese to the merchants of Nablus; the rest of the year they sell the sheep for meat. Once a year they shear the herd, but nobody buys sheep's wool anymore.
The sheep rush to the water trough to slake their thirst. They crowd around the tiny trough, sipping water and making room for the next in line. Afterward they hurry to the lean-to, to grab a cool corner in the shade to escape the burning heat of the Jordan Valley, crowding alongside one another. This encampment is under lock and key: Israel dug dirt trenches, impassable to cars, to separate the encampment from the Jordan Valley highway. The iron gate on the dirt road is opened only three times a week, on Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday, one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening, in order to release those imprisoned in their own homes for a while. In the jeep of Bassam Eid, the head of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, we find a way to bypass the locked iron gate and the dirt trench. Once every few months, the Civil Administration comes and destroys the encampment.
Every day, Salah drives out in a tractor to bring water from Kfar Tamun. One of the children of the family, Yihye, who is now 10 years old, is blind in one eye. When he was 3, he picked up abandoned munitions in the IDF firing range and lost an eye. The blind eye bothers the boy and he often scratches it. Neglect is also apparent in the other children of the family.
The young shepherds, Saliman and Mashhur, sit exhausted on plastic chairs. They left this morning at 5 A.M., as they do each day, to take the sheep out to graze; now they will rest in the intolerable heat of the afternoon, and later go out to the grazing area again. That's what they do day after day, and that's what they did on Wednesday, July 2.
In the morning, Saliman and Mashhur went out with the flock to the southern grazing fields, returned at noon and went out again at 3 P.M. to the eastern fields on the other side of the Jordan Valley highway. At 5:30 P.M. their father was astonished to see the flock making its way toward the encampment, without the shepherds. He rushed toward the sheep, helped them cross the highway, and began to worry. Where had the children disappeared to?
Salah waited for an hour, an hour and a half. It had happened in the past: The children were detained while grazing the sheep, taken to one of the checkpoints and released several hours later. When night began to fall and the children had not returned, Salah telephoned a MachsomWatch activist, Daphna Banai, who had helped him in the past. Every Palestinian in distress now has the cell phone number of some righteous Israeli woman for emergencies. Who else can he turn to?
Banai began making phone calls: She called the coordination and liaison offices in Jericho, where a female soldier named Bar hung up on her, claiming that she was not allowed to speak to her. The next call was answered by Yogev, who promised to check. Later he said that the children had not been detained by our forces. Banai phoned the police in Ariel and in Maaleh Ephraim, where she says they told her: "It's not our job to search for Palestinian children, let the Palestinian police search." She also phoned the Jenin coordination and liaison headquarters; they knew nothing either. Night fell. During the next four hours, Banai also phoned MK Ran Cohen, but nobody knew where the children were. Salah was "crazed with worry," as Banai described him in the report she wrote.
At midnight, Salah phoned Banai again and told her that he felt a foreboding and that he wanted to go out to the grazing areas to search for the children, in case an accident had befallen them. Maybe they had played with ammunition, maybe they were lying there, injured; three months ago a 15-year-old boy was murdered there. Salah was afraid to go out alone in the dark, in case he encountered the army, and he asked Banai to get a permit for him. Banai asked for an IDF Jeep to accompany the father in his searches, and in fact a Jeep was sent in the direction of the iron gate that encloses the encampment. Banai told Salah to go out toward the gate with a flashlight and wait for the Jeep.
During the next two hours, Salah and the soldiers looked for the children, using the Jeep's spotlight to illuminate the grazing areas. At 3 A.M. the soldiers suggested to Salah that he return home and call in the morning, and then they would renew the search.
Salah and his wife, Kauthar, didn't know what to do. They didn't close their eyes for a minute and Salah spent the time chain-smoking. In the morning the phone calls to relatives in Tamun began; maybe the children had gone there. Afterward he set out for Ein al-Bida, maybe the children were there. Nothing. Salah worked as an assistant cook in Tel Aviv for 12 years, among other places in the Grand Beach Hotel. Now he felt helpless.
During that entire night the children were imprisoned in the IDF base near the settlement of Hemdat. Saliman says that in the afternoon a Jeep or Toyota van came and three soldiers got out. He thinks they were sergeants. "What are you doing here?" they asked, and the boys answered that they were grazing the flock. One of the soldiers slapped them and loaded them onto the vehicle in back. When they approached the base the soldiers blindfolded them. One of them spoke fluent Arabic.
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