The village near the settlement is unlawful
By Amira Hass

"I was born here, in Khirbet Tana, and I inherited the land from my grandfather. I am a shepherd and have a family of 10. All of us are shepherds, and that is our sole source of livelihood. In June I moved to Beit Furik, because in the summer the sheep can't take the heat in Khirbet Tana. On Tuesday, July 5, 2005, at around 8:30 A.M., I received a phone call from one of the shepherds in the area, who told me that the Israeli army was demolishing our houses. I immediately went there and when I was two and a half kilometers from the houses in Tana, Israeli s...

The village near the settlement is unlawful
By Amira Hass

"I was born here, in Khirbet Tana, and I inherited the land from my grandfather. I am a shepherd and have a family of 10. All of us are shepherds, and that is our sole source of livelihood. In June I moved to Beit Furik, because in the summer the sheep can't take the heat in Khirbet Tana. On Tuesday, July 5, 2005, at around 8:30 A.M., I received a phone call from one of the shepherds in the area, who told me that the Israeli army was demolishing our houses. I immediately went there and when I was two and a half kilometers from the houses in Tana, Israeli soldiers in an army jeep prevented me from getting any closer. The soldiers left the area at around noon. In place of a house I found a pile of cinder blocks. My family and I live in two new structures built of cinder blocks and mud. We built the house to live in and protect ourselves from the cold in winter and the heat in summer. The soldiers also destroyed the livestock pen. We kept the taboun [a large brick oven] in the pen. They didn't leave us anything. They also demolished other houses and huts of people in the area."

This is the account that Wassef Hanani, 51, gave to a B'Tselem field researcher. The home of Abed al-Kader Ibrahim, 72, was also demolished. He still remembers his grandmother as the owner of the surrounding land. He and his brothers and sisters were born in Tana. "I don't know any other place. Here I got married and my nine children live here .... Between June and August we move to Beit Furik ... to herd the sheep and live there in tents, but it's only temporary. There isn't enough land or water there for herding. They didn't only demolish homes, they also destroyed the elementary school building. It had two classrooms where the children study up to fourth grade. It's the only school here. They also destroyed part of the fence around the mosque. An ancient m

Information about the destruction of Tana has been completely swallowed up by the media inundation of disengagement-related news. It is a Palestinian community that developed as an annex of the existing village Beit Furik, east of Nablus. There are dozens of similar subsidiary communities that formed over the centuries in the West Bank. Some grew into independent villages, some depend in one form or another on the main village. But the gradual transition from living in caves to living in ramshackle huts, to small buildings and even to larger buildings, is common to all of them.
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Much can be learned about this natural process from a research study drafted by the geographer David...

Information about the destruction of Tana has been completely swallowed up by the media inundation of disengagement-related news. It is a Palestinian community that developed as an annex of the existing village Beit Furik, east of Nablus. There are dozens of similar subsidiary communities that formed over the centuries in the West Bank. Some grew into independent villages, some depend in one form or another on the main village. But the gradual transition from living in caves to living in ramshackle huts, to small buildings and even to larger buildings, is common to all of them.
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Much can be learned about this natural process from a research study drafted by the geographer David Grossman, printed in 1977 in the book, "Judea and Samaria, Chapters in Settlement History," which was published by the departments of geography at Tel Aviv and Bar-Ilan universities (Rehavam Ze'evi was one of the editors). This prolonged process demonstrates the continuity of Palestinian existence here over hundreds of years, the way that traditional agriculture coped with natural hardships and the preservation of pre-capitalistic agrarian traditions, on the one hand, and on the other, the emphasis placed in recent years on educating the younger generation: This is why schools were built in these annexes, if only the earlier grades.