If you lose your sheep, you lose your life.

"How did you learn English?" I asked the man walking beside me as we were leaving his camp. "I have a Masters in history," he answered, "from Jerusalem University, and my wife is American." This is not the story I expected to hear from a Bedouin who has just endured the loss of his entire community. Israeli bulldozers destroyed their homes and animal shelters on September 11 (is this date cursed?), leaving a tangled mess of corrugated iron, boards, mattresses, clothes, blankets and basic foods such as flour. Another man picked up handfulls of flour to show us what had become of their supplies.

The man with the Masters, Ahmad Abujalia, is a member of the Jahalin Bedouin tribe. He grew up tending sheep and goats, which is the life of most Bedouin, and he acknowledged that it was difficult to study at the same time as caring for the animals, especially when the goats ate his books! This bit of humor contrasted starkly with our surroundings. Palestinian Bedouin have been so persecuted by Israel that the area where they can still graze their animals has been reduced to the driest, most barren soil. They must buy hay and grain for the herds because the vegetation is long gone. In fact, I felt that this land I was walking on could not support life. Yet here 47 people including school children, plus a large number of goats and sheep, a very handsome tom turkey and some chickens had lived until a month ago.

Well, they still do live here but now in three small tents provided by the Red Cross. However, this meager shelter won't last long. Israel has decided that the Bedouin must leave this area to make way for settlement expansion. Even before they lost their homes and barns to the bulldozers, the Bedouin were denied access to water and electricity. They solved these problems by stealing a minimal amount of electrical current from a nearby town and by trucking in water. The water truck was parked there by the Red Cross tents.

When we first entered the camp I detected a bad smell, like something long abandoned and left to die. Maybe it came fom the heap of discarded animal skins which covered some animal carcasses, or maybe from the insecticide that Ahmad told me they have to spray in order to control infestation by rodents or insects. But I couldnt shake the sense that it was the smell of destruction.

Three little boys, about 5 or 6 years old, sat near us on some rubble. When we talked to them, they were all smiles, belying the fact that they had witnessed the flattening of their homes. Our guide for this visit, Angela, explained that children like these become chronically traumatized and cannot heal from the experience because the occupation is an on-going trauma.

I took pictures, which I am sorry not to include here, of the sheep and goats in their make-shift corral. Because without a shelter for the animals, their babies will die in the winter cold. Without the babies to sell for meat, the owners will have to kill the larger animals and thus reduce the herd. In this way, the livelihood of the Jahalin Bedouin is stolen from them, and Israel succeeds not only in cleansing them from the land but in forcing them to give up their culture and way of life.

Our guide, Angela Godfrey-Goldstein, has creaded an organization to defend the rights of the Jahalin who number 2,000 in this area near Jerusalem. ( Jahalin Association.org) She urged us to tell our politicians about what we saw, and to ask our media why they didn't cover this story. (Philip Weiss did cover it: Mondoweiss.org) Two other Jahalin camps were demolished on the same day as this one, so the total displaced were 88 persons. One of the places Israel offers to relocate them to is on top of a Jerusalem landfill, where others of their tribe have already been condemned to live.