“Meet Ata Jaber, a farmer whose house outside Hebron has been destroyed four times by settlers but who rebuilds and hangs on, rarely leaving his property, because he has no choice but to defend his livelihood and ancestral lands for the sake of his children.”
So begins an article based on interviews with Jaber by Philip Weiss, accompanied by four videos, on the news website Mondoweiss. The site is devoted to covering American foreign policy in the Middle East, chiefly from a progressive Jewish perspective.
Ata Jaber’s home was the very first one that ICAHD ever rebuilt and at present the settlers are targetting him and his family aggressively. He has suffered amazing abuse of his rights and destruction of his livelihood, such as having the irrigation pipes on his own land where he grows tomatoes and courgettes being ripped out by the Israeli civil administration and water company Mekorot.
Through his years of stubborn resistance, he has shown an astonishing capacity to retain his own humanity. To the interviewer Philip Weiss’s question whether or why not he has never shown aggression to a settler, Jaber “repeatedly tells me this idea is not in his mind, and tells me about the dangers of taking up arms– to his own humanity and to his family. He also tells me about settlers who have been kind to him.”
WATCH THIS SPACE for advice on action you can take to support Ata Jaber and his family in their struggle.