Where is the vanishing point at which everything recedes into infinity in this lovely, sad photograph by AFP’s Jaafar Ashtiyeh? Is it located between the three soldiers, above the head of the pale-faced settler with her hair covering and her child? In the depth between the two red tractors in the field? How shall we divide this photograph − which was taken from afar on January 2 in a Palestinian field near the extremist outpost Esh Kodesh (which means Sacred Fire)? Between its focal points of interest? Lengthwise? Widthwise? Depthwise? Between the soldiers surrounding a woman who took a baby with her as part of the settlers’ hostile activity − resistance, as they see it − and the red tractors with the small plows, which were given permission to plow the soil that belongs to them?
Even though the soldiers and the settler woman are the focus of this photograph − as though they came across her in the field and don’t know what to do with her − our gaze wanders in this image. It wanders to the red tractors, to the woman, then to the tractors, and the two are irreconcilable. This photograph is sad, essentially, because what it portrays conflicts with its beautiful colors and conflicts with every measure of decency.
This is because since January 2, when the Palestinians were given authorization to work their land, the residents of Esh Kodesh and other settlers from the mother settlement, Shilo, decided to sabotage the authorization. They told the Arutz Sheva station that they expect the government to bring about the dismissal of GOC Central Command Maj. Gen. Nitzan Alon and complained that “the Binyamin Brigade commander is allowing Palestinians to approach the settlement for three days, for observation and to collect much information about the settlement under the guise of plowing” [sic]. Prime Minister Netanyahu, they say, is tainted by election considerations, and they just can’t understand how it’s possible to let someone take over territories.
It’s not the first case in the area, said the chairman of the Binyamin District settlers’ committee, “of a takeover of land.” Indeed, how is it possible to allow someone to take over someone else’s land? This is one irony that history, though it patiently suffers many ironies, will not be able to endure much longer.
After all, it was last February that the family of Hajj Mahmoud from the village of Jalud, with the assistance of Rabbis for Human Rights, petitioned the High Court of Justice against the theft of their land. In fact, the family’s lands, which were seized by Esh Kodesh settlers, lie in Area B, as demarcated in the 1998 Oslo Accord signed by Netanyahu himself. Areas A and B constitute only about 40 percent of the West Bank, with the remaining 60 percent considered Area C, under joint military rule, so it is settled almost without interference.
But all this is trivial in the eyes of the Esh Kodesh settlers, who live within a hallucination that is increasingly supported by overt political power. It is not so much that they are sacrificing themselves on the altar of their beliefs − that they are sacrificing the State of Israel and all its citizens on that altar.
So that when legal protection was given to the Palestinian family so it could work its land, this woman went out to sit on the land, taking her little boy along, to confront the soldiers. The child looks frightened. And why not? Soldiers are always frightening.
The baby’s fair head peeks out from her bosom. The Palestinian photographer cannot really approach them, so he captures the furrows and the sky from afar, creating the composition, evoking two great paintings that converge in his shot: Millet’s “The Gleaners” (1875) and Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring” (1665), which seems to superimpose itself on the woman settler’s young, smooth, cloth-framed face.
In the days that followed, Palestinians from Jalud were stoned, a 4-year-old boy was struck on the head by a stone, and confrontation returned to the field. Settlers were hurt too, and hopes for a third intifada, which would retroactively justify their aggression, again stirred the settlers of Esh Kodesh. Only the red tractors and the plow relate that the earth needs turning and thirsts for water. A small protruding belly is visible on the patient, paternal-looking soldier in the center. The frightened, round-eyed child should be in preschool, not amid these furrows.
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