Israel’s Valley of Darkness

Effie Crassac, a tour guide by profession, recently took on a new job: cheerleader for the remaining residents of her withering settlement in the Israeli-occupied Jordan Valley.

The regional government hired the tiny, intense Crassac to plan get-togethers and outings to lift her neighbors’ spirits. The 26-year-old is upbeat about a visit she has planned to a Jerusalem restaurant. She has booked an armored bus and hopes a dozen couples will turn out for “an evening where we can get away and laugh a bit.” But even if the trip is successful, Crassac said, she knows she faces an uphill task.

In 14 months of fighting, Israelis have been attacked by Palestinians both within the nation’s pre-1967 borders and throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In the last week, suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Haifa killed more than two dozen Israelis and injured scores.

But if there is a place where Palestinian attacks have achieved their intended effect, it is here, in this once-sleepy valley named for the biblical river running through it. Palestinian drive-by shootings and roadside bombs have turned the Jordan Valley into a battleground and triggered the sort of exodus of Jewish settlers that Palestinian gunmen say they want.

In the last year, more than 50 of the valley’s 680 Jewish families have moved away, according to Orit Arzieli, spokeswoman for the Jordan Valley Regional Council. That is the largest one-year exodus of Jews since the settlement effort began under a Labor Party government shortly after Israel captured the valley from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East War.

Four Israelis have been shot to death on Highway 90, the valley’s north-south artery, and scores more have been shot at or pelted with stones.

Israelis who live within their nation’s pre-1967 borders no longer visit here or travel the highway from Jerusalem to the Galilee, as thousands did each day before fighting erupted. The valley’s Jewish children and their teachers drive to school in armored vehicles. Most residents restrict their car journeys to the essential.

The valley, Crassac acknowledges, has become a place most Israelis avoid and many residents want to flee. And Yafit is among the hardest hit of its 18 Jewish settlements.

Seven of Yafit’s 31 families abandoned the settlement in the last six months. More are talking of leaving. One 5-year-old neighborhood of 10 cheery, pink stucco houses was attracting middle-class families before the Palestinian revolt erupted. Now most of its homes have been deserted by frightened owners. Crouched behind its security fence, the settlement feels besieged, its shaded lawns and playgrounds empty, its kindergarten guarded by a soldier.

“Five years ago, the mood here was wonderful,” Crassac said. “Seven young families with 17 children had moved in, and there was activity, culture. People started getting together for Friday night dinners; we celebrated birthdays together.”

Now, Crassac said, when she pushes her 3-month-old daughter in a stroller down the streets, “the houses are empty, the homes are dark, the only sound you hear is maybe a dog barking.”

The valley suffered economic woes long before the fighting began. It never became the thriving agricultural region the Labor Party envisioned when it encouraged communal farms here--the party’s model of small farming communities has proved economically inefficient. Most residents abandoned farming a decade ago and began commuting to jobs in pre-1967 Israel. Few residents prospered.

But the Palestinian attacks ripped away the illusion many residents had that they were somehow different from Jewish settlers in the more densely populated mountain ridges of the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip. Unlike their often more conservative counterparts in those areas, settlers here are generally secular Israelis who identify with the center-left Labor Party. They call themselves mitnashvim--the term applied to the early immigrants who settled what became the Jewish state. And they insist that they are nothing like the mitnahalim, a pejorative term that Israeli leftists coined for West Bank and Gaza settlers in the 1970s.

Farmers came here in the 1970s and ‘80s less for ideological reasons than to escape Israel’s crowded central plain. Many were loners looking for a change. They felt like pioneers, owning villas and pieces of land in a nation where such property is beyond the economic reach of most Israelis within the pre-1967 borders.

Settlers believed they were moving to a land Israel would never cede, a place only sparsely populated by Palestinians. They had generally cordial relations with their Palestinian neighbors and employed them as farm workers.

According to Palestinian Authority statistics, nearly 33,000 Palestinians live in the valley, most of them in the city of Jericho. There are about 3,000 Jews.

“Look around you,” said Sajed Bani Odah, a Palestinian who has worked for 13 years at a crocodile farm run by Fezael, a moshav (collective farm) just north of Jericho. “The grass is dead. I am all alone.”

Bani Odah, 26, said most of the men in his village, Jiftlik, worked in surrounding Jewish settlements and have been unemployed since the start of the uprising. Five of them worked with him but were let go when tourists stopped coming and Fezael closed the farm to the public.

Now he tends crocodile eggs and the baby crocodiles Fezael is raising for their skins, but he worries that the moshav will sell off the 320 breeding crocodiles who lie basking in the sun around a man-made swamp and that he too will be fired.

“We had both Arabs and Jews visiting here,” said Bani Odah’s Jewish boss, Zvika Zinger, 55. “A lot of Arab schoolchildren came here on field trips.” After Israel signed the 1993 Oslo peace accords, Zinger said, “we thought this road would be the main road of the Middle East, that people would be driving from Amman [in Jordan] to Beirut along this road.”

The two men, Arab and Jew, sat dejectedly at one of the farm’s broken-down picnic tables, mourning what might have been and the gulf that has opened between their communities.

Military Presence Only Adds to Climate of Fear

One recent night, the Jewish settlers turned off the lights in their homes and along the streets. The protest was meant to send a message to fellow Israelis of what might happen if steps aren’t taken to revive the valley’s economy and return its sense of security, council spokeswoman Arzieli said.

The protest had little resonance with the Israeli public, but a visit to the valley underscores the settlers’ point.

From Jericho in the south to Mehola, the northernmost settlement, Jewish communities and businesses look dilapidated and ill-kept. Empty greenhouses, their torn plastic sheets flapping in the breeze, dot the arid landscape. Highway 90 is traveled mostly by locals, and soldiers in armored vehicles.

In recent weeks, the army has tried to restore a sense of security by flooding the highway with troops, erecting roadblocks and building outposts. But the heavy military presence has not stopped the drive-by shootings and has only deepened the atmosphere of danger.

“I feel the passengers’ fear,” said Menashe Nuriel, a driver for the Egged bus line who has been traveling Highway 90 for 18 months. “They sit, uptight; they don’t just doze off. I’m scared too. . . . I’m afraid of every suspicious-looking passenger, even from a girl standing alone at the bus stop, even from a soldier who looks Middle Eastern.”

In August, Nuriel thwarted an attack on his bus when he noticed that a Palestinian teenager who boarded at a little-used stop was cradling a bag in his arms “as if it were a baby.” When the youth failed to respond to Nuriel’s questions, the driver grabbed him by the shirt and saw him reach into his pocket. “I saw the switch, and understood that he was a suicide bomber,” Nuriel said. “I dragged him down the steps and pushed him away from the bus.”

The would-be bomber was subdued by a passing soldier, and the bomb was dismantled. But Nuriel said the experience haunts him.

“I drive faster through the valley--as far as I know, there is no speed limit there now,” he said.

Along the highway, restaurants, gift shops, gas stations and attractions that once catered to busloads of tourists have nearly all gone bankrupt.

Ranches, Gas Stations, Restaurants Close Down

The Good Earth--a ranch that boasted a Bedouin tent where tourists were served tea, an orchard where they picked fruit and donkeys they could ride--has closed. Its owners have left the valley.

Yafit’s tiny shopping mall, Mifgash Yafit, which opened days after the Palestinian uprising erupted, is now only another burden on the struggling community. A photo store, two fast-food kiosks, a clothing store and a shop showcasing local artists, run by the regional council, are all that remain of what was supposed to be the valley’s first retail center.

The restaurants, gas station and half a dozen other shops haveclosed. The Burger Ranch that was to open never bothered.

“Dear customers,” reads the hand-lettered sign at one of the center’srestaurants, “we are forced to close this store immediately because of the security situation, which causes severe economic damage. Thank you for your support. Shula and Shlomo Nedham.”

Pnina Ivgi, 51, finds it hard to remember the last time she saw a tourist. A 22-year veteran of the valley, Ivgi cannot understand why Israelis are abandoning it.

“It’s no more or less dangerous than anywhere else in the country,” she said. “But there is something in the Israeli mentality. People think that this is a scary place now.”

Truth is, the valley’s statistics are unnerving.

A kindergarten teacher and a driver who was ferrying teachers to work were killed in September by gunmen who riddled their van with bullets. That same month, Salit Sheerit, a 28-year-old whose family was among the valley’s first settlers, died when a gunman beside Highway 90 opened fire on the car in which she and her husband were riding. Tal Gordon, 19, an off-duty soldier aboard a civilian bus with his girlfriend, was shot to death on the highway shortly after the revolt began.

Before the uprising, Arzieli said, the valley had been building a tourism industry that featured bed-and-breakfast inns, jeep trips into the mountains and tours of agricultural communities. It sold itself as a slice of unspoiled countryside just an hour’s drive from Israel’s biggest cities.

But shortly after the fighting began, the army clamped severe restrictions on off-road safaris, and most Israelis chose to sightsee within the pre-1967 borders.

It is the sense of isolation, residents say, that bothers them the most. To drive south to Jerusalem, north to the Galilee or west to the coast is to take their lives in their hands.

Nurit Schlomi von Strauss and her husband, Uri, haven’t entertained guests at their home in Moshav Roi for months. The couple, who moved to the community in the heights above the northern end of the valley in 1979, thought they had hit upon the perfect income supplement to Uri’s job as a customs official when they opened a bed and breakfast three years ago. For a while, business thrived. But for months, almost no one has stayed in their two cozy cabins or joined them in their garden for the home-cooked meals Nurit builds around herbs and fruit grown in their garden.

These days, Uri, 50, wears a Glock pistol on his hip at home and when he drives to work. Nurit is so afraid of driving that she hasn’t visited her large Yemenite family on the outskirts of Jerusalem in eight months. The couple’s 10-year-old daughter, Ruth, and 7-year-old son, Dan, go to school in an armored bus and spend the afternoons and evenings at home, surfing the Internet, reading or watching satellite television. Several neighbors have moved out in the last year, the couple said.

“My father was a pioneer and always, when I was growing up, I was jealous that his generation had done everything,” Uri said. “They handed us the country already finished. But now, I feel like we are living in the kind of situation my father used to tell me about, the kind of situation before there was a state, when there was a war for the roads.”

Nurit is more pensive about the loneliness. She fights depression, she said, by launching new projects: planting flowers, preserving fruit, painting whimsical stencils on the walls of their home, which is cluttered with books and artwork.

“Positive thinking, positive doing,” she said. “I have the tools to go on. I don’t have the luxury to crack, to fall down.”

But she worries about what will happen if families continue their exodus. She worries about the possibility that talks with the Palestinians will resume and the valley will be handed over, the settlements evacuated. She and Uri have argued, Nurit said, over whether they would try to resettle somewhere within the pre-1967 borders or leave Israel altogether if the valley is abandoned.

“My family’s history, for the past 300 years, was to be kicked out of their homes,” Uri said. “Every 50 years there was a pogrom or some other disaster. At last we have a home. If we leave this valley, I will feel like the government has put a knife in our backs.”