Education Institute
by Anne Laurel Carter
Groundwood, 2008
The Shepherd’s Granddaughter delivers a clear message: Israelis, in the person of IDF soldiers and privileged settlers, are usurpers in the West Bank.
The book’s heroine, Amani, is a twelve-year-old Arab girl whose family has been herding sheep “for more than a thousand years” in the West Bank village of Al-Khalil. Amani wants to continue that tradition, but regulations to protect Israeli settlers put her family at the mercy of debilitating restrictions on their movement, making it hard for them to earn a living under the Israeli occupation.
What Carter does not tell her readers is that Al-Khalil has another name -- Hebron. It is the site of the Cave of Machpelah, which, according to the biblical account (Genesis 23:11-20), the Jewish patriarch Abraham purchased from Ephron the Hittite to bury his wife Sarah. Until the Jewish community of Hebron was driven out by the murderous Arab pogrom of 1929,[i] Jews had been living there virtually uninterrupted since the Byzantine era, likely longer than the purported thousand-year presence of Amani’s family. In fact, it was the Jews who approached the invading Arabs in 638 CE with these words:
Grant us security . . . and may we be conceded the right to build a synagogue in front of the entrance (to the cave of Machpelah). If you will do this, we will show you where you should make a gateway.[ii]
Jews were living in Hebron well before the Arabs.
When Israel won the Six-Day War in 1967 – a war of aggression launched by Egypt, Jordan and Syria to annihilate the State of Israel – and captured the West Bank, it never occurred to the Israelis not to resettle their historic city, the heart of the Jewish homeland, from which a millennium-old Jewish community had run for their lives in 1929.
To Carter, the Jewish settlers are interlopers. To the Jews, they’ve come home.
Carter ascribes all restrictions on Palestinian movement to Israel’s will to dominate the Palestinian population. But, as historian Yaakov Lozowick explains, “the present no-movement restrictions don’t appear on the 1997 map. Nor did they exist in 2002, at the height of the 2nd Intifada. They were put in place, or rather they evolved, as part of that war.... Sucking the life from the heart of Hebron and transforming it into a ghost town was not a result of the settlements, which were all there a decade before the 1997 partition.” [iii] What Carter ascribes to Israeli malice was put in place to protect Israelis against Palestinian attacks. But these attacks – the Intifada – barely register in Carter’s book.
Carter also accuses settlers of poisoning the water supply of Amani’s sheep. There are indeed extremists among some West Bank settlers, and the Israeli government took a stronger stand against the notorious Hilltop Youth once their provocations became obvious. But Carter seems unaware that accusing Jews of poisoning has a long and shameful history. In the Middle Ages, Jews were accused of poisoning Christians’ wells to cause the Black Plague. In 1983 a yellow dust on a West Bank school’s windowsill was cited as evidence that Israel was deliberately releasing poison. In the end, the yellow dust proved to be nothing but pollen, and the Israelis uncovered a deliberate PLO plot to spread the poisonous rumour.[iv] Given the long history of this antisemitic canard, Carter would do well to ask herself why she received the malicious libel so uncritically.[v]
-Reviewed by Marjorie Gann/April 2, 2025
[i] In 1929, instigated by the Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin Al-Hussaini, Arabs in Hebron attacked the Jewish residents, killing sixty-seven and wounding another sixty. The riot was sparked by a false rumour that Jews were attempting to take over the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
[ii] “Canonici Hebronensis Tractatus de invention sanctorum patriarchum Abraham, Ysaac, et Jacob,” in Sefer ha-Yishuv, vol. 2., p. 6 , in Norman A. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book, Jewish publication Society, 1979, p. 152.
[iii] Yaakov Lozowick, “Hebron Regrets to Inform Jerusalem,” December 2009 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gczZhu09kwKL-NObG2wdDHjizIJjJOObXFBMZbFIiVQ/preview Accessed June 6, 2021. This link is no longer working; readers can reach the reviewer through CAMERA for a copy of Lozowick’s post.
[iv] The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, called on by Israel to conduct an independent investigation, concluded that the schoolgirls’ symptoms, attributed by the PLO to poisoning by Israel, were psychological or caused by hydrogen sulphide, a smell released by raw sewage.
[v] There have been many similar accusations. For example, in 1999, Suha Arafat, Yassir’s wife, announced publicly that the Israelis used poisonous gas against Palestinians to increase cancer cases among women and children, and poisoned the PA’s water sources with chemicals. The director of the PA’s Committee for Consumer Protection said Israel supplied chocolates that cause mad cow disease to the Palestinian market. The Palestinian UN representative accused Israeli authorities of injecting 300 Palestinian children with the HIV virus.
