Haaretz
At dusk last Friday, the funeral dispersed and the mourners made their way slowly back to their village. They gathered in the large space on the ground floor of the deceased’s home, which served as a mourning tent and was already lined with plastic chairs for the visitors. The dead man, who was 80, left behind seven sons, three daughters and 30 grandchildren.
Friday evening. The traditional bitter coffee and sweet dates were being offered to the grieving family and people who came to pay their condolences, when suddenly a group of young people arrived at a run, distraught.
Jewish settler terrorists were digging in the earth and opening the grave, they declared.
People who were present couldn’t believe their ears. They’d already seen and heard everything about settler terrorists, they knew that there are no limits to their greed for land, to their violence, and evil-heartedness. But necrophilia? That was new to them. As one relative of the deceased told us this week: ‘It was totally incomprehensible. It couldn’t happen. No way. It’s abnormal. We were in a state of shock.’
Locals know that settlers don’t leave the living in peace, but they didn’t believe that they would continue to abuse even the dead.
The homes of the new-old settlement of Sa-Nur – clearly visible on the hill across the way from this village, al-Asasa – had been repopulated just a few days earlier, portending trouble. But even so, this scenario was insane. As the mourners were trying to figure out whether the report was true, another youth came running in. He showed everyone a video he had shot with his phone from a distance. Dozens of settlers were seen crowding around the freshly covered grave, digging and poking around in the earth.
For a moment the mourners were struck dumb. Then, overwrought and appalled, the whole village rushed to the site.
High up on the hill the new iteration of Sa-Nur is perched, with its security lighting turned on day and night. There is a stone building that once served as a British Mandate police station in the original settlement, which was established by guile. A cluster of mobile homes recently appeared there after the government authorized the reestablishment of this settlement in the northern West Bank, which had been evacuated in the disengagement of 2005 along with the Gaza Strip settlements.
The small community of Russian-born artists who lived here until the second intifada, which began in 2000, has now begun to morph into yet another violent, threatening settlement, whose inhabitants have chosen an original way to abuse their Palestinian neighbors: by harassing the dead.
Afterward, no doubt, they will get to the living.
Al-Asasa is a tiny village of around 1,100 residents, situated on the road between Nablus and Jenin, adjacent to the larger town of al-Fandaqumiya. Since the grotesque and despicable events of last Friday evening, the village has found itself in the headlines of international media outlets – apparently for the first time in its history.
‘The Palestinian who was buried twice’ reads a sign in Arabic, at the entrance to the mourning house. Hussein Al-Asasa was a tiller of the soil, head of a respected family in the village. His children live in a compound consisting of a few apartment buildings, including the home of their father, now deceased, and their now-widowed mother Sabaha, 76.
Last Thursday, May 7, Mohammed, 51, took his father to the doctor; he wasn’t feeling well and he was found to have fluid in his lungs, but was sent home fairly quickly. Around noon the next day, Hussein, who had no preexisting illnesses, complained of pains in his chest. Mohammed immediately set out with him, he tells us now, for the clinic in the neighboring village of Ajjah, but Hussein breathed his last on the way and was pronounced dead on arrival.
It was about 2 P.M. Friday. The body of the deceased was brought back to his village, where preparations for the burial began at once. While the gravediggers headed to the cemetery – the final resting place of some 150 people, located about a kilometer from the village – to begin work, the local council head, Ataf al-Asasa, a cousin of Hussein, contacted the Palestinian Coordination and Liaison Administration, requesting permission to hold the funeral. He had never done so before in advance, he says, but because the settlement nearby had been recently repopulated, he decided to be on the safe side.
The council head got the go-ahead to hold the funeral following the afternoon prayers, between 4:30 and 5:30 P.M. The procession set out as scheduled: All the local residents and many inhabitants of neighboring villages accompanied Hussein on his final journey.
When they got to the cemetery, they noticed a few settlers watching from a distance. A member of the family asked one of them whether they could bury the deceased. The soldier replied that he was new, part of a recently posted battalion, and he had no idea what was permitted and prohibited.
The funeral passed without incident, relatives tell us, other than a few racist curses heard from the direction of the settlers, which the Palestinians chose to ignore. Bassem al-Asasa, a nephew of the deceased, says: ‘I told the family: Just let the settlers vent whatever they want to vent. We don’t want problems during the funeral.’
The mourners then returned to the village – but were almost immediately called back to the cemetery after receiving the horrific report that the body was being exhumed. Some 300 meters away, they were stopped by a military force that had already arrived at the site, in three jeeps and accompanying the troops were dozens of settlers.
Sa-Nur’s security chief was sharp and unequivocal. ‘You have two choices,’ he told the villagers. ‘Either you exhume him or I’ll bring in an excavator, remove him and throw him to the dogs. Or I’ll find a pig and tie him to it.’
Bassem, 48, the proprietor of a vegetable store in the village who speaks fluent Hebrew, says: ‘I hear what he’s saying and I’m in shock. I can’t believe this is happening. A person who was laid to rest, my uncle – and I will take him out of the grave? A man of 85? It’s not a nationalist issue. If it were, I might understand. I ask him: ‘How can I do a thing like that?’ And he says, ‘I’m not here to solve problems. Either you exhume him or I exhume him. He will not remain here.’
It was Shabbat eve and the security man was wearing a kippa, a white shirt, and carrying an M-16.
The soldiers, Bassem adds, stood to the side and didn’t intervene. What did they have to do with keeping order and preventing this madness? Imagine if Palestinians tried to exhume the body of a Jewish settler. Would the army stand aside in that case, too?
The settlers who had descended upon the grave with shovels had by this time reached the place where a layer of stones covers the shroud. If the youths hadn’t reached the villagers and warned them about what was going on in time, they would have discovered a vandalized, empty grave.
What would the settlers have done with the body? Would they have made good on their revolting threat? Would they have just thrown it on a trash heap somewhere, for it to rot or be eaten by animals?
The settlers allowed only seven relatives to access the grave and exhume their loved one. Bassem, who conducted the negotiations, was worried about settlers attacking the villagers, and asked the soldiers to protect them while they dug up the body. ‘You asked, you got it,’ said the officer. And indeed, under the protection of the IDF, seven men set about carefully removing the stones covering the corpse.
But then the security chief ordered them to stop what they were doing and to just drag the body out.
That was the hardest moment. ‘What did we do? We pulled him out. There was no other choice,’ Bassem says, adding that after the body was removed, they carried it back to the village. ‘Where will we go? Where will we bury him now?’ he recalls asking.
A billboard on the road to Al-Asasa this month, saying ‘Welcome to North Samaria. We have returned home.’
In the end, the family contacted people in the town of al-Fandaqumiya, who gave them permission to bury Hussein’s body for a second time that day, in the local cemetery.
On Sunday, representatives of the military government’s Civil Administration arrived at the office of the council head, Ataf al-Asasa, and asked him to accompany them to the empty grave.
As soon as they arrived at the site, he says, settlers showed up and demanded to know what they were doing there, as if they owned the place. No one has dared to approach the cemetery since.
Bassem: ‘What will happen if someone dies here, heaven forbid? I don’t have an answer. We are very afraid to approach the cemetery. This isn’t the army that you can talk to. This is the settlers, who shoot you straight away.’
When we asked to go to the cemetery, our hosts pleaded with us not to, because it’s dangerous.
The latest development was inevitable and fast in coming: This week Matan Golan reported in Haaretz that Central Command recently signed an order calling for the seizure of land in the area abutting Sa-Nur, which will apparently be followed by construction of a ‘security road’ for the settlement. In essence, then, the cemetery is gone, the lands are gone. Moreover, the fearful villagers know they cannot visit their dead as they wish, or on religious holidays and memorial days, as is the custom.
As we approached al-Asasa on our way in, we saw a billboard: ‘Welcome to North Samaria. We have returned home.’
Next to his father’s new grave, surrounded by stacks of tires in a neglected, dusty part of the cemetery in al-Fandaqumiya, one of Hussein’s sons, Fares, 41, stood and prayed for the soul of his beloved father – the man whose body was removed from his grave by settlers and reinterred here, far from his family and his home.