http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27883685
Not even trying to hide the corruption it seems.
A Palestinian Christian family that preaches non-violence from a farm in the West Bank is battling to hold on to land it has owned for 98 years. Now surrounded by Israeli settlements, the family is a living example of the idea of peaceful resistance.
On his farm outside Bethlehem, Daher Nassar is picking apples from the ruins of the orchard he planted at least eight years ago. The fruit is scattered across ground freshly opened and imprinted with the tracks of a bulldozer. At the field's edge, branches reach out from inside a mound of earth, the bark stripped and mangled, unripe almonds still clinging to the trees.
On 19 May a Palestinian shepherd from the village of Nahalin was out at first light and saw the bulldozer at work in the field, guarded by Israeli soldiers. By the time Nassar arrived the whole orchard - the best part of a decade's work - was gone. His English is far from fluent, but there's no mistaking the pain in his voice: "Why you broke the trees?"
A spokesperson for the Israeli military authorities in the West Bank said the trees were planted illegally on state land.
Nassar's sister, Amal, has a different explanation. The government, together with the Israeli settlers who live around the farm, is "trying to push us to violence or push us to leave," she says. Amal insists that her family will not move from the land, nor will they abandon their commitment to peaceful resistance.
"Nobody can force us to hate," she says. "We refuse to be enemies."
For the most part, though, the hills around Bishara's land were still open countryside, farmed by Palestinian families or used as grazing by shepherds. In the 40 years since, Israeli settlements have been built on every one .
There are five settlements in total, the nearest so close that the settlers' voices carry across the valley to the farm. The most recent, Netiv Ha'avot, is little more than a strip of houses encircled by coils of razor wire and festooned with Israeli flags. The largest, Beitar Illit, is a town of more than 40,000 people, a blaze of lights on the hillside at night. All of them are considered illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this.
As they watched the settlements rise around them in the 1980s, the Nassars began to worry. Their farm was in a prime location, close to the main north-south road through the West Bank and on high ground.
In 1991 their fears were confirmed. The military authorities declared that more than 90% of the farm now belonged to the State of Israel. Gush Etzion, one of the biggest settlement blocks in the West Bank, looked set to expand on to the Nassar farm.
In 1924, realising that the Ottoman Empire was finished and worried by rising tensions between Arabs and Jews, Bishara Nassar's father had registered his property with Palestine's new imperial rulers.The British issued land deeds that specified the size and borders of the farm, and Bishara's father, who was a literate man, held on to the documents. Almost 70 years later, those papers would form the basis of a legal case that has been in front of the Israeli courts for 23 years. It remains unresolved.
When they were informed, after 10 years in the military courts, that their Palestinian lawyer was not eligible to contest the case in Israel's supreme court - because he carried West Bank identity papers - they found an Israeli firm willing to take it on. When they were told to provide a land survey, they hired (at a cost of $70,000) an Israeli surveyor, and sent him to consult maps and documents in the imperial archives of London and Istanbul. When they were asked to bring witnesses in support of their claim to have farmed the land for three generations, they hired a bus to take more than 30 Palestinian villagers to the military court near Ramallah. "We had to wait five hours outside the court under the sun," remembers Amal Nassar. "And then, after five hours, a soldier come out, they say, 'We don't want witnesses, go home.'
"Every time they see you are ready to meet their demands, they ask [for something] more and more difficult, [so] that you say 'I am fed up, I cannot.' Yes, this [is] always the process. We know it. It's a game to push us to leave."
The way Amal sees it, the Israeli military and the settlers, having failed to evict the family by legal means, are now trying to force them out. She remembers the settlers who uprooted 250 young olive trees in 2002, and who permanently closed the road to the farm with rubble. The demolition orders posted on the gate, threatening to destroy the Nassars' home and water wells. The soldiers who, in 2009, forced her 72-year-old mother out of bed at gunpoint in the middle of the night and made her wait in the cold while they searched the farm.
Not even trying to hide the corruption it seems.