IN STEREO

Maybe we are crazy; maybe we are clever. I don’t know. Still now, we feel we are at the beginning, of course. The beautiful thing is that we make the beginning. We don’t wait. And we’re ready. We asked the restaurants to buy their vegetables from the farmers in Battir. The farmers came back to work on the land. And we made a new restaurant in a historic place, where people left. We want to give it life again. And this restaurant works the same way: he buys his vegetables from the farmers, and he asks the farmers to come back to their land: “I’ll buy everything you grow.” Now, when all of the visitors come here, [they throw] some rubbish, some trash, and we clean it every time. But if somebody takes any animal from the nature, a bird or a turtle…. We have a lot of these in Battir, and you know, they’re endangered.

You cannot take any animal from the nature; you cannot take any [plants]. You cannot move a stone. This is not just our image, I say. We are like this. We love the animals; we love the nature. We are not savages, that’s it. We are normal people, like every people in the world. Who makes us [seem] sometimes dangerous and bad? Their side. When somebody takes your house, maybe you’ll be crazy. Some people lose their minds and they kill themselves. Somebody who’s lost their farm, their house, their everything, and they stay in a tent... [If] you want to judge somebody, judge them when they’re in their house and everything is OK. The Israeli side tries to judge us when we are under pressure. Give me my land, give me my freedom, and after that, judge me. – Sultan