Experiences in Palestine (Apartheid in Hebron)
Sunday afternoon I went to Hebron to join a group of Internationals.
While Jerusalem seems normal, if you don´t look closely, nothing is normal in Hebron.
Several hundred thousand Palestinians live there. But a big part of the inner city is closed down to all Palestinian cars for the security of just 400 Israeli settlers.
Those settlers are protected by 1800 Israeli soldiers.
The area of Shuhada street used to be the richest shopping street of town, one of the richest in all of Palestine. Now all shops have been closed down.
6 years ago the area had been put under curfew for 3 years.
The 3 families who lived between 2 settlements had their front-doors welded shut. A few days back they got the permission to open their doors again and walk a short part of the street to the nearest checkpoint.
Palestinian families who live at the other part of the street are not allowed to walk past the settlements or to those houses in between.
The inhabitants of houses above Shuhada street or children who want to go to the school above the street have to use staircases and pathways around, because they are banned to walk by the settlements.
But even at the streets or pathways on which Palestinians are allowed to walk they often get harassed by settlers. Most often the Israeli soldiers who are at different checkpoints and could intervene and protect Palestinians or Internationals from settler attacks will not do this. But if a Palestinian pushes back, he or she will get arrested, even a child. This is, why international human right workers will stand at the streets or patrol the pathways so that they, by just being there, hopefully can prevent harassments and attacks by the settlers against the Palestinians and if necessary, intervene by non-violent means.
There is a special presence when children walk to school in the morning or walk home in the afternoon.
The worst incidences happen often on Saturdays, which is the settler’s Sabbath, where they do not drive their cars for religious reasons and instead walk like the Palestinians have to.
Palestinians above the age of 16 are not even allowed to ride a bike. When they are lucky they may push a small two wheel shopping cart to transport heavy stuff. But often not even those carts are allowed through the checkpoints.
Mostly people have to carry everything they buy outside. The hills in Hebron are very steep. I have seen 3 teenagers carrying a new still inpacked washing machine up through the pathways to their mothers’ house.
On school days you can see three other teenagers pushing their handicapped brother or friend up the steep hill. They seem to be used to it. But still half-way they have to stop and catch their breath.
Well, I had to do this too, even without carrying anything. The hill really is steep and I´m not much of a sportswoman.
One of the things people there have to carry regularly are the heavy iron gas-bottles, which they have to connect to their gas-stoves to cook their meals, since there are no gas-lines in Hebron.
At the checkpoints which lead of out the Israeli controlled area Palestinians and internationals have to walk through metal detectors and all bags get checked.
At the inside checkpoints, and there are many of them, bags often get checked again.
Palestinian men also often have to lift their shirts and their trousers shafts. Sometimes they even have to lift their under-shirts and turn in a circle, which is quite humiliating for Palestinian men. Women are normally checked with a metal detector, sometimes, if they are lucky, their bags get checked with those metal detectors, as well. But when they are not so lucky and they have big bags with shopping, they sometimes have to empty them on the street.
When anybody protests verbally, he will be detained, which means his ID card is taken and checked and phoned in to military command. And then he has to wait for half an hour or one hour or longer until the soldiers get a clear from their superiors. If the Palestinian protests too much, the police is called and he is taken to the station, where he will be detained for several hours and nearly always has to pay a fine before released.
So nearly everybody complies quietly.
Outside the closed area, in the area which is officially controlled by the Palestinian authority, is now the market. But in reality, the Israeli army can enter the area whenever they want and they do this on a daily basis, arresting people and sometimes shooting whole families.
One of the market streets leads to the Ibrahim's mosque, the place, where according to Christian, Islamic and Jewish tradition Abraham and Isaak have been buried. It was here were in 1994 Baruch Goldstein, a religious radical, and an army physician went with a machine gun and opened fire at the people praying inside, killing 29 and wounding about 200 worshipers.
One Palestinian who lives close by the Jewish Tel Rumeida settlement has seen Baruch Goldstein talking to Baruch Mazel, the leader of the settlers here, just hours before the massacre.
But of course, the testimony of a Palestinian does not count in an Israeli court.
After the massacre Ibrahim´s mosque was closed. It was then reopened after 6 months, and part of the mosque was turned into a synagogue. The Palestinians say that the settlers have gotten their synagogue - paid in Palestinian blood.
The street leading to the checkpoint before the mosque, an area were many Palestinians still live, passes a settlement block. Palestinians have spanned an iron net over the street because the hateful settlers from this block regularly throw trash and stones out of their windows on shoppers and passerbys. The big pieces of trash are stopped by the net, you can still see them, when you look up, but dirty fluids still get through, sometimes spoiling the merchandise of the shopkeepers.
A couple of weeks back a group of French visitors got showered with the stuff.
The checkpoint at this street is the biggest and toughest in Hebron. People are often detained there for a long time and for no reason at all.
Human right workers try to support those who protest against mistreatment or those who are detained or arrested. But there is very little they can actually do. Official complaints are filed but nearly always they are not acted upon by Israeli authorities.
But while Palestinians are humiliated and deprived of rights and comforts for "security reasons", the Israeli settlers can do whatever they want. They can drive their cars everywhere. While everything that looks even remotely like a stick or a metal pipe is being confiscated from Palestinians, many Israeli settlers wear constantly handguns in belts around their hips, others have big guns strapped over their shoulders.
They can harass, hit or stone whoever they want, or destroy Palestinian property whenever they want. Unless they seriously hurt somebody they never get arrested.
They see themselves as superior to their Palestinian neighbors and they show it.
Over the years they have taken over many Palestinian houses. Sometimes after months or years, they have been evicted by court order, sometimes not. At other times there were eviction orders, but they were not followed through.
One of those houses, nearly as big as a housing block, was taken over only 2 months before I came to Hebron. A large Palestinian family had built it. It was nearly finished and the family was ready to move in, when the Israeli settlers came and took it over. An Israeli court has given the settlers an eviction notice, but it was not enforced.
Close to the area were the Internationals live, a Palestinian man has rented a small house from people who have left, probably because of being harassed so much. But the settlers had destroyed all the interior of the house, since it is close to their settlement and they want the house to be theirs or empty.
The Palestinian has a court order that he is allowed to renovate and then move into the house - but not right now, maybe later, some time later.
For now his house is a closed military zone, where nobody is allowed to go. Which doesn't hinder the Israeli settlers to be inside whenever they want. The other week they had their bonfire in front of that very house. The restrictions of "Closed military zones" only apply to Palestinians.
When the settlers walk or even drive by,they often haul verbal abuse at Palestinians or Internationals.
If they don’t curse us as Nazis or bitches they tell us to go to Sudan and save the Christians there or to the Kurdish areas and help the Kurds to get a state.
They seem to be totally blind to the injustice they do to the Palestinians.
