West Bank Culture of Conflict

In a West Bank Culture of Conflict, Boys Wield the Weapon at Hand

Israeli soldiers stormed into the home of Muhammad Abu Hashem, 17, to arrest him in the West Bank village of Beit Ommar.

By JODI RUDOREN
Published: August 4, 2013


BEIT OMMAR, West Bank — Muhammad Abu Hashem, 17, was sleeping in a sleeveless undershirt when the Israeli soldiers stormed into his home here at 4 a.m. on the second Monday in July. As they led him away moments later, Muhammad’s mother rushed after with a long-sleeved shirt: they both knew it would be cold in the interrogation room.

It was Muhammad’s fourth arrest in three years for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers and settlers. His five brothers — three older and two younger — have all faced similar charges. Last year, three Abu Hashem boys, and their father, were in prison at the same time.

“Children have hobbies, and my hobby is throwing stones,” Muhammad explained weeks before his most recent arrest. “A day with a confrontation is better than a free day.”

As Israeli and Palestinian negotiators resumed peace talks last week in Washington, the stone throwers of Beit Ommar are a reminder of the abiding tensions that animate relations between the two peoples that would populate the imagined two states living side by side.

Youths hurling stones has long been the indelible icon — some call it a caricature — of Palestinian pushback against Israel: a recent United Nations report said 7,000 minors, some as young as 9, had been detained between 2002 and 2012. Here in Beit Ommar, a village of 17,000 between Bethlehem and Hebron that is surrounded by Jewish settlements, rock throwing is a rite of passage and an honored act of defiance. The futility of stones bouncing off armored vehicles matters little: confrontation is what counts.

When they are not actually throwing stones, the children here play Arabs and Army, re-enacting the clashes and arrests. And when 17-year-old Bilal Ayad Awad was released in June after 16 months in prison, he was welcomed like a war hero with flags and fireworks, women in wedding finery lining the streets to cheer his motorcade.

The arrest of Ahmad Abu Hashem and his son Muhammad on July 8 was almost routine for a family in which few months have passed recently without at least one member behind bars. Mr. Abu Hashem, an activist in Beit Ommar, and all six of his sons have served time for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers and settlers. Source: Abu Hashem family and Israel Defense Forces
The New York Times
The arrest of Ahmad Abu Hashem and his son Muhammad on July 8 was almost routine for a family in which few months have passed recently without at least one member behind bars. Mr. Abu Hashem, an activist in Beit Ommar, and all six of his sons have served time for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers and settlers. Source: Abu Hashem family and Israel Defense Forces
The Israeli Army commander in the area counts 5 to 15 stone-throwing incidents per week, and the July 8 arrest of Muhammad and his father, Ahmad, brought to 45 the number of Beit Ommar residents taken into custody since the beginning of 2013, 35 of them ages 13 to 19. A teacher at the local high school said 20 boys missed class while in prison last year. A few, including Muhammad, were out more than 60 days, forcing them to repeat a grade.

“Here, it is as if the intifada never stopped,” said Musa Abu Hashhash, a field worker for the Israeli human rights group B’tselem.

Beit Ommar, a farm town with roots in the Roman era, is a hot spot because of its perch off Road 60, the main thoroughfare from Jerusalem south to the settlements of Gush Etzion, which the Palestinians say have taken up to one-third of the village’s original 13 square miles.

The military, which since May has been joined by a company of border police to crack down, focuses on 11 prime stone-throwing points along the village’s mile-long stretch of the road. There are “the duo,” two houses teenagers hide between; “the stage,” a raised area; “the triangle,” an open field; and “the Molotov bend.” And then there is the 200-year-old cemetery that slopes up from the road just north of the village entrance.

On Thursday, after the burial of a 63-year-old retired teacher, a teenager hurled a rock at a passing car with yellow Israeli plates: whack. Another teenager, two more stones: another direct hit.

The settlers stopped their car, got out, and began shouting at the small crowd. Soon, there were soldiers, rifles raised and tear gas at the ready, who eventually hauled a Palestinian taxi driver into a waiting army jeep.

Menuha Shvat, who has lived in a settlement near here since 1984, long ago lost count of the stones that have hit her car’s reinforced windows. “It’s crazy: I’m going to get pizza, and I’m driving through a war zone,” said Ms. Shvat, who knew a man and his 1-year-old son who died when their car flipped in 2011 after being pelted with stones on Road 60. “It’s a game that can kill.

¶ For as long as anyone here can remember, the cemetery has been a field for that game. Residents said it was often surrounded by soldiers and filled with tear gas, though the military commander said he stations his troops across the road and instructs them to unleash riot-control measures only if violence erupts.
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¶ Muhammad sees it as his Islamic duty to help bury the dead, and he has his own funeral-preparation ritual. He pulls on boots. He sprays his hands with perfume to counteract the gas. He grabs a face mask, to protect his identity, and his muqlaa — a homemade slingshot.

¶ It was the June funeral of a 2-year-old girl accidentally crushed by a relative’s bulldozer that led to his most recent arrest. “They were shooting gas, and I was with my mother in the car while the soldiers’ jeep was entering the town,” Muhammad admitted to a police officer after the arrest. “So I got out and threw stones at them.”

¶ Musa Awad, a teacher at Beit Ommar’s high school, said that eight generations of his family are buried in the cemetery, but that he is one of many village residents who have stopped following funeral processions there because of the inevitable clashes. Two years ago, Mr. Awad said, he and his brothers offered to donate a patch of land for a new cemetery, far from the main road, but the Islamic authorities declined.

¶ Mr. Awad, like many here, views the stone throwers with a mixture of pride at confronting Israel and fear for their safety. “Nobody dares to criticize them and say, ‘Why are you doing this?”

¶ The youths, and their parents, say they are provoked by the situation: soldiers stationed at the village entrance, settlers tending trees beyond. They throw because there is little else to do in Beit Ommar — no pool or cinema, no music lessons after school, no part-time jobs other than peddling produce along the road. They do it because their brothers and fathers did.

¶ Nasri Sabarna, an English professor who was Beit Ommar’s mayor for much of the past five years, remembers his first arrest vividly, despite the passage of four decades.

¶ He was 14. Israeli soldiers had installed a plaque on his school saying it had been built under their supervision. He took the coins his mother had given him for food and bought black spray paint to cover the Hebrew letters.

¶ “When I saw their language, it is not easy to stay and do nothing,” Mr. Sabarna recalled. “When they came on the second day, we have nothing except stones. You revenge for yourself.”

¶ Of Mr. Sabarna’s eight children, only Ahmad, a 21-year-old engineering student, has been arrested: he is serving a six-month sentence that started in May, his fourth prison stay. When the youngest boy, Abdullah, started skipping school and throwing stones at age 7, after a night raid on the family home, his parents took him to see a psychiatrist to work out the anger.

¶ “I want him to go to school, to study and to look for his future, but they are pushing us in the corner,” Mr. Sabarna said, referring to the Israelis.

¶ Now 10, Abdullah uses binoculars a relative bought him for bird watching to monitor military movement. “I feel happy when I throw stones on the soldiers,” he said. “They occupy us.”

¶ One Friday in July, two soldiers stood sentry on a hilltop several hundred yards inside the village. Five border police officers were stationed under an olive tree near the wholesale fruit market. More soldiers were on nearby rooftops, army jeeps in the middle of a road.

¶ Three young men with slingshots crouched between trees, sending a little brother out to scout. They whipped the woven-string contraptions over their shoulders one, two, three, four times, then the stones disappeared in the distance. Two stones, five, seven. The boy reported that soldiers were coming closer. The young men retreated to a lower ridge.

¶ Two soldiers with riot helmets and rifles appeared on a rock wall a few feet from where the stone throwers had been. Too late.

Three people from Beit Ommar were arrested in the wee hours of the following Sunday. That night, Muhammad Abu Hashem slept, while his father and younger siblings sat a vigil on worn couches on their roof.

The patriarch, Ahmad Abu Hashem, is an activist who videotapes arrests and clashes for the Center for Freedom and Justice, an advocacy group. His cellphone rang at 3:45 a.m.: 13 jeeps were entering the village. He was heading out to follow them when the alley filled with shouts of “Soldiers, soldiers!” They were coming for him — and his son.

It had been only a few weeks before when a gaggle of neighborhood children were scurrying around the same alley playing Arabs and Army.


By Heather Murphy, Sandra Stevenson and Jodi Rudoren
Muhammad Abu Hashem participates in a role-playing game constructed around being arrested for throwing stones.
Boys wearing fatigues and toting toy guns kicked on the front door and Mr. Abu Hashem opened it, smiling. While one of the “soldiers” checked his green ID card, another imitated a defensive military maneuver to secure the house. “It is a wrong ID,” a boy said in a mixture of Arabic and Hebrew. “Where is Muhammad Abu Hashem?”

Muhammad appeared at the doorway, and was blindfolded with a black sweatshirt. “Come with us,” the soldier-boy ordered. “You are under arrest.” Girls’ screams of mock horror were punctuated with giggles as Muhammad vanished into the midnight darkness.

“You are lucky if you meet Muhammad here next week,” his father said. “He can be arrested for real any moment.”

That was what Muhammad told the girl he talks to daily by telephone and sneaks glances at on evening ambles through the village: “ ‘Be careful, I am maybe one month outside and 10 months in prison.’ She said, ‘O.K., I am waiting for you.’ ” He did not tell the girl, in June, when his left leg was sprayed with five rubber-bullet fragments as his stones smacked an army jeep carting away a beloved cousin.

Muhammad captures the contradictions of growing up here. He was tickled at the first salon-slicking of his short hair for a relative’s recent wedding. But he shunned a snack of popcorn outside: prison food.

He recently sneaked into a settlement before dawn to steal apricots he finds especially delicious because they grow on land he sees as stolen from his people. One of his hobbies is rescuing abandoned bird eggs and nurturing them in cages warmed by light bulbs until they hatch.

“When they fly,” he said, “it’s like a person in prison, and he will take his freedom.”

Muhammad’s first arrest was in October 2010: his family paid a fine of about $1,400. He was jailed from April to June of 2012, then returned to prison that September for another seven months. Graffiti welcoming him back remained on the outer wall of the family home as a dozen soldiers arrived July 8.


By Heather Murphy, Jodi Rudoren and Sandra Stevenson
Excerpts from Muhammad Abu Hashem's interrogation by the Israeli police along with photos of his arrest.
Two soldiers crouched in the driveway and 10 crowded the living room. Muhammad crammed on a couch with his two younger brothers and a cousin while the soldiers examined his father’s identification. Then they asked for his.

The whole operation took eight minutes. The jeeps had not left the alley when it erupted in stones.

Defense for Children International, an advocacy group that last year documented 360 cases of arrested Palestinian youths, found that many were blindfolded, beaten and threatened during interrogations. Most confessed, and 90 percent received jail sentences in Israel’s military system, according to the report, compared with 6.5 percent of arrested Israeli children, who are prosecuted in a civil system.

When Muhammad and his father appeared for their first hearing, they raised their wrists — handcuffed together — in something of a salute. The teenager’s face was a mixture of triumph and terror: he could face up to 10 months after a trial scheduled to start Aug. 18.

Their lawyer, Nery Ramati, soon discovered that Muhammad had already admitted throwing a stone during the girl’s funeral.

“I have nothing to do for him now,” Mr. Ramati sighed.


Rina Castelnuovo, Nayef Hashlamoun and Khaled Abu Aker contributed reporting.