Erella Dunayevsky

Dear Friends,

We turn to you with an urgent call for help. Our friends in Masafer Yatta—whom we’ve accompanied for years in their struggle to remain on their land—are facing imminent destruction. We need your support now.

On June 18, Israel’s Higher Planning Council for the West Bank made a devastating and arbitrary decision: to permit IDF training in the infamous Firing Zone 918. This means the total demolition of 12 villages—home to around 2,800 people—and the final stage of ethnic cleansing in Masafer Yatta.

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This letter from Erella isn’t dated, which seems apt, since it speaks to the relentless essence of the occupation…

Dear friends,

For sixteen years I have walked at Nasser’s side. He was 20 years-old when we first met. His youthful dream was to become a vet. Luckily, he didn’t manage to fulfill his dream, otherwise how could he have grown up to document everyday injustices as a B’Tselem employee and still manage to remain connected to himself?

Early last week, we had our usual “how are you?” phone call. Nasser told me that he’d had a week full of demolitions at the various locations for which he was responsible. After a moment’s silence, he said: “What most frightens me is that I will get used to it.”

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Erella Dunayevsky’s report on her last visit to Jaber’s village…

May 8, 2025

Dear friends,

On the morning of May 5th, I heard the sound of a WhatsApp message on my phone, while doing post-operative, physical therapy exercises to hasten the healing of my leg. I wanted to go on with the exercises, but that sound at 8 a.m. was ominous. I answered. In the WhatsApp video I saw several bulldozers and cars in a convoy on the main road of the South Hebron Hills, and it was obvious that a demolition was brewing today in Masafer Yatta. What wasn’t obvious yet was exactly where it would take place.

By 11 a.m. everything was very clear – Khalet a-Dabe yet again. This time destruction was extensive. Most of this hamlet was pulverized. 9 houses, 6 caves, 10 water tank, 4 sheep pens, 11 outhouses, 7 water holes, the central electricity control, 400 meters of outer perimeters of farmland, and a hundred human hearts that could not even weep for sheer shock, to say nothing of crying out loud.

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Noelle Canin, who’s helping translate Erella Dunayevsky’s writings for First, had some late-night advice for your editor when I mentioned I’d had trouble sleeping after reading one of Erella’s recent stories…

Benj, never read testimonies before going to sleep. We need softness and love before going to bed. Our world is going to get a lot harder and we need sanctuary as part of and in order to cope. What is happening in Israel gets worse by the day and there are now demonstrations planned where we’re forbidden to hold up pictures of Palestinian children who’ve been killed. Those pictures will get held up.

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Last year, after First began publishing Erella Dunayevsky’s stories about her encounters with Palestinians in South Hebron, one engaged reader demurred (gently). The pieces struck him “as what the French call ‘angelism,’ casting the victims of an atrocity in an almost holy light.” This next story, composed by Dunayevsky in 2018, is beyond such caveats. (See the epiphany that follows Dunayevsky’s admission of her pique at the plaints of one Palestinian woman: “She tired me and I tried to ignore this, making a great effort to hide my own fuse, shortening as her speeches lengthen…”) First will be posting more of Dunayevksy’s letters on the Occupation in upcoming months…

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Greetings our friends all,

Bertolt Brecht had already said that “when crimes pile up, they become invisible. When suffering becomes unbearable, the screams are no longer heard.”

This was exactly the reason for our visit to Khalet al-Dabe two days after the Civil Administration and the Israeli army, two loyal arms of the Occupation, changed the appearance of this village completely – 7 houses were demolished, 3 caves severely damaged, solar panels broken and electricity cables cut so no light, water tanks smashed so no water – and then they left.

Demolished, collapsed, broken, smashed – even if I used more of the words describing ruin, I could not describe the sights and the heartache. They become lost in the general chaos of the Middle East and the entire world.

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Erella Dunayevsky’s stories evoke the dailiness of Palestinians’ lives under occupation. They take place over many years but, as Dunayevsky has written, “the essence of the stories is identical, whether they took place during the nineties of the previous century or are happening right now.”

Erella composed this epistolary story on February 19, 2008…

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Erella Dunayevsky’s stories evoke the dailiness of Palestinians’ lives under occupation. They take place over many years but, as Dunayevsky has written, “the essence of the stories is identical, whether they took place during the nineties of the previous century or are happening right now…”

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Erella Dunayevsky’s stories bring home what Daniela Kitain terms (above) “the daily reality of Palestinians’ lives under occupation.” What follows is Dunayevsky’s own letter to her readers and two of her urgent yet timeless stories. First of the Month will post more of Dunayevsky’s dispatches in upcoming months.
……….

Dear Reader,

The stories before you take place over many years.

Figures and places vary, but the essence of the stories is identical, whether they took place during the nineties of the previous century or are taking place right now.

The Hebrew language only has four tenses: past, present, future and imperative. I actually need more tenses, as there are in English for example – past continuous and present continuous – so that you, the reader, will correctly interpret the stories before you. They constitute one story about ongoing occupation. A glimpse into the souls who constantly experience it. Something that began to take place once and continues to take place into time unknown.

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