The first time I heard about wild pigs in Palestine was probably back in 2006. Landowners would talk about how they traveled in packs and just laid waste to everything, uprooting vegetables and vines and trampling saplings. They were often talked about as a weapon, and people had stories about seeing pigs being released from the backs of settler vehicles. One guy, if I’m remembering correctly, claimed the army helicoptered them in. People seem to date their arrival to the 1990s. I never quite knew what to make of these stories. Fast-forward a decade, and I heard a lot more about the pigs when I was doing fieldwork with surveyors. (When I finally saw a wild pig, thankfully not alive, I was truly shocked by how big it was). I don’t know how I’m going to include about these stories in the book. What was striking though was how, more than anything else—from Israeli settlers to rainfall to insects to markets—pigs came up.
In lots of places, people saw the pigs as one of the main reasons why certain crops were no longer cultivated. In Bruqin, it was the loss of wheat cultivation. In Farkha, one landowner had given up growing peas because of the pigs. They seem to leave the bean plants alone though. And they love grapes. And often, when I walked with surveyors past ruined terraces of grapes, no longer tended to and growing wild along the walls, people would bring up the pigs. They are smart, they hop over walls. One guy I spoke to really hated them, called them a plague. Recently, he fumed, they had attacked his horse.
Killing pigs is difficult. In part, they’re hard to find. They hide in the brush, especially in areas where people tend the land less. They only come out at night, but you can see their tracks in the morning, as well as the muddy streaks they leave on the trunks of olive trees. One guy told me how, in Jenin, they used to go out with guns on motorcycles and hunt them. But in the hilly areas, that doesn’t work so well. It seems also to be technically illegal to kill the pigs, at least according to Israeli law. Here, the pigs are part of a wider web that includes a whole bunch of laws, military orders, and forms of regulation that weaponize environmental preservation to prevent a whole bunch of different forms of Palestinian land use. And like other more violent forms of coercion, it has a similar effect. In most places, fear of being attacked by pigs, army, and settlers were all reasons given as to why people visited their lands less often.
Even the survey teams were thinking of pigs. In one meeting, a PLA representative who was supposed to be introducing the land project got sidetracked into a discussion of how to prevent them from destroying crops. Maybe, he suggested, everyone could pitch in for a big fence? (Somehow he tied this back to why land titling was a good idea, which seemed to be a stretch). Surveyors also included the pigs in one of the job hazards. In Biddya, one surveyor even got attacked. These surveyors were all pretty young, recent graduates of al-Najah, and took great pleasure in telling me all sorts of terrible stories about encountering snakes and spiders. But the pig story was the prize. Apparently two of the guys had approached a thicket and the pig had charged them. They both freaked out and booked it. In a hurry to escape, one guy ran and jumped-fell over a wall. His GPS unit went flying, the pole striking the other surveyor who had been in charge of paint. Either as a result of the initial shock of being charged, or after being struck by his companion's pole (my notes are unclear on this detail), he spilled paint all over his pants. It seemed unlikely that he was going to live that one down anytime soon.