Twelve forty-five, this past Monday, in the northern Jordan Valley. The northern section of the Allon Road (Highway 578) is deserted, as usual, but by the roadside, between the settlements of Ro’i and Beka’ot, a small convoy of water tanks, pulled by tractors and trucks, is standing and waiting. And waiting. Waiting till the sheep come home. Soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces were supposed to come a few hours ago to open the iron gate, but the IDF isn’t showing up and isn’t calling either, as the song goes. When the number listed by the army on the yellow gate is called, the phone on the other side of the line is answered and then immediately disconnected. An activist with Machsom Watch: Women for Human Rights, Tamar Berger, has tried three times this morning, and each time, as soon as she identified herself, the other side slammed the phone down demonstratively. The Palestinian drivers are afraid to call.

A Bedouin encampment abandoned by its residents due to settler violence.Credit: Alex Levac

This is the time of the yellow wind, the time of the water carriers in the northern Jordan Valley, who are compelled to wait for hours upon hours until the army force that holds the key arrives and opens the gate for those hauling the water to enter. In this parched region, Israel doesn’t allow the Palestinian residents to hook up to any water supply network: They and their sheep must depend on the expensive water that’s transported in the tanks, and the drivers of the trucks and the tractors are totally dependent on a soldier with a key.

The soldier with the key was supposed to be here in the morning. Drivers have been waiting here since 8 A.M., in a few minutes it will be 1 P.M. After the gate is opened, they will wind their way to Atuf and fill the tanks with water, then return via the dirt road on their way to the villages on the eastern side of the road, where they must again wait for a soldier with a key who will deign to open the gate for them, so that they can deliver the water to humans and animals that have no other source for the commodity.

Since the start of the war, this barrier has been locked by default, after having stood open for years. Since the car-ramming attack that occurred here two weeks ago, in which two soldiers were lightly wounded, the troops with the key have been late in coming or haven’t come at all. During this latest period, entire days have gone by with the gate remaining locked and the inhabitants left without water. The truck drivers and the shepherds need to be punished for a (non-fatal) terror attack perpetrated by a resident of the town of Tamun, west of here, who was himself shot to death. So now the Palestinians are being hung out to dry, so to speak.

The eastern side of the road is officially water-denied. It’s forbidden to drink and forbidden to irrigate, by order. That’s what Israel decided, with the unspoken aim of embittering the life of the shepherds until it becomes untenable for them, and then of removing them from this area. The settlers too are terrorizing the Palestinians with the aim of expelling them, even more intensely under the cover of war’s darkness. As at the other, far end of the occupation, in the South Hebron Hills, here too, at its northernmost point, in the area called Umm Zuka, the overriding goal is to be rid of the shepherds – the weakest and most helpless population group – and to seize their lands.

New fences have already been erected along the side of the road, apparently by settlers, around the entire area, with the aim of completing the cleansing process. To date, around 20 families, constituting almost 200 people including children, have fled, taking their sheep with them and leaving behind, in their flight, slices of life and property.

A truck stuck at an improvised roadblock in the Jordan Valley while waiting for the army to decide to unlock the gate. If the trucks carrying water can’t get through, the shepherds and their flocks will have nothing to drink.Credit: Alex Levac

Back to the yellow gate. Dafna Banai, a veteran of Machsom Watch in the Jordan Valley, who has been assisting residents here with endless devotion for years, has been waiting with the truck drivers since morning. She and Berger were detained by soldiers at the Beka’ot checkpoint on the false grounds that they had entered Area A. “I know who you are, and what you’re doing,” the unit’s commander snapped at them. Rafa Daragmeh, a truck driver who has been waiting since 9:30, is supposed to do four rounds of water deliveries every day, but now it’s the middle of the day, his tank is full and he hasn’t yet finished even one round. On one occasion he asked a soldier why they don’t show up. “Ask whoever carried out the terrorist attack,” the soldier replied, which makes it sound like collective punishment – but that can’t be, since collective punishment is a war crime.

On the other side of the checkpoint, an empty water tanker has also been waiting since morning. The driver, Abdel Khader, from the village of Samara, has been here since 8 A.M. Another truck is packed with animal feed – it’s doubtful that the soldiers will let it through. Its driver has to bring the cargo to a community that lives 200 meters to the east of the barrier. Two flytraps hang alongside the checkpoint, time creeps along.

After 1 P.M., a civilian Nissan Jeep with a flashing yellow light pulls up. From it the force emerges, determined and confident: Four soldiers, armed and protected as if they were in Gaza. Quickly they take up positions. One soldier climbs onto a concrete cube and aims his rifle at us unflinchingly; his commander, who is masked and wearing gloves, asks us “not to interfere with the work,” and threatens that if we dare to take pictures the trucks will not go through. Maybe he’s ashamed of what he’s doing.

A third soldier opens the Nissan’s baggage compartment and from it takes out a key that dangles at the end of a long shoelace. This is the coveted key, the key to the kingdom. The soldier strides to the barrier and opens it. Now comes the stage of the security check. Maybe the water is poisoned, maybe it’s heavy water, maybe it’s an explosive device. With Arabs you never can tell.

To pass through here you need “coordination.” An Israeli Bedouin driver from the north of the country says he has coordination. His truck is carrying construction materials. The driver of the tanker tells us that the shipment is intended for settlers; the Bedouin driver denies that and says it’s for shepherds. But there isn’t a single shepherd in these parts who has permission to build even a tiny wall.

A German shepherd warms itself in the sun and observes the goings-on with wonder. One tractor goes by smoothly; one truck, the one coming from the west, is delayed and its driver sits on the ground at the checkpoint while he waits. But the grotesquerie has barely begun. The peak comes when a minibus bearing Israeli license plates arrives and disgorges a frolicsome group of Haredi yeshiva students equipped with an amplifier that plays Hasidic music and with a tray of sufganiot, Hanukkah donuts. The Palestinian drivers who are still waiting can’t believe their eyes – they thought they’d already seen everything at checkpoints.

Dafna Banai, a veteran of Machsom Watch in the Jordan Valley, near the roadblock this week.Credit: Alex Levac

The yeshiva students, who are from the town of Migdal Ha’emek in northern Israel, are doing a mitzvah by distributing donuts that were dispatched from the Chabad center in Beit She’an for the soldiers at this and other checkpoints, to the astonishment of Palestinian water carriers who want only to cross over and deliver their cargo of water.

The soldier with the rifle that’s aimed at us chews his donut lazily, one hand holding it, the other on the trigger. All together now: “Maoz tzur yeshuati” – “O mighty stronghold of my salvation.” The truck with the animal feed doesn’t get through. No coordination. An officer wearing a kippa is summoned to the site and from a distance takes our picture with his phone.

The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, in response to an inquiry from Haaretz about the irregular operation of the checkpoint: “In the wake of a number of security events that have occurred here, the gate was blocked in part. Passage through the gate is with coordination only, and is permitted according to the operational situation appraisal in the sector.”

A few kilometers to the north, there are remnants of life on the roadside. Here two sheep-herding families lived for years, but settlers from nearby outposts made their lives a misery until, two weeks ago, they left, abandoning their meager property. A playpen, two refrigerators, a rusting iron bed, two wrecked animal pens, a couple of children’s books and a drawing of socks captioned by the word for socks in Hebrew, probably from a schoolbook.

Dafna Banai explains that the settlers have fenced off the entire area of the Umm Zuka nature reserve, some 20,000 dunams (5,000 acres), to cleanse it of its shepherd inhabitants. It’s the same old system, Banai explains: First the sheep are prevented from grazing and the pasture lands are downsized, then the people in the tiny communities are attacked almost every night – sometimes the assailants urinate on their tents, sometimes they also begin to plow the soil in the middle of the night, in order to create “facts on the ground.” Tareq Daragmeh, who lived here with his family, couldn’t take it any more and left, and so did his brother, who lived next to him with his family. This isn’t Gaza, but here too people are being forced out of their homes with threats and violent assaults.

Further north still is a well-appointed shepherd community that is bustling with life. This is El-Farsiya, in the far north of the Jordan Valley, almost the outskirts of Beit She’an. Three shepherd families live here and two others not far off. Two families left. One came back after Israeli volunteers started to sleep here nightly after the start of the war, protect the inhabitants bodily. There are 30 to 40 of these beautiful Israelis, most of them relatively advanced in age (60 or older), who divide the shifts to protect the Palestinians in the northern part of the Jordan Valley, stretching from the settlement of Hemdat to Mehola. “But how long will we be able to safeguard them 24 hours a day?” asks Banai, who organized this volunteer force.

Yossi Gutterman, one of the volunteers, this week. “I don’t think the purpose of settler violence is to cause damage as such – it’s the wearing down, the intimidation, the creation of despair,” he says.Credit: Alex Levac

Three of the volunteers descend from the hill. Amos Megged from Haifa, Roni King from Mazkeret Batya and Yossi Gutterman, the veteran of the group, from Rishon Letzion. There are two or three of them in every 24-hour shift. King was until recently the veterinarian of the Nature and Parks Authority; Megged, the younger brother of writer Eyal Megged, is a historian who specializes in the annals of the Indians of Mexico; and Gutterman is a retired psychology lecturer. He is equipped with a body camera.

Today they’re here having returned from an incident of sheep rustling from the Palestinians, and there aren’t any volunteers yet for the coming night. Since the start of the war it has become an urgent necessity to sleep here, Gutterman says. “Settler violence has become a daily matter, taken for granted, and includes nighttime invasions of the tent camp, the breaking of objects, smashing of solar panels. I don’t think the purpose is to cause damage as such – it’s the wearing down, the intimidation, the creation of despair.”

One family left, the volunteers relate, after settlers from Shadmot Mehola and their Shabbat guests from a religious boarding school at Kibbutz Tirat Zvi broke the arm of the father of the family. “Two weeks ago,” explains Gutterman, “when three friends of ours were here, settlers roused the whole tent camp at 2:30 A.M. with shouts and flashlights, and frightened everyone. Then they started to plow a plot of private land that had recently been declared ’abandoned land.’”

Less than two weeks ago, two volunteers were attacked here. One was beaten with a club and was pepper-sprayed in his eyes, the other took a stone to the head. “There is a campaign of ethnic cleansing going on here,” Gutterman says.

A phone call sends the three scurrying to their car and north toward Shdemot Mehola. A shepherd tells them that settlers have just stolen tens of goats from him. Police and army came to the site, and with the aid of the three volunteers, 37 goats were found and returned to their owner. They weren’t all the goats that were stolen.

In the meantime, the tractor and truck drivers finished filling up with water and hurried back in order to go through the same gate, which was supposed to remain open for an hour. When they arrived, at 2:30 P.M., they discovered that the gate was locked and the soldiers gone. They waited four hours, until 6:30, for their return. Undoubtedly due to the operational situation appraisal in the sector.

Gideon Levy, Alex Levac

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