Yousef Nawajaa strode between the tents bedecked with Palestinian flags, scattered through parched orchards and rocky hills, shouting delightedly to a man nearby: “Hey, did you hear? John Kerry spoke about Susiya!”
Nawajaa, 38, was mistaken, but not by much, in his observation about how outsized the cause of his tiny village has grown. It was not Secretary of State John Kerry but John Kirby, the U.S. State Department spokesman, who urged Israel recently not to raze Susiya.
How did a hamlet of 340 Palestinians in a dusty corner of the southern West Bank find its way onto the global stage? Residents point to a chain of events that began two decades ago with visits from sympathetic foreign visitors and that has now made Susiya a symbol for pro-Palestinian activists of how Israel has sought to maintain control over large parts of West Bank.
Nawajaa said, “The Israelis used to destroy our village, and we slept in the wild, in the rain, and nobody knew about us.”
The trouble is that Susiya’s residents always seem to be in Israel’s way. The village has been displaced three times in the last 30 years, and residents are faced with ejection once again. Unless the Israeli Supreme Court orders officials to reverse themselves and accept a master plan for the village, Susiya will be demolished.
Susiya’s residents now live on a stretch of land between an Israeli archaeological site and a Jewish settlement with a very similar name, Susya. They were pushed out of their homes in 1986 to make way for the archaeological dig, which uncovered a fourth-century synagogue.
Palestinians say one proposal is to relocate them to an area on the outskirts of Yatta, a town about a mile away. But Susiya’s residents worry that if they leave their orchards and pastures, their land will be seized by the neighbouring Jewish settlers. The Susiya residents say they are being pressed to leave precisely because the settlers want to extend their community to reach the archaeological site, with its tangible evidence that Jews were here 1,700 years ago. Years of advocacy appeared to pay off when Susiya’s residents began warning early this month that their village was under threat. Israeli activists flocked to the area, a European Union delegation visited the village and so did U.S. consular officials.
Then Kirbyraised the issue of Susiya on July 16. Susiya’s demolition “would set a damaging standard for displacement and land confiscation, particularly given settlement-related activity in the area,” Kirby said.Guardian News Service
