OPINION: Israel’s enemies will rejoice if the village of Susiya is bulldozed
“All the gateus are locked except the gate of the oppressed.”
The Talmud attributes this saying to Ima Shalom, the sister of Rabban Gamliel. Her name means ‘peace mother’. We don’t know whether she refers to the gates of prayer or to the gates of Heaven but her meaning is clear: the voices of the oppressed cannot be silenced forever.
Ima Shalom’s words came to mind this week when I read that hundreds of Jews in Israel had demonstrated against the issuance of a demolition order for the village of Susiya.
Susiya is a tiny Arab village – more a shanty-town than a village – sandwiched between two Jewish settlements at the southern edge of the West Bank. It has been repeatedly demolished by the IDF since its creation in the 1980s. It is about to be demolished again, by court order, because it is sited on agricultural land and its residents have never been granted permission to build.
The Arabs, whose shacks are to be demolished, have Turkish documents attesting title to their land. They also hold title to the site of one of the nearby Jewish villages, also called Susiya. No-one disputes that they lived there until the early 1980s. But they were evicted when archaeological remains were discovered and they camped out in their fields. Now, thirty years later, they are facing eviction again.
Susiya.
