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By International
Solidarity Movement
I visited Hebron between the dates of September 13th and 20th 2004,
part of a group of 10 ISM activists which included 5 Buddhists from
the UK. Tariq was our local coordinator. He is 24 years old, a
student of engineering. I learnt that his father had been detained
without trial by the Israeli army for the past 2.5 years, the rest
of his family had emigrated to Jordan but that he was refused exit
from Israel because of his father - who he is not allowed to visit.
His top two projects for us were first to help local villages resist
the Israeli Apartheid Wall that was being built on their land, and
second to help the situation in the Old City, now almost a ghost
town because of the great number of soldiers there and the
difficulty of living so close to the aggressive Israeli settlers.
This report focuses on the Old City not the Wall. Topics:
Closure of Shuhadda Street to Palestinians Checkpoints and Soldiers
patrols - Freedom of movement
Army closure of shops Continuous curfew for 3 years Death of the Old
City market Settlers' harassment Process of colonization, extension
of illegal settlements Tit-for-Tat violence Collective punishment
Water rights – Economic warfare Settlers' propaganda / Media
blackout
Hebron is presently unique in the West Bank because it has a
substantial illegal Israeli settlement (Beit Hadassah) right in the
very centre of the Old City, creating a situation where the lives of
some 60,000 Palestinians are systematically disrupted by some 4,000
soldiers for the sake of some 400 settlers. It is a ludicrous
situation and would almost be funny if it was not so real and the
cause of so much suffering for so many people. It is also a part of
a much larger process of gradual illegal invasion and colonization.
During the time we were in Hebron the situation was relatively quiet
and there was little for us to do except walk about the Old City
meeting people and speaking with them. Most people were very
friendly as soon as we said "Salaam Al-e-Qum" and smiled, however
there was clearly a lot of tension in the air and some suspicion -
probably because the settlers are in the habit of walking up and
down 'their' city and there is a real fear of them extending their
territory.
We were staying for a night in one of the further suburbs of Hebron,
and when leaving in the morning, passed a little girl who started
crying violently - we learnt later that she thought we were
settlers! In general though we were made very welcome indeed - very
few friendly foreigners find their way to Hebron these days.
Quiet it might have been, but I should emphasize very strongly that
'quiet' does not mean 'all right'. Once or twice in the silent
streets I found myself thinking "this seems all right" and had to
remind myself of the facts of the matter.
•Closure of Shuhadda Street to Palestinians
Despite Hebron being a part of Palestine and not Israel, the main
street of the town (Shuhadda Street) is now completely closed to
Palestinians, except for the very few who live there. This means the
town is effectively cut into two halves, to cross those few yards
means a detour of several kilometers. The town's graveyard is on the
wrong side of the road, this means local people are unable to visit
their family tombs.
Shuhadda Street has become a sort of mid-Western film set - hot,
dusty, and empty, with guns never very far away. The only people who
walk up and down it now are the settlers, who generally carry
machine guns, even the young teenagers, strange to see them toting
machine guns and their Jewish kippa caps on. This is quite scary to
see, even for me, who was less likely to be shot at.
We were not able to speak to any settlers although we could probably
have arranged it if we had wished, being Internationals. It was
clear however that there is absolutely no communication between
locals and settlers. The soldiers are supposed to be there to keep
the peace between the two sides but this seems to mean keeping the
locals firmly to the edges and allowing the settlers to walk where
they please. Certainly the Palestinians do not see the soldiers
there to keep the peace, rather to dominate them.
•Checkpoints and Soldiers patrols
Behind the main street are a maze of smaller streets leading up to
the Old City. These can only be reached by passing an army
checkpoint continuously manned by soldiers with machine guns, making
passage into the Old City a nerve-wracking affair.
Most days however, what is in a way worse than the machine guns is
the arbitrariness of the soldiers: they can detain any Palestinian
at any time for any or no reason, and often do, making them sit at
the side of the road in the hot sun for many hours at a time.
Not surprisingly people have chosen to avoid the area, and the
town's main market has moved about 1km away.
In addition to the checkpoints, in the narrow streets of the Old
City there are frequent 6-man soldiers' patrols, before they enter
you can hear them lifting their machine guns into firing position
and cocking the trigger. No doubt they are afraid themselves but it
is very intimidating to hear.
Hebron is well-known among international aid agencies, we met CPT
(the Christian Peacemaker Team) and TIPH (the Temporary
International Presence in Hebron) while there. TIPH's job is to
monitor and report on the situation, CPT intervenes more actively if
local people are being harassed.
• Army closure of shops
As well as the checkpoints and the patrols, about 200 of the Old
City shops have been summarily closed by military order, and many
houses have had their front doors welded closed by the army. This
means that in some cases the owners can only enter and leave their
homes through a window at the rear of the house, or over the
rooftops.
• Continuous curfew for 3 years
In addition to the checkpoints, the patrols, and the closed shops,
the Old City has suffered from a strict curfew for three of the past
four years. An Israeli army curfew generally means that the soldiers
have orders to shoot to kill on sight, it creates an extremely
dangerous situation for any person to go anywhere at any time, even
outside the official curfew hours. This includes delivery of basic
supplies of food and medicine, and also the movement of children,
who are as likely to be shot as adults under a curfew.
Who can blame the shopkeepers and market stallholders for moving?
Although the curfew is not presently in force, evidence of the
effects of Army violence and repression is everywhere - bullet holes
in shopfronts, cobwebs on the fronts of shops...
Although things were quiet, the Army has retained all its
observation and sniper positions around the city - many of the most
strategic buildings have camouflage netting draped over the top
balcony or steel observation posts perched on the roof. We were told
that in reality sniper positions are often concealed, but occupied
or not, the visible ones create a constant and frightening reminder
that the city is under armed occupation and that curfew can be
reimposed at any time.
• Settlers harassment
In addition to the checkpoints, the patrols, the closed shops and
the curfew, we heard a great many reports of vandalism and verbal
abuse by the settlers.
In many cases the houses of the settlers directly overhang the
streets of the Old City, and here the locals have had to fit thick
metal mesh across the streets to catch the rubbish that has been
thrown out of the settler's windows onto the street - and the
Palestinians - below. In several cases the metal mesh was sagging
due to the weight of debris above. It is of course impossible for me
to say what motives the settlers may have for throwing rubbish in
this way - had they wished to continue being malicious t hey could
have thrown foul water, but I did not hear of this being done.
Nonetheless they must have known full well that the streets below
their windows were Palestinian streets. A lot of Palestinian windows
were smashed, apparently by stones often thrown by settlers'
children.
These all combined - together with the real violence of recent years
- have made the whole of the Old City into a ghost town. The reason
given by the Army is always "security", but one feels the real aim
is colonization, certainly the effect is depopulation of the Old
City through fear and strangulation.
These processes of displacement and harassment have not ended yet.
• Process of colonization, extension of illegal settlements
On the outskirts of Hebron is the much larger illegal Israeli
settlement of Qiryat Arba. For those interested, this means 'Town of
the Four', referring to the four biblical couples reported to be
buried here in the Cave of Machpelah under the Ibrahami Mosque -
Adam and Eve (!), Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob
and Leah. This biblical fame explains a good deal of why the city
has become such a battleground and focus for extremist Israeli
settlers - it is the no.2 site in Palestine for both Jews and
Muslims. The locals probably wish it had never been mentioned! It
was a women from Qiryat Arba who in 1979 illegally occupied the old
Jewish hospital of Beit Hadassah in Hebron's Old City, leading
directly to its present death-like state.
• Settlers' harassment
Walking up to Qiryat Arba, and along the road which marks the border
between Israeli and Palestinian areas, one sees graffiti which has
been sprayed on the doors of many Palestinian homes - Stars of David
and angry writing in Hebrew (which I have not yet been able to
translate but will). The feeling I get is that the graffiti is
saying "you're next..." and I can imagine that it is extremely
intimidating to receive. It is in fact eerily similar to tactics
used by the Nazis in Germany, not a happy thought.
Of course you can dismiss provocative graffiti as being 'only' spray
paint, more concretely there are plans afoot for a new Israelis-only
road to link Qiryat Arba with the Cave of Machpelah and one can be
sure that it will not be long before it is extended a few yards
further to the illegal settlement in the heart of the city. Up on
the border road, there are plans to construct a new Jewish synagogue
on the Muslim side immediately adjacent to Muslim homes. This is
presently being blocked by the Israeli authorities - but it is
probably only a matter of time until they arrange the necessary
military cover - ie a new Army checkpoint or base - and it goes
ahead!
Hebron has a long history with ownership moving between Jews and
Muslims many times over the centuries. For this reason, since the
Jews started their illegal settlements in the area there have been
major propaganda efforts to justify their right to be here, an
Internet search looking for 'Hebron' or 'Beit Hadassah' will quickly
lead you to some of these.
They consider their occupation of Hebron to be legitimate because
there were Jews living there in the past, most recently in 1929 and
most anciently when Abraham purchased the cave of Machpelah for his
burial site sometime around 1,800 B.C! Their desire to live here
would not be so bad if it was based on a desire to peacefully
co-exist. Instead the settlers have gone on record as aiming to
completely expel the Palestinians from Hebron or at least from its
Old City. This is no idle threat as the 4,000 soldiers based here
constantly remind one.
• Tit-for-Tat violence
Over the years there has been a great deal of violence in Hebron,
not least in 1994 when Baruch Goldstein, a settler, entered the
mosque and massacred 29 Muslims while they were at prayer, wounding
a further 200. According to my guidebook, there is now a shrine to
him in the adjacent illegal Israeli settlement of Qiryat Arba. The
guidebook (Lonely Planet) describes him as "a popular settler hero".
Not surprisingly there has been a good deal of tit-for-tat violence
over the years, but with the massive army presence in town it is
mostly Palestinian civilians who are injured or killed.
Palestinian suicide bombers have certainly killed settlers over the
years, and this led to an Israeli Army invasion of whole district &
city in 2002 - after similar invasions of Jenin, Tulkarm, etc. We
were told that the Israeli Army becomes nervous if it is not able to
operate inside a city. The invasion is partly a tactic to expose &
kill - to 'flush out' - the most active resistance fighters.
• Collective punishment
As well as being in the Old City, we spent some time in other areas
of Hebron, and it was here that it was most obvious that what is
happening on Hebron's Old City is part of a much larger violent
occupation of the whole country. The reality of the situation is not
immediately apparent to the naked eye, you have to have things
explained by a local. For instance, there are many gaps or piles of
rubble between the houses. Why?
Collective punishment has been very much used by the Army, this
usually takes the form of blowing up or bulldozing the family home
of anyone who has been discovered to be a suicide bomber or other
form of fighter. To give an example, we stayed in a house in the
suburbs, next door there was an empty space with a big pile of
rubble. On asking, we were told that this house was blown up by the
Israeli Army some three months ago, the explosion was so violent
that it blew in all the doors and windows on that side of our host's
house. The family were living in a makeshift tent in one corner of
the space. Across the small valley we could see a bulldozer working,
we were told that was a house which had been blown up only last
week. On the corner of the street was a small corrugated iron shop,
the owner used to occupy a five-storey house on the site before that
was blown up some years ago.
These are examples of collective punishment, which is specifically
outlawed under international law and the Geneva Conventions, which
prohibit the punishment of innocent people who may be connected with
a 'guilty' party. Israel and her Supreme Court have consistently
refused to uphold the Geneva Conventions and the illegality of its
collective punishment, using a variety of reasons but notably that
the Occupied Palestinian Territories (ie the West Bank) never
constituted a sovereign state so Israel's invasion and occupation of
Palestine do not count as the invasion and occupation of another
country - and so international humanitarian law does not apply!
• Water rights – Economic warfare
Besides collective punishment, there is lower-level but on-going
economic warfare being waged by Israel against the Palestinians. An
example of this is water - Hebron has many natural springs, but
local people are not allowed to use them. Instead they have to buy
water at considerable cost, often delivered by tankers, while Israel
helps itself to 80% of the water in the underground aquifers for
intensive agriculture and 'modern' plumbing. .
• Conclusion
We went to Hebron at Tariq's invitation, inspired by his vision of
bringing life back into the Old City. He thought that our presence
might give locals confidence to re-enter it in greater numbers.
Maybe we had some effect, it is hard to be sure. One idea he had was
to organize a daily 'boy's march' through the checkpoint (children
below a certain age do not need ID) to generate momentum and
confidence in entering the Old City, followed by us or others
putting on a concert or other entertainment to draw in the locals.
One thing we realized while there was just how hard it is to
actually DO anything faced with such overwhelming odds and where
people have more-or-less got used to the wrongness of the situation.
We felt very strongly Tariq's - and I am sure, thousands of others')
acute frustration and yet puzzlement what to do.
ISM has now established a flat for volunteers in the centre of the
Old City, as we left five others arrived, and hopefully they will
build on what we have done so far. One day, Palestine will be free …
Source: www.scoop.co.nz
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