Taybeh, occupied West Bank – Underneath a painting of Jesus and his disciples, Sandra Basir brought out what she and her husband, Roland, now keep to protect their home: a couple of fire extinguishers. They keep them because the last time Israeli settlers set fire to a neighbour’s car outside their house, no one else came. After everything was already over,” Roland says.
The couple’s nightly routine in their Palestinian Christian town is now similar to the majority-Muslim rural Palestinian communities besieged by settler attacks and nighttime military raids for years. Sandra checks the doors more than once before bed. They got a dog to stay outside to alert them of any trespassers.
Sandra is, by her own description, always half-awake – listening for whoever might be coming for her four small children while they sleep. Their seven-year-old son has stopped playing outside, Sandra says, and for months, the little boy told his father not to go to work – scared he might not return. After employing 40 local Palestinians, he has found his life’s work snatched by marauding settlers, both armed adults and some barely teenagers.
In the past three years – and with the situation deteriorating even more severely this past year – he and his workers were frequently chased off by settlers at gunpoint, with his quarry’s heavy-machinery equipment set on fire. The most brazen attack came in March, when Roland says some 30 to 40 settlers stormed the quarry site in a coordinated mass incursion. Videos and photos show them raising Israeli flags over the grounds and performing prayers on the land.
Before leaving, they smashed his office, destroyed electrical panels, and pulled cameras from the walls. Roland documented everything on video, filed complaints with the liaison office, the police, and every institution he could reach. All his efforts to mobilise help to protect his land, however, were for naught.
The settlers were back the next day, with their attacks continuing ever since. Meanwhile, Roland showed Al Jazeera donation pages online for the settlers that he says carried out the attacks. He also alleges that stone taken from his land was registered under a settler’s name and resold.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
