wherever soldiers tread, no grass ever grows

Ali Bani Odeh was a livid rage bomb. He stood by his home at Ras Al Ahmar and gave a bitter shriek, his hands waving in all directions. His face was flushed and his eyes bulged. We stepped back, feeling that if he had any explosives he would blast himself and us with him. The entire valley heard his cries. We were startled, thinking how we could get away unharmed. We never before witnessed such rage.
Slowly we began to understand the story as he shrieked.

Three weeks ago bulldozers arrived at dawn and razed all of his belongings – the home, the sheep pen, the granary, even the family outhouse – everything was destroyed. For days he and his nine children slept in the open, and in the daytime they gathered the remains of their belongings from among the rubble. A whole life was buried in there.

Humanitarian organizations donated some tent a week later. Ali spent the rest of his savings on shades to shelter the sheep, especially the day-old lambs many of which died of exposure to the seething sun and the freezing night.

And then at 5 a.m. on Monday, as he and his children were asleep, the army came again, with its jeeps and armed soldiers. This time they confiscated the tractor. “Entry into a firing zone” were the words written on the crumpled page he held in his uncontrollably waving hand. “What entry? How entry?” he cried. “We were sleeping! Even the tractor was sleeping!” “I live here, I was born here, my father was born here, my grandfather was born here! This is my home!” “I am a nail stuck deep in the earth!” he cried. And now what? “The tractor is my hands and feet!” “I have no water. Israel won’t let me pump water from the ground. How will I bring water for my children now? For my sheep? Let them die?” he fumed at me. “How can bring them feed now? A farmer  cannot live without a tractor!”

And if that was not enough, on Tuesday the army evicted Ali and his children from their re-ercted home for the night in order to hold maneuvers. I asked his 12-year old son, where did they sleep?  “Over there in the valley, in the open”. He points.
Of all places, right here in crowded Ras Al Ahmar the army wanted to play its war games, for as the army officer on the planning and construction committee said, “wherever soldiers tread, no grass ever grows”. The point is to harass them to the point that Ali and all of his neighbors leave the Jordan Valley.

Now he has no “hands and feet”. The armhy will hold that tractor for 40 days and then Ali – like his four neighbors whose tractor was confiscated – will have to pay a fine of thousands of shekels and holding fee in order to get back their equipment, and there is no guarantee that a week later it would not be confiscated again.

With all this desperate rage – I ask to what dangerous point of no return are we pushing Ali? Is this what the poet meant, writing –

“I do not hate people
And I do not steal from anyone
But if I starve
I will eat my oppressor’s flesh
Beware, beware of my starving
And my rage.
Beware…
Beware…
Of my starving
And my rage!”
(Darwish, 1964)