In the Village of Nowhere, a Fate Soon Sealed

Idyllic and isolated by layers of hills, Nuaman is a mix of two dozen aging stone houses and grander homes of a younger generation, clustered along the one-lane road that dips toward the valley below. Tilled plots of vegetables, olive trees and lemon groves line the back yards, and on weekends they fill with parents and children helping with harvests. Stands of cypress surround small graveyards on the hillside above and in the valley below.

This village lies close enough to Jerusalem's Old City that some of its men travel by foot to the al-Aqsa mosque each Friday to pray. On nearby hillsides, topped with minarets and watchtowers, camels graze in the twilight shadows cast by apartment towers in the Jewish settlement of Har Homa. The fence draws tighter each day.

"This village," said Labib Habib, a lawyer representing the residents, "will not survive."

'The Original Owners'

In sandals, Darawi negotiated the rocky hillside beneath his house one recent afternoon holding the hand of his 5-year-old daughter, Yara. The slope bloomed with wildflowers and spring wheat under his feet.

The landmarks on the hillside, he said during the walking tour, tell the story of his family's claim to the land.

Darawi is tall and broad, round around the middle with thick hands and a smile that rarely appears unless his three children are nearby. His hair recedes in a black widow's peak, and his bristly mustache is streaked with gray.

In silence, he made his way to an opening in the hillside, ducking into a cavern with rough walls blackened by a thousand cooking fires. The outlines of an animal pen appeared in one corner. Across its length sat the stone oven where his grandmother baked bread as recently as three decades ago.

"We are the original owners of this land," Darawi said, emerging from the cavern and ascending toward a stone house with shuttered windows and grassy tufts sprouting from the roof. A stone above the door, etched with a crescent moon and Arabic script, says the house belongs to Suleiman Darawi, Jamal's grandfather. It was built, according to a date on the stone, in 1963.

Darawi grew up walking to schools in East Jerusalem. He participated in demonstrations protesting Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon and marking the anniversary of the 1967 war. He attended university in the territories and in Jordan, receiving his undergraduate degree in 1987. That December, a Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation broke out and his plans to work in a medical laboratory suddenly changed. He joined the ranks of the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine, a radical nationalist movement with a Marxist orientation. At 21, Darawi began his first of four stints in Israeli prisons, held without charge, he said, for participating in the uprising.

After the 1993 accords, he joined the newly established Palestinian Authority, where he now works as a political organizer in Bethlehem, a city that will soon lie on the West Bank side of the fence. Even now, his work is reachable only by passing through an Israeli military checkpoint.

As he returned home from Bethlehem with his toddler son, Suleiman, and some Palestinian laborers last month, Darawi said, soldiers at the checkpoint ordered them out of his Isuzu Trooper. The soldiers began a search and then told the men to lift their T-shirts, though Darawi refused as his son looked on. The others obeyed.

"I have my dignity," he said. "I have my self-respect and I won't take my clothes off for them."