According to the Abrahamic religions, that is to say Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Hebron is where human civilisation started. It now appears to me to be where it is tearing itself apart. The ideological and actual struggle between the Arab population and the Jewish Israeli settlers is fraught with hatred and violence and whilst walking through the now dilapidated markets of the old town or the deserted streets of the Israeli settlement a sense of intransient destruction pervades.
Trade and activity in the antiquated souk of the old town is sluggish at best due to the strangulation by the settlement developments and the forced closures of many shops. Some resilient traders remain, “this shop has been in my family for over sixty years and I will stay here till I die” said Jamaal the Hebron market trader in his misplaced Mancunian accent. In the alley outside his store there is wire mesh and fencing overhead to protect those walking below from the festering waste that the settlers throw down from above. “They throw on to us dirty nappies, used toilet paper, waste water, half full cans of drink….” hissed an angry but resilient young man who still lives with his family in the old town. The proof is there for all to see rotting on the wire mesh in the mid day sun.
Once inside the Jewish Israeli settlement there was a complete absence of any signs of life or activity. All of the shops were barricaded closed and the trees and shrubs were reclaiming the buildings. To demarcate this desolate territory as exclusively Jewish all of the shop fronts have been sprayed with the Star of David. One can’t help but feel that there is either a complete misunderstanding or disregard for history. Didn’t the Nazis mark all Jewish properties in the same manner? When speaking to the official spokesman for the Jewish community in Hebron, David Wilder, I challenged him about the rubbish thrown down on his Arab neighbours and he reasoned “we have been trying to clean that for a number of years but we have been prevented because it can be used as a serious piece of propaganda against us. One has to remember that for many years people were physically attacked…and there were times when some people, especially the younger folk, had difficulty controlling themselves”.
The settlers live completely separated from the Arab community in a fortified complex dominated by barbed wire, concrete roadblocks, army watchtowers and a road network reserved exclusively for Jewish Israelis. Throughout the markets they have occupied the upper floors of many of the buildings and in some cases they control whole streets which are barricaded with steel gates and barbed wire. Consequently they can roam through the upper floors of the sealed buildings and the overhead passageways almost completely out of view of their unwanted neighbours. Human interaction between the two communities is non-existent.
The click click of rotating turnstiles and the bleep bleep of metal detectors is not the sound one usually associates with the entrance to a place of worship. It is unfortunately the welcome received at the Ibrahimi mosque in the heart of Hebron’s old city. As well as being the supposed burial place of Abraham, Isaac and Rebecca, Joseph, Jacob and Leah it is also the place of one of the most barbaric incidents in Palestine’s recent history. During morning prayers on February 25, 1994, during the holy month of Ramadan, a settler by the name of Dr, Baruch Goldstein burst into the mosque in Israeli military uniform and opened fire on the prostrating worshipers. By the time he was overwhelmed and killed he had managed to murder 29 men and boys and wound almost 200 more. It is a shocking and depressing thought that his tomb and memorial are to this day a pilgrimage sight for ultra-right-wing Zionists.
In the eyes of the settlers the real breakdown in trust and coexistence between the Arabs and Jews in Hebron was in 1929 with the murder of 67 Jews by the Arabs and the expulsion of the remaining community by the British. The amorality of this act is undeniable but the question of causality has to be raised. Was it not the case that the violent breakdown in Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine was because of the stated designs of the Zionists to take over the whole country for Jewish domination? David Wilder’s response was categorical “No, Not at all! The fact is Haj Amin al-Husseini (the grand mufti at the time) was a tremendous Jew hater and anti Semite. In 1929 it was the period before the war of independence when Zionism was still a very small movement…the land was pretty much desolate”. This is very thin ice to tread. By 1929 the Balfour declaration had been signed and the Zionists had the support of the British for their homeland in Mandate Palestine. Arab fears and resentments were very real and justified. That the land was pretty much desolate is a myth that has been categorically disproven so many times it’s not necessary for me to dispute it.
Not only are the settlers completely cut off from their Arab neighbours in Hebron but they are also sitting on the fringes of Israeli society. Their messianic conviction that there needs to be a restitution of the Jewish people in all of Eretz Israel doesn’t bode well with many Israelis. With that said the power of the settler communities is growing with much of their support and money coming from ideological Zionists, particularly from America. I wanted to know if David thought that if Israel were to be guaranteed its security in a final political solution then the Palestinian people should be granted a viable and sovereign Palestinian state. His answer was very telling, “of course, they can form a state in Sinai (a large desert in Egypt) if they want…or east of the Jordan river in the country that is today called Jordan.” In essence he means there is no place for the Palestinians in Palestine!
Many Israeli apologists try to portray the disastrous colonisation of Hebron as the workings of a group of fundamentalists living in a messianic fantasy world outside of mainstream Israeli society. However, the Israeli government provides four soldiers for every settler and it builds the settler only roads, the watchtowers and the fortifications. With such blatant and explicit support from central government it is not credible to dismiss this as the workings of a fringe group of extremists. To quote a 2004 report by the Alternative Information Centre which is a joint Israeli-Palestinian initiative “Israel’s settlement policy, which supports the presence of radical Jewish fundamentalists with a strong anti-Arab identity in the middle of a Palestinian city, is the proximate reason for the high level of violence in Hebron…”.
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