Hebron

Walking through the streets of Hebron’s old city, I was struck first by its similarities to other ancient cities in the region. Damascus, Jerusalem, Nablus, Nazareth – all share narrow, labyrinthine alleyways, groups of women window shopping at a snail’s pace, and stubbly shopkeepers drinking enough coffee and tea for all of us. The atmosphere of these places of commerce – except Jerusalem, as throngs of tourists throw it off a little – always gives me the faint impression that I’ve traveled back in time.

Hebron is said to be one of the world’s oldest cities, although I’ve become skeptical of such claims after seeing the slogan ‘The World’s Oldest City’ in about six urban centers throughout the Middle East – as well as one dusty Turkish village on the Syrian border (though some would say it’s a Syrian village on the Turkish side of the border).

Suffice it to say, Hebron is old. Very, very old. Over the millennia, dozens of people groups have lived in, ruled over, and fought about it.

As we entered deeper into the maze of narrow streets, I started to see things that brought me abruptly back to the present. After a certain point near the edge of the bustling market, shops were closed. Their doors had been welded shut. A few meters down, there was no longer just sky above us. An ugly, rusted chain link fence rested above the market path, keeping piles of trash and sun-bleached buckets from falling onto the cobblestones below. Sellers, some of whom had set out their wares on tables in front of their closed shops, looked on bemusedly as we realized where we were – that this was what we’d read about.

Israeli settlers took the buildings above this market in the years following 1979, when the first house in the bustling old city, Beit Hadassah, was occupied by an extreme right-wing group of Israelis. The Israeli Defense Force (IDF – the Israeli army) assisted the settlers in taking the buildings and has protected them at all costs since.

The IDF has forced more than 550 shops in the bustling central marketplace to shut for good. With only 24 hours’ warning and no chance of appeal, the proprietors are often left with nothing as the heavy iron doors to their shops are welded shut, their merchandise still inside. This video from Israel’s leading human rights organization, B’Tselem, shows three shops being closed in this manner just days before I visited.

The fence above the market was placed there in order to protect Palestinian shoppers from items like trash, dirty water, urine, eggs, and even bleach that, appallingly, are often thrown down by the settlers. We saw streaks of eggs across pashmina scarves hanging in a shop that had been thrown from a window above – a window ironically decorated with a menorah, a symbol usually associated with the pursuit of peace, justice, and enlightenment. The shop’s proprietor, a grizzly old man in a jelebiyah robe named Ali, told us that the eggs had been thrown by a settler woman just that morning.

 

A rusting fence bends under the weight of trash tossed down by Israeli settlers living in the compounds above the market. Photo: J. Fischer.

 

One former market street in Hebron's old city that's been completely closed by the IDF in order to protect Israeli settlers. Photo: J. Fischer.

 

Next door to a settler compound, a Palestinian girl sits on her rooftop in front of an IDF watchpost. Photo: J. Fischer.

 

An Israeli checkpoint in a square at the center of the old city. Photo: J. Fischer.

We walked further along, following our tour guides from the Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI), a group organized and funded by the World Council of Churches. In 2003, Palestinian Christians asked the WCC to send international observers into occupied Palestine to observe and document incidents of injustice and accompany Palestinians through areas where they may be harassed by settlers or IDF soldiers. Our guides, Dan and Muhanad, were both Swedish. They brought us through the Ibrahimi Mosque in the center of the old city, where it’s believed that Abraham is buried, along with Rachel, Sarah, Adam, and Eve. Worshippers there, delighted that internationals wanted to know about their plight, showed us the bullet holes from the 1994 massacre that occurred there during the regular Friday prayer.  Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn-born Israeli settler, with the worshippers’ backs to him, sprayed automatic fire through the mosque, killing 25 and wounding more than 120.

The vast majority of the Israeli public immediately condemned the killings, but until today there stands a monument to Goldstein in the nearby settlement of Kiryat Arba.

Following the massacre and riots that followed it, control of the Ibrahimi mosque was divided between the Muslim waqf and the Jewish settler community. There now stands a synagogue in about a quarter of what was entirely a mosque. There are two entrances, one for Jews and one for Muslims; we entered through both. On the Muslim side, we walked to what both Muslims and Jews recognize as Abraham’s cenotaph (the term for an empty, symbolic tomb). The cenotaph is set in an octagonal room and a green, dusty shroud embroidered with Arabic calligraphy is draped over it. The dividing line of the mosque/synagogue runs through the center of the octagon, so looking from the Muslim side we could see Jewish worshippers paying their respects and from the Jewish side, Muslims. I could only imagine what one thinks of the other as they glance over the prophet they share.

 

An Israeli soldier stands guard near the Ibrahimi Mosque and cave of Machpela. Photo: J. Fischer.

 

Inside the Ibrahimi Mosque, the site of Baruch Goldstein's 1994 massacre. Photo: C. Babcock.

 

Abraham's cenotaph from the Muslim side. Notice the bulletproof glass and the elbow of a young Jewish girl through the window behind it. Photo: C. Babcock.

After walking through an area completely closed to Palestinians (another part of what was once a bustling marketplace), we soon came to the front door of Beit Hadassah, the first building taken in1979. We saw young orthodox Jewish children playing happily inside, safe under the watchful eyes of IDF soldiers on the roof. Muhanad told us that EAPPI observers have to walk with Palestinian schoolchildren as they pass that house because the settlers that live there, both children and adults, often harass them, throwing rocks and eggs and shouting obscenities. The nearly 1,000 IDF soldiers stationed in Hebron to protect 20-25 settler families rarely intervene. This disturbing video is one of many pieces of evidence corroborating Muhanad’s story. In it, Palestinian children and their mothers are walking home from school when they are harassed and physically attacked by settlers. It’s telling that even the Anti-Defamation League condemned the settlers’ actions in 2008.

I couldn’t help but wonder how growing up amidst such insanity will affect both groups of kids: the protected, secure ones playing inside and those walking quickly and fearfully by outside.

Many settlers are lured to the West Bank for economic reasons like subsidized housing and industrial jobs, but Hebron’s settlers are ideological. They believe that Hebron’s Jewish community should be restored, no matter the cost to the surrounding Arab residents. Forgoing discussion of ancient Jewish claims to the city, we know there was a Jewish community in Hebron for hundreds of years until 1929, when, amidst ongoing conflict between Zionist Jews, Palestinian Arabs, and British mandate officials, rioting Arabs massacred 67 and injured 60 of Hebron’s Jewish community. 435 other Jews escaped the pogrom by hiding with their Arab neighbors, a fact that affirms the two communities’ history of largely peaceful coexistence prior to Zionist colonization of Palestine.

But, as Amnon Birman, an Israeli whose mother was one of the original, pre-1929 Jewish residents of Hebron, pointed out in 1997, “claiming Jewish property inside the West Bank could set an awkward precedent, encouraging Arabs to reclaim their ancestral property inside what is now Israel.” He is quoted in a 1997 Philadelphia Enquirer article about the sons, daughters and grandchildren of Hebron’s original Jewish community who now stand in opposition to the settlers, charging that they are an obstacle to peace. It should be noted that none of the current Jewish settlers of Hebron are actual descendants like Mr. Birman.

The precedent set by the settlers’ claims is certainly ‘awkward.’ In fact, the entire Zionist colonization and ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine is ‘awkward’ in the same way. But that’s a matter for another post, likely one the length of a book.

Robert Fisk, a journalist who has been based in the Middle East for over 30 years, often says that war is ‘a total failure of the human spirit.’ The situation in Hebron especially, but also in all of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, is just that: a total failure of our ability to work for justice, propagate equality, and live together in tolerance and peace. I say ‘our’ because we are all culpable, especially those of us living in democratic, open societies. Without mentioning the more obvious blunders in Iraq and Afghanistan, we can look from the United States’ support for despots like Mubarak and Ben Ali to its willful ignoring of both Israel’s and the Palestinian Authority’s human rights abuses as only a few of the innumerable examples of the West putting its self-interest before what’s right. Even Hebron’s community of extremists is funded largely by an American charity, which retains tax-deductible status with the Internal Revenue Service.

Equality and justice are not just catch phrases. They are the keys to a peaceful world. If I learned anything from those two horrible days in Hebron – and believe me, for a very long time it was difficult to take some sort of grand lesson out of the experience – it’s that. The only way to build a more peaceful world is to fight for those ideals whenever we see them violated. I take comfort from knowing that most Israelis that I spoke with about Hebron expressed disgust for the settlers there. One friend who lives in West Jerusalem nearly spat on the ground as he said, ‘Don’t talk to me about those motherf&*$ers. I hate them. They themselves are an existential threat to Israel. If they are allowed to continue their bullshit, Israel will not survive.’ I have to agree with him. Admittedly, it is one of the most extreme places in Palestine as far as how the occupation is realized on the ground. However, the same unjust, racist principles that are used to justify the actions of Hebron’s settlers are used to justify the occupiers’ actions all over the West Bank, Gaza, and even in Israel itself. One group of people have more rights, more protection, more impunity than another simply because of their race and the military might that backs it. Sooner or later, despite billions in American aid and unlimited American political support, such systemic injustice will become unsustainable. Just like the Apartheid regime in South Africa. Just like Mubarak, Ben Ali, and now, God willing, Qaddafi.

It’s simply a matter of time. Let us hope beyond hope that the downfall of the system that sustains Hebron’s extremists will come about peacefully, cooperatively between Palestinians and Israelis, and in a way that ensures some significant measure of justice for all. The only other option is an endless cycle of violence, retribution, and hatred, no matter how much money and might are tossed into the fray.

 

 

Links:

An Introduction to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict by Jewish academic Norman G. Finkelstein (slightly thick, but a fantastic primer if you’re not familiar with the cores issues of the conflict)

B’Tselem

B’Tselem’s archive of incidents in Hebron

Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine and Israel

Breaking the Silence – An organization founded by former IDF soldiers who were stationed in Hebron that ‘have taken it upon themselves to expose the Israeli public to the routine situations of everyday life in the Occupied Territories. We endeavor to stimulate public debate about the price paid for a reality in which young soldiers face a civilian population on a daily basis, and are engaged in the control of that population’s everyday life.’

An article from ynet about the descendants of Hebron’s Jewish community visiting Hebron to show solidarity with Hebroni Palestinians

Collection of articles about the descendants of Hebron’s pre-1929 Jewish community opposing the current settlers

Journalist Chris Hayes’ October 2010 report from Hebron

Christian Peacemaker Teams in Hebron

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