The Hilltop (2 page)

“I've organized a donation from a good Miami Jew,” replied Shimoni.

At the time, Othniel was planning to build a permanent home in Ma'aleh Hermesh but had run into a seemingly endless web of red tape with the council engineer, a troublesome neighbor, and a corrupt real estate attorney.

“Screw them all,” he finally said to Rachel. He'd had his fill of the exhausting bureaucracy, the sleepy, complacent bourgeoisie of Ma'aleh Hermesh, and the daily walk to and from his plot of land, a mile in each direction.

He loved the hilltop, the winds, the ancient landscape; and he longed for the pioneering spirit of his youth—the sorties into Hebron and Kiryat Arba, the visits down south to Yamit before the Sinai town's dramatic evacuation, the Sabbaths spent in settlements reeling from the barrage of Arab terror during the first intifada, the stormy protests against the Oslo Accords, when he and his fellow demonstrators faced off against club-wielding riot police and water cannons.

Othniel gave in to the urgings of Uzi Shimoni, who had somehow gotten his hands on a pair of twenty-two-square-meter trailers, one of which Othniel, with the help of an expert welder, connected to the office-warehouse container and the guard hut and turned into a home for his family. The Shimonis settled in the second trailer. The two men went off together to the Registrar of Non-Profit Organizations in Jerusalem to set up an NPO, naming it the Hermesh Cooperative Farming Association.

Next came the clearing of an access road to the hilltop. Giora, the brigade commander of the sector, and a friend of Othniel from his military days, claimed to have been unaware of the newly cleared route, which ran, invisible from the main road, from Ma'aleh Hermesh B., down through the deep, dry riverbed, and up the hill. Soon afterward, however,
following a call to a friend in the National Infrastructures Ministry, the Public Works Department erected safety guardrails along the dangerously steep makeshift road.

The brigade commander told later of receiving a call on his two-way radio one cold winter night with a report of five new twenty-two-square-meter prefab trailers that had been set up on the land adjacent to the Assis farm. He arrived on the scene to find several trucks and trailers at the site. The settlers, he said, blocked his command car from approaching. The head of the regional council turned up, things got heated, and the brigade commander, who came under a barrage of abuse, called the Civil Administration for advice on how to proceed. The new trailers, he was told, were there without a permit. However, their removal, too, required authorization, which they didn't have. And thus the soldiers loaded the settlers onto the military vehicles and drove them away—with the records of the army and Defense Ministry duly noting that the outpost had been evacuated. The settlers returned the very next day, and the brigade commander turned his attention to more pressing matters.

Thus the outpost took hold.

*  *  *

The five trailers were leased from the state-owned Amidar housing company, with the Housing Ministry's approval forthcoming, thanks to the regional council head's ties with the deputy minister. Despite the biting cold, mosquitoes abounded, and the prefab structures themselves were somewhat dilapidated. But the settlers fitted nets to the windows, attached wooden doors to the makeshift homes, used a digger to carve out access roads, and paved pathways. One of the structures was set aside as a synagogue (a recently refurnished Jerusalem synagogue had donated its old items, including an ark in good condition, and one of the men turned up with a Torah scroll, without saying where it had come from). At night, after working long, hard days, they stood guard, because the Arabs from the neighboring village were keeping a watchful eye on them. The water and electricity supply remained erratic, but the residents made do with a rusty, leaking water tanker and oil lamps. A mountain hyena occasionally plundered food and items of clothes, and rock rabbits and rats liked to visit, too.

Two of the families left within the first few weeks, but the Assises and Shimonis stuck it out, while the third survivor was Hilik Yisraeli, a political science student in his late twenties whose scraggy face was adorned with thin-framed glasses and a mustache. Seeking to satisfy his pioneering spirit and belief in the redemption of the Land of Israel, Hilik, who grew up in Ma'aleh Hermesh but had tired of its gentrification, moved into one of the prefab trailers with his wife and two toddler sons.

But where there are two Jews, there are three opinions, and where there are three Jews, well, God help us. Hilik questioned Shimoni about the promised donation from the wealthy Miami Jew, as Shimoni appeared to be pumping sums of money into construction and infrastructure, but precisely how much, and who got what and why, remained unclear. Uzi Shimoni, in turn, went straight to Othniel to complain about “that cheeky kid I invited here and who now has the balls to ask me questions.” Othniel nodded in agreement, but after returning home and discussing the matter with Rachel, he realized that the young man had a point, and he went back to Shimoni to get some answers. How much money did they have? Could they get a more powerful generator? What about erecting a security fence and setting up lighting for nighttime? “Everything is under control” and “Stop worrying,” Shimoni grumbled in response. Othniel promptly began to worry.

And then, speaking to them through his car window one day, Shimoni informed Othniel and Hilik that two new families would be moving into the vacated trailers within the next few days.

“What families?” a surprised Hilik responded. “And who decided to take them in, based on what criteria?”

“Listen up, kid,” Shimoni said, glaring at the young man and stroking his thick beard. “Any more of those questions and you'll find yourself out on your ass.”

From that moment on, Othniel and Hilik formed a united front. When they tried to delve deeper into the money-from-Miami story, the evidence provoked their strong suspicion that Shimoni was dipping his fingers into the NPO's coffers. Othniel was livid. He had run into a fair amount of corruption in his lifetime, but stealing from the settlement enterprise took the cake. Was nothing sacred these days? He didn't
confront Shimoni directly, choosing instead to pull some strings of his own. Shimoni was well connected, but Othniel also was acquainted with council officials, and he had close ties with its head and with the secretary of Ma'aleh Hermesh. Little by little, Shimoni found himself excluded from the circles of influence.

One morning, Othniel was making his way up to the outpost in his Renault Express. Shimoni's dog was lying in the middle of the road, scratching himself behind the ear.

“What the hell! Why him? What did he do wrong?” Shimoni yelled as he and the rest of his family came rushing out their home at the sound of the animal's anguished cries.

“He jumped in front of the car. I couldn't brake in time,” Othniel responded, still stunned by what he had done.

“Don't lie! You ran him down intentionally. He's never done anything to you!”

Uzi's girls were sobbing. He looked at them in pain and then turned to glare furiously at Othniel. “I never thought you'd go this far, Othniel,” he growled. “Will you guys stop at nothing?”

Under the barrage of Shimoni's continued accusations, Othniel's shock soon transformed into a growing rage. “What about the NPO, Uzi?” he asked, glaring at Shimoni. “What's with the finances?”

Shimoni didn't respond. He drew his pistol, loaded it, and put an end to the dog's suffering with a single shot. “Come,” he said to his family and turned back toward their home. The following morning, he packed everyone up and left for a hilltop in Samaria, branding Hilik and Othniel “worse than Korah,” the biblical villain who led a revolt against Moses.

Left behind were two families, united in their love for the land and in a singular viewpoint as to the nature of the outpost and its management, yet penniless. Slowly but surely, however, their luck changed. Because an Israeli anywhere in the Land of Israel is afforded protection in the form of a security perimeter to keep Arabs out, Israel Defense Forces troops were dispatched to the area to keep watch over the Assis and Yisraeli families and the three empty trailers, bringing with them a guard post, a water tower, and a generator that was ten times more powerful than the small one provided by the Jewish Agency. Othniel called in a favor from
his friend Giora, the brigade commander in the sector, and asked to be allowed to draw electricity from the military generator and water from the tower for the trailers. “Sure. Why not?” Giora responded with a wink.

The WZO's Settlement Division took to the idea of the farm. After all, who could say no to fresh asparagus and mushrooms, and fine goat-milk cheese, too, not to mention the true pioneering spirit of old? Settlement Division officials thus retroactively approved the expansion of Ma'aleh Hermesh B. and even included the farm in the Outposts Agreement—in which it was recorded under the name of “the South Hermesh Goat Farm”—in return for the removal from the site of one of the trailers. A new family moved in, however, and the trailer, in fact, was never removed—despite that family's departure a few weeks later.

The Amidar housing company was then free to move additional trailers to the site.

And the Postal Authority had a green light to set up a mail-distribution post.

And the National Infrastructures Ministry could instruct the Public Works Department to make good use of days when Civil Administration officials weren't patrolling the area, to lay down some asphalt.

And the Agriculture Ministry was able to approve Othniel's status as a farmer and his eligibility for water quotas at a reduced cost.

And the deputy accountant general at the Finance Ministry could instruct Bank Tefahot to offer mortgages for housing units at the site—a move that brought automatic Housing Ministry authorization for infrastructure work and widened the Arab-free radius in one fell swoop.

And Amana, the settlement division of the right-wing Gush Emunim organization, got in on the act, proposing initiatives and determining criteria for working the land.

A combine harvester even turned up one day, courtesy of a German Christian organization sympathetic to the concept of a Greater Israel.

An aerial photography exercise perpetrated by some left-wingers resulted in calls from the Defense Ministry, the Interior Ministry, the Housing Ministry, and the prime minister's office: Whose decision was it to establish a new settlement in Israel? Who owned the land and/or the rights to the land? Was it state land, state-designated land, survey land, or
perhaps private land appropriated for security reasons, or maybe private land purchased from Palestinians, or even Palestinian-owned land that wasn't purchased? And if the land was privately owned by Palestinians, was it being used for agricultural purposes or not? Was the land on record anywhere, registered anywhere? Was it Mandate-era land? Who gave the go-ahead? Were any formal planning procedures carried out? Had architects submitted master plans to the relevant planning committees? And if such plans had been submitted, were they approved? What was the jurisdiction of the new settlement? What did the state budget director have to say about it? Was there any word from the custodian general? Had they discussed the matter with the coordinator of the government's activities in the West Bank? And the brigade officers, what did they think? And had they spoken to anyone at the office of the IDF commander of the area?

Endless questions!

All the callers were politely informed that the so-called new settlement was nothing more than an agricultural enterprise within—at least for the most part—the judicial boundaries of Ma'aleh Hermesh, merely an expansion of the existing settlement that was not subject to government approval, as the establishment of a new settlement would be, and there was nothing to be concerned about. What was the big deal? All Othniel Assis had sought was to grow the very mushrooms, asparagus, and arugula that these bleeding-heart left-wingers themselves cut into their salads and served steamed alongside a slice of salmon at their Tel Aviv dinners. So, please, give me a break, okay? The outpost nevertheless made it into Peace Now's Outpost Monitoring Report, and even found its way onto the interactive map on the
Haaretz
daily's news website. Civil Administration officials then showed up with orders to cease all work related to the family residences.

The move served only to prompt a flood of callers requesting to join the outpost.

Followed closely by approval from the defense minister's deputy on settlement affairs for the transportation to the site of two additional Amidar trailers.

Then came assistance from the Housing Ministry's Rural Construction Administration.

Along with a budgetary allocation from the regional council.

More families arrived, and young couples, and singles, too—some were lovers of the Land of Israel; others were lovers of serenity and nature; still others, lovers of low costs. Everything was out in the open—the minutes of the meetings dealing with the division of the land were posted on the synagogue notice board for all to see!—but no declarations were handed down. From time to time, threats of evacuation were voiced and scolding fingers were raised. But more babies were born on the hilltop, and thus, modern-day pioneering flourished, and Ma'aleh Hermesh C. grew and expanded.

A
hilltop. The earth light and still, almost barren: a brownish yellow, dotted with rocks and lonely olive trees, and, here and there, soft patches of green brought on by the rain. Cutting through the center of the hilltop ran a narrow and bumpy single-lane road. A trailer—a mobile home—attached to the back of a large truck slowly climbed and descended its winding path. A yellow Palestinian cab bearing a green license plate crawled along impatiently behind. And after the cab chugged an old and dusty white Renault Express, its rear window bearing stickers declaring
MY GOLANI DOESN'T EXPEL JEWS
;
HEBRON—NOW AND FOREVER
; and
BRING THE OSLO CRIMINALS TO JUSTICE
. Behind the wheel of the Renault sat Othniel Assis—bearded, wearing a large skullcap, just as dusty as his vehicle. Weeping miserably in a car seat in the back sat his youngest, three-year-old Shuv-el. He had dropped his packet of Bamba as they rounded one of the sharp bends, and neither he nor his father could pick it up off the floor of the car. Yellow crumbs from the peanut butter–flavored snack had stuck to one of the child's sidelocks. The fourth vehicle in the impromptu convoy that day on the rough road through the Judean hills was a military jeep, a David, carrying the section commander, Captain Omer Levkovich, along with his crew.