The Atlas of Ertas

I've been doing a lot of exploring in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, ever since I moved to a plush neighborhood in the Western half of Israel's capital. The most recent excursion was to Ertas, one of the most ancient villages in the West Bank whose farming culture is facing a dual challenge: both the Israeli settlements at its edge, and locals who can't be bothered to tend their fields.

To learn more about Ertas, I called up Awad Abu Sway. He grew up farming with his father and seven brothers and sisters. Today he works for the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture in the ironic title of Coordinator of the Wall and Settlements. But what takes up nearly all his time is his volunteer work in rounding up local farmers and delivering free labor, tools and saplings to their fields. The idea, Abu Sway says, is to work the fields before they can be swallowed by Israeli settlements. He's in a race with time, and trees are his weapon.

Ertas is a small village of 4,500. To get there, I took bus 21 from Hebron Road in Jerusalem to Bethlehem, and then an orange minivan for the ten-minute trip to Ertas. The driver knew where Abu Sway's house was. He dropped me off on a road with a cement stairwell descending the village's steep slope as Abu Sway walked up.

The battle for land is so all-consuming that Abu Sway's house is littered with its signs. In the living room hangs a map of the security wall in the Bethlehem district. The couches are covered in t-shirts and duffel bags, reminders of the three American students Abu Sway is hosting for free in exchange for their labor in the fields.

When we step into his foyer, one of his two cell phones rings and he immediately picks up a coffee-stained legal pad covered in names and numbers. "We start at 9.30," he says to the woman on the other line while jotting down her details. "We should be done at two. Will you be there?"

Abu Sway says he gets olive and almond saplings from the Ministry of Agriculture. Then he tries to get them into land that is at risk. Right now he's focused on Umm Salamuna and Ertas, two southern West Bank villages hard up against the wall that skirts the Gush Etzyion bloc of settlements. The internationals, whom he recruits through word of mouth, email and the Alternative Information Center in Beit Sahour, help him with the manual labor. Sometimes they also help him take care of his kids and do his laundry; he is separated from his wife, who moved to another village.

But this is actually Abu Sway's day off. With his kids in school, he decides to take the three Americans and their friends, along with me, on an extensive tour of all of Ertas.

We walk along a paved road with homes under construction on either side. Far off in the fields, Abu Sway points out a few newly built houses.

"We convinced these two guys to build down there so we can take the land," he says. "This is a huge amount of land and the population is getting bigger and bigger. So it's much better to build a house rather than leave a bite for the Israelis."

Inside the village, Abu Sway knows everyone. He calls to a woman baking bread outside in her coal-fired aluminum oven; a toddler climbs up a cement stairwell to bring Abu Sway a fluffy warm flatbread. On our left we see a three-story apartment building being built, and Abu Sway knows the workers.

Yet as we walk further and further away from the houses, I see how that intimacy could also be a problem.

"See that guy ahead?" Abu Sway asks me, pointing to a man in a leather jacket and a black ski hat, sitting on a tractor. "This asshole here, he owns eleven dunams and he doesn't farm. I told him you will get trees, and you have to plant."

We come to a clearing in a forest, where two men sit on stones enjoying the sunny Wednesday afternoon. One is his cousin. "Motherfucker," Abu Sway expounds. "He's bringing trucks full of garbage and throwing it out on the land. I'm going to sue him."

It's a strange sight. Abu Sway sees his family members (the Abu Sway clan numbers 600), describes them from a distance in salty English, and then greets them in Arabic before blasting them for not working the land.

To illustrate, he walks up to Joel, a Canadian volunteer whose palms are blistered after three days of planting trees with Abu Sway.

"Look at his hands!" he says to the men sittng on the rocks. "He's a Canadian. He came here to work. Where are you?"

The men are not in the fields. One works with Palestinian intelligence. They are unapologetic about it, unmoved by Abu Sway's imploring. He tries cajoling them, he tries screaming. At one point, fed up with their excuses, he looks skyward and whistles.

Two other men appear, also on a scenic walk through the park. Abu Sway checks on them as well. They are a taxi driver and a construction worker from the nearby Al-Khadr village. Abu Sway wants to know, are they farming? They say they are, but it makes no money.

"We have two dunams in Efrat [settlement] and ten outside. I don't work it all 100 percent," says Ibrahim, 52. "In the grape harvest I go to the market and I get half a shekel per kilo for grapes."

Abu Sway is satisfied with them. He makes a final plea to the first two men, his cousins. Then we keep walking. On a hill behind us is an army observation post. "They take our pictures for free," he says, looking up at the post and waving.

Ertas's fields form a narrow green ribbon in the valley between rough hills. As we walk, we see a man beneath us on our left, carefully guiding a wooden plow pulled by a brown donkey across a postage stamp of land.

We continue walking between the hills to the edge of Ertas's fields. On this spot, Abu Sway says, the IDF tore up more than 60 trees to install a water drain in 2007. He says it was unnecessary, and he got arrested for camping out in the orchards for 22 days to prevent the uprooting. Today the drain stands, a giant cement corridor bereft of trees. Abu Sway walks through it, screaming "Hello, hello" and listening for the echo.

From a high point, we see his own patch of land: carefully cultivated trees on brown tilled soil. But Abu Sway notices black rubber tires that have rolled onto his land from his cousin's illegal dumping nearby. "One, two, three, four...eight," he counts. "Yeah, that's good evidence. I'm going to sue him." Here's a truck in action:

We return to the village, passing one more man with a donkey plow. Awad notices red marks on the footpath and on rocks up to our right. "These are new marks. I've never seen them before. I'll get some spray paint." He calls two friends to divine what the red spraypaint means. They don't know. He rubs out the one on the ground with his foot and sees a few more. "Oh fuck."

Wending our way back to town, we run into a flock of sheep. The American students just came from Egypt, where sheep were slaughtered in the street for Eid al-Adha. I had just seen a live slaughter in Jaffa the previous Friday (and written about it here). The sheep seem skittish and quickly clear the path for us; we read this as post-Eid anxiety. Abu Sway stops for a cup of orange Fanta and comes up the valley path puffing a cigarette from the pack he keeps in his front shirt pocket. The tour over, Abu Sway goes home to prepare for another day in the fields.