‘In the days of old, the world was safe’: West Bank family’s enduring unity
A West Bank family clings to four generations of shared meals and laughter as settler attacks, one deadly highway collision, and military bans slowly choke their ancestral pastures.
Hajja Latifa still remembers nights when her family could sleep under the stars in the hills of Khirbet al-Marajim. "In the days of old, the world was safe," the 66-year-old says quietly, her back bent from decades milking sheep and goats. That safety ended with her husband's death, repeated arsons, kidnappings, beatings, and the steady theft of their livelihood once Israeli settlers began targeting their land.
The Masallam compound houses 15 people across three single-room homes in a hamlet where only two households remain occupied year-round. A century-old stone house with thick walls and a thorny-brush roof shelters Nayef, 52, and his sons. Two tin structures nearby hold his eldest son Muhammad, wife Mona, their children, and the women of the family. Every evening the circle swells with relatives and friends drinking mint tea, smoking arghila, and listening as Thabet, 24, calls for quiet so Hajja can speak.
Thabet has become the family's anchor and its most visible target. He works the phones during settler attacks and military incursions, ringing relatives in nearby Duma, Palestinian liaisons, and Israeli solidarity activists. "If they manage to displace our family, they control the pastures," he explains. The settlers understand this; their focus on the Masallam house is tactical. The family keeps flocks penned to avoid theft or violence while settler cows roam free, destroying olive trees on the flower-dotted hills.
The turning point came in 2016 when patriarch Musa, then 80, was struck by a motorcycle ridden by a settler from Kokhav HaShahar while crossing Allon Road on his donkey. The animal died instantly. An Israeli ambulance treated only the settler, the family says; Musa bled internally and died en route to hospital in a Palestinian ambulance. The family filed a complaint. No one was held accountable. The military and settlers then banned them from the very hill where the collision occurred. Two grandsons and a great-grandson now carry the name Musa.
Before that loss and the surge in violence after October 7, 2023, the rhythm of life was communal and self-sufficient. Twenty or 30 relatives from Talfit would arrive for wheat harvests that Maysoon, 42, still calls "a party." Hajja and Maysoon baked bread in an outdoor taboon oven; the family produced roughly 1,000 litres of olive oil each year from their own groves. "We would go in the night to Duma," Hajja recalls. "We would stay up until 10 or 11 and go home walking... We could never sleep outside now."
Even under pressure the family refuses to surrender its character. The women sing folk songs while making baladi cheese in the courtyard. Siblings steal moments to dance while brushing their teeth at night. "Laughter and joy come naturally to us," Thabet says on a calm evening. Yet the metal door still carries the dents from a settler's axe, a daily reminder that the world they describe no longer exists for them.
What remains is the stubborn circle of four generations refusing to leave land inhabited for millennia. The open question is how long one visible household can hold against coordinated pressure that has already emptied neighboring communities along the Allon Road.
Original reporting: Al Jazeera English.
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