Assaf Gavron - The Hilltop

“To fall in love?” Gabi asked apprehensively.

“Exactly, to fall in love. Then you will know who you are and what you are doing here. Yes, to fall in love. And you know what? Perhaps that’s what I need, too, right now.” Roni stood up and stretched. “Let’s go, Gabi boy. Pick yourself up, we’re going.”

“Going where?” the younger brother asked.

“I don’t know where. But we’re going to do something with our lives.”

Hilik Yisraeli headed home from Jerusalem, after hours of slogging away on his doctorate at the National Library. The working title for the thesis was “Pioneering, Land Redemption, Ideology: The Pre-State Kibbutz Movement as a Failure-in-Waiting.” In his paper, Hilik sought to point out a wide range of early warning signs, arguing that the manner in which the kibbutzim were established and evolved — beginning with the appropriation of land, the decisions vis-à-vis sources of livelihood, and the receipt of state credit and benefits, including, too, the reliance on slogans and ideology, and through also to the condescension and arrogance of a closed society, alienated and on a pedestal, functioning according to its own set of rules — signaled the failure of the Kibbutz Movement some fifty years before the onset of its actual demise. Or something to that effect.

On the road back from his one day a week at the university and enjoying Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F Major, he and his car came under a barrage of rocks, one of which cracked the front windshield at the top, on the side, in front of the passenger seat, and ricocheted off the glass. Hilik stepped on the gas, his leg filled with adrenaline, his heart violently pumping blood to every inch of his body, fear shaking and numbing the tips of his fingers, the pianist playing on beautifully, and the car raced up to Ma’aleh Hermesh, and from there, home, to C.

He pulled up outside his house, got out, and conducted a comprehensive inspection of the Mitsubishi. Seeing him do this, from the window of the house, his wife, Nehama, clearly anxious, hurried outside, followed by their two toddlers.

“What happened?” she cried out.

“They cracked the windshield, the dogs.”

“Sons of bitches! Where? Are you hurt?” Nehama asked, examining her husband with concern. His skullcap sat tight on his parted hair, his thin-framed glasses were in place, and his painter’s-brush mustache was still neat and tidy. She didn’t see any stains on his plaid button-up shirt, his dark trousers, or his Source-brand sandals. Apart from a bead of sweat across his delicate brow and the fear in his eyes, Hilik appeared unscathed and well.

One by one, the neighbors gathered round.

“Oh my,” said Othniel, his hand caressing the butt of the Desert Eagle pistol stuffed into the back of his pants, “terror is again raising its ugly head.”

“That head needs to be chopped off,” Josh said, and he looked up at the young Jehu, who was surveying the nearby village of Kharmish from atop his horse.

“Was it the good old boys from Kharmish? We could pay them a courtesy visit,” Othniel suggested.

“No, it happened at the bottom of the road, before the corner. Majdal Tur.”

“Damn animals need to be wiped off the face of the earth,” Othniel said.

Sporting a broad skullcap and thick, untamed sidelocks that dangled down on either side, Jehu nodded slowly in agreement.

Yoni arrived on the scene, followed by Roni and Gabi, and then Rachel Assis and her daughter Gitit in a car, returning from the grocery store in Ma’aleh Hermesh A.

“What happened?” Yoni asked.

“Terrorists. More stone-throwing,” said Nehama. “Thank God for the armored glass, I don’t even want to think what would have happened without it.”

“Oh my God,” said Rachel, her fingers stroking her throat.

“Go down to their village right now, impose a curfew, do a house-to-house search,” Othniel instructed Yoni. “If not, they’ll think they can get away with anything they like.”

Yoni mumbled something about having a word with Omer. The crowd slowly began to disperse a few minutes later, but not before Nehama and Rachel sought to ease the anxiety by exchanging notes on a recipe for a spicy fish dish with potatoes and a tomato sauce.

Yoni called Omer to report the incident. Omer said he would dispatch a patrol to Majdal Tur as a show of force, and come up to the hilltop.

“Meanwhile,” he said to Yoni, “tell Othniel and his buddies not to try anything foolish. The army’s here, we’ll handle it.”

“Gotcha,” Yoni said, and looked around to see if Othniel was still in the vicinity. Aside from him, however, only Gitit Assis remained. She had returned to the car to get the grocery bags.

“Need some help?” he asked the tall, slender, straight-haired young girl. “I have something to tell your father. Let me get those for you.”

“Okay,” she answered shyly.

He adjusted the strap of his weapon, picked up all the bags, and smiled at her. “Okay, shall we go?” he said.

She returned his smile, blushed, and walked lightly beside him.

* * *

The military demarcation order handed over in February by sector commander Captain Omer Levkovich to Othniel Assis may not have had a practical, or rather, immediate effect on life in the settlement, but it did spark an unusual sense of urgency in and around Ma’aleh Hermesh C. the moment it arrived. With the help of lawyers from the regional council and Natan Eliav, the secretary of Ma’aleh Hermesh A., an appeal against the order was lodged with the defense minister. As a result, implementation of the order, originally due to take effect within eight days, was suspended indefinitely, and a team of state officials was sent to the outpost with the task of determining the nature of the land rights in question. Is the land state-owned land that was allocated by an official entity for settlement purposes (or state-owned land that hadn’t been allocated); is it survey land (under ownership review); is it private land purchased by Israelis (and if so, had the Israel Lands Authority authorized the purchase) or is it privately owned Palestinian land?

Othniel, Hilik, and Natan Eliav accompanied the surveyors, two women in suits and a young man, and attempted in every way possible to explain to the honorable delegation that the land on which Ma’aleh Hermesh C. was established fell within the jurisdiction of Ma’aleh Hermesh, despite its distance, as the crow flies, from the homes of the mother settlement. Over the days that followed, Natan Eliav got word from an associate who was a member of the review team that the findings were inconclusive. It emerged, as was already known, that the settlement was erected on land of mixed status. Some of it — at the entrance to the settlement — was indeed state-owned land that fell within the jurisdiction of Ma’aleh Hermesh. Some, in the playground and the center of the hilltop, where most of the trailers were located, was survey land. The southern slope, where some of Othniel’s crop fields lay, was private agricultural land owned by a Palestinian living in Beirut, while the area on the edge of the cliff that dropped down into the Hermesh riverbed was in fact designated a nature reserve, meaning it was owned by the State of Israel and could not be used for settlement or construction purposes.

As expected, the appeal filed with the defense minister was rejected. The council lawyers then filed a petition with the High Court of Justice, hoping for an actual court date far enough into the future to allow for the arrival of a few more families, for Othniel to expand his farming enterprise, and for the outpost residents to cover their prefabricated mobile homes with stone. Trucks laden with rocks, sacks of sand, mortar, and gravel turned up one day and unloaded their bounty, courtesy of the regional council, and almost all the residents eagerly set about the business of stoning over their homes. (“The stone enhances the aesthetics of the structures, blends with the surroundings, serves as thermal insulation, and gives added protection against stray bullets, God forbid” read the brochure.) They erected timber piles, mixed cement in a single mixer on wheels that was moved from place to place, or manually in tin basins. Othniel’s home had had stonework done long before then. And, apart from the newly arrived trailer and the trailer that served the IDF (the outpost residents did indeed offer to give it the same treatment but were turned down by Captain Omer, who argued that the stone could create the impression of a fixed structure, and that the army wouldn’t want to come under fire for erecting a fixed structure in the area of Judea and Samaria without the appropriate permits, and certainly not with a High Court decision pending), not a single trailer on the hilltop remained bare. The walls of the trailers were thus turned into a mutation of geological layers that told of the passage of time: drywall, spray foam insulation, thin aluminum, cement, Jerusalem stone.