Reporter’s notebook: Two weeks in the West Bank

The Christian Science Monitor’s Taylor Luck found that there’s only one thing you can count on in a violence-wracked zone: That you can take nothing for granted. 

Middle East correspondent Taylor Luck has been in the West Bank for two weeks on his most recent trip there. If he’s become acutely aware of one thing, it’s that spikes in violence mean that you can take nothing for granted. 

Checkpoints appear overnight. ID and car checks go from taking minutes to taking hours. Routes change abruptly: “To interview one displaced Bedouin family,” Taylor says, “we drove on a side road outside Turmus Aya where a large berm had suddenly appeared, placed by settlers. As we turned onto another road, a farmer yelled at us to stop – that had become a settler-run, shoot-to-kill zone; we turned around just in time.”

People are on edge: When Taylor spilled his hot coffee and yelled in pain, nearby people ran into the street, believing his cry signaled that Israeli soldiers had entered Ramallah and a third intifada had begun.

But Taylor noted another powerful current as well. He met Ahmed Abu Hussein, a Bedouin shepherd in the northern Jordan Valley whose tent-and-shack community was facing daily settler attacks. He can’t graze his sheep, and he worries settlers may set fire to his tent to force him off his land. But he sounded neither angry nor anxious. Taylor asked him why he was so calm.

“He told me, ‘I am just one in a chain of generations, passing on our herd and way of life. There were troubles that threatened my ancestors, too. The land will remain, and we will remain.’

“‘Know your history, and you will know [that] your future will be alright.’”

Check out more of Taylor’s reporting by following this link.