Excerpts of interviews from a village up north, from a man who is a long-time organizer as well as local landowner. Both have to do with Plia Albeck, who served as the assistant to the attorney general, and as far as liberal Zionists are concerned – the ones that love the rule of law and wonder what went wrong – she is the devil incarnate. Anyways, it turns out there are all sorts of ways to fight the state, and even more ways to lose.
On Plia Albeck. He knew her well, and remembers dealing with her at the court and in the village, where Albeck did multiple visits. The first time she came, he served makloubeh to them in his house, and she didn't eat because she was Orthodox. He remembered this, and the second time he served her fresh cheese. In 1987, settlers burned some 500 of his trees. Albeck ended up in the village a few years later, as part of her inspection to determine the extent of cultivation [uncultivated land could revert to the state, and thus the control of whatever Israeli settlement was in the area]. He tells me that when she visited his land, she noticed that small green branches were growing again from the burnt trees. She also counted the number of fruits on the small branches, and she concluded that the land had been planted and cultivated, and thus was not state land.
Here is another Albeck story. At one point, she was trying to get someone to surrender one dunum of land for the construction of a reservoir that would later serve the settlement that was built nearby. Her was offer was this: if he would give her one dunum, she would recognize the other 39 dunums as private land. He refused to do so. In the end, the land I think the entire plot was confiscated.
