The trip to get to Yanoun was interesting- in fact, just the trip to just reach the taxi that would take us to Yanoun was delightful in itself. We were hungry for breakfast but it was Friday, a holy day in Islam, so many places were closed. We went to a bakery and bought some bread and noticed that four or five of the workers were standing and eating felafel with hummus and bread. We asked them where we could find an open felafel shop to take with us on the trip, and instead of answering they just insisted we join them and eat their's. So we spent the next twenty minutes standing with four bakers eating felafel, hummus, bread, and drinking tea. I ate plenty and was full, but the baker kept insisting I eat more. I eventually convinced him I was full, and he seemed appeased, but the next time I looked over he was handing me bread with hummus already on it. Such is the limitlessness of Palestinian hospitality. When we left, he gave us a bundle of free bread.
We finally made it to the taxi, haggled a little bit for a cheaper price, and started on our way to Yanoun- we thought. We made a detour to a junk yard and picked up a brake disc for the taxi, and then made another detour to the auto shop to get the brake disc installed. We sat in the cab as the mechanic jacked up the car and installed the part. It was so absurd we couldn't really bother being annoyed. Luckily, one of the volunteers was able to translate most of what was going on, so we weren't left completely in the dark.
Once on the road, our driver began to tell us that he was from Awarta, a village near Yanoun and near the large Israeli settlement Itamar, where in March of 2011 an Israeli family was murdered. He described that after the murders, the Israeli Defense Forces periodically raided and ransacked Palestinian homes in Awarta, supposedly looking for information on the killers. In reality, they were merely terrorizing the population. He showed us a video on his phone of his entire house completely overturned and destroyed. Eventually, three Palestinians were arrested and are now in prison for thirty years.
Itamar, created in 1984, is made up of mostly ideologically motivated ultra-Orthodox families considered among the most fervent Israeli settlers in the West Bank. The settlers have been accused of burning olive trees, destroying cars and shooting at Palestinian residents. In the last 12-15 years the residents have begun encroaching upon and annexing the hills East of Itamar, often in outposts considered illegal by the Israeli government. These are the outposts that now surround Yanun, which sits in between them in a limbo of being unable to expand, terrorized by settlers, and shrinking in population.
In Yanoun, we went to the house of the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI) volunteers, who are stationed in Yanoun for 3 month intervals to witness settler violence. Alex, a volunteer, told us that things had been calm lately, but they had noticed some extra activity upon the hill they faced, outpost 777. 777 consists of a watch tower, some trailers, and some agricultural structure. Such a small group of structures imposes such huge amounts of influence and power over the village. I was quite taken with the feeling of constantly being watched from the watchtower on the hill; and later the EAPPI volunteer joked that they call the tower their own experience of Foucault's panopticon. The experience of constantly being watched, without seeing your watcher, so that that feeling comes to shape your lifestyle.
The EAPPI described that the settlers will sometimes come down and walk through the village with dogs and machine guns, but refrain if they know that internationals are there. They said that one night they moved accommodations, and as soon as they moved, the settlers came down. This means that it's quite literally the international presence that keeps them from continually harassing the population. They persist, though. The water supply in Yanoun is undrinkable because the settlers pour trash and dead animals in the well at night. In the past, they have tipped over water containers and lit generators on fire, chased and shot at from their olive trees. The life has become so unbearable that the population in Yanoun has greatly decreased, and international support is struggling to keep it functioning.
In Yanoun we stopped by the mayor's house, a shepherd with an amazing mustache who served us hot coffee and hot tea. With the help of our friend and translator, who helped us through the taxi adventure, and we had a great discussion with him on the state of things in Yanoun, largely in the context of the Oslo Accords, which cut the land up in the Areas A, B, and C. "Our problem is Oslo", he said. We discussed the level of strategy involved in the carving up of the land; "Where is the water in Yanoun? It's in upper Yanoun, and so upper Yanoun is Area C" (Israeli control), while lower Yanoun remains in area B. And while Area B is under "joint Palestinian-Israeli control", if any part of it is declared a military zone, it is automatically under complete Israeli control. This is how the land we had heard about had been seized and had begun being tilled. While in Area B, it was declared a military zone, the Palestinian inhabitants were evacuated, and now Israelis were beginning to build on it.
Some words that floated around the conversation over and over again were "lawlessness" and "experimentation". Those seemed to sum up the things that were happening in Yanoun. The town seemed small enough that the settlers and military could dick around together and see what they could accomplish in terms of land annexation. The mayor of Yanoun said that sometimes, the settlers would change into military garb and set up a make-shift checkpoint between lower and upper Yanoun. Once, a settler attacked a Palestinian, ran away, and changed into a military outfit in the next few minutes, apparently completely absolved of his crime. So while the outposts are technically illegal and unsanctioned by Israel, they are made up of the Israeli military themselves. Thus, there is no accountability in Yanoun. It's lawless, as the wild west was, and the world remains ignorant.
After we said bye to the mayor, we took an hour walk to Lower Yanoun. The views of the Jordan Valley were breathtaking. In Lower Yanoun I sat in the living room of a woman's house with her two daughters, we tried to communicate through the language barrier but mostly just laughed at the impossibility of it. She told me I needed to eat more if I ever wanted a husband. Our wonderful taxi driver from earlier never showed up to pick us up, so we hitchhiked to Awarta and found a taxi to take us back to Nablus.
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