A middle-aged Palestinian man waits behind a metal gate on a deserted stretch of
road in Hebron, during a break in a blistering cold rainstorm earlier this
month. Several meters away, two border police officers take shelter inside a
small cement post, the same site where a month earlier 17-year-old Muhammad
Salaymeh was shot to death by a female border police officer, “N.,” after he
pulled a toy gun and punched one of her fellow officers.
Though N. has
now been reassigned outside of Hebron, little else has changed in the past month
– a couple of officers man the checkpoint, controlling vehicle and foot traffic
in this part of the mixed Palestinian- Jewish city.
For border police
chief at the Tomb of the Patriarchs Cmdr. Taliya Shaanan (which also
includes checkpoint 160), the shooting was nothing out of the ordinary, just
another in a long line of incidents in this powder-keg city in which patrolmen
under attack have used deadly force.
“My first responsibility is to
protect my fighters. She [N] did exactly what she was supposed to do – someone
who comes to hurt us will be hurt, and she reacted in kind.”
Shaanan said
the event was a sensitive one, and that for a few hours the Islamic Wakf
authorities cut off communication and stopped cooperating with the border police
and the IDF in the area, but eventually after a few hours things got back to
normal, because “they [the Islamic authorities] know not to push things too
far.”
Though the day after the event was made notable by riots that
continued for hours across the West Bank, and the shooting was seen by many as
having the potential to spark a new round of violence in the West Bank, Shaanan
said that the event was not a unique one.
When asked why the story of
N.’s use of deadly force attracted so much media coverage, and why she was
showered with such praise by the heads of the border police, Shaanan said it was
“because it happened during a sensitive time, but also because of the positive
way she responded.”
He said the attention the story received was not
because N. was a woman, or because of some effort to attract more enlistment by
women, saying “we have enough female fighters, and we’ll always attract female
fighters,” adding that the Tomb of the Patriarchs Border Police unit has 12
female fighters and one female officer among its 225 officers.
The
incident at checkpoint 160 happened at the end of a week of repeated reports of
IDF soldiers being chased out of West Bank villages by rock-throwing
Palestinians, and one story reported on Ynet – though denied by the IDF and
police – where an undercover border police unit was exposed by Palestinians in a
village in Jenin, and had to abandon its mission and flee.
The reports
were analyzed by Israeli talking heads and pounced on by politicians in
elections mode as being a sign that the IDF had lost its deterrent power in the
West Bank partly through “having their hands tied” in dealing with Palestinian
rioters.
Others remarked that the nearly daily events in the West Bank
hinted that Israel could potentially be facing a third intifada, an analysis
that Shaanan dismisses.
“We’re not talking about a possible third
intifada here. The fact that there are cost-of-living protests and
disturbances in the Palestinian Authority doesn’t mean that we see a third
intifada on the approach. We do see people try to carry out terror attacks
because of frustration, but what is printed in the media and what actually
happens are two different things.”
Still, he admits that “every incident
that happens here can become international.”
No greater example of the
Hebron tinder box exists than the massacre in 1994, when Israeli settler Baruch
Goldstein walked into the Ibrahim Mosque and gunned down 29 unarmed Palestinians
and wounded over a hundred before he was disarmed and beat to death by the
surviving worshipers.
Shaanan gives a play-by-play of the shooting,
pointing at the spot in the Ibrahim Mosque where Goldstein stood and began
unloading clip after clip of his Galil assault rifle into the
worshipers.
Shaanan points to the spot in the corner where Goldstein was
eventually overpowered by the crowd, meters away from where three members of the
Wakf huddle around a coffee pot seeking shelter from the rain
outside.
The massacre was a watershed event for Israel as a whole, and in
particular for the daily operations of the Tomb of the Patriarchs
complex.
No longer did the two sides overlap with one another, and
serious measures were put into place to separate the two. These included
barriers, checkpoints, and a metal wall running through the middle of the
complex.
The border police under Shaanan today have the delicate task of,
in his own words “ensuring religious freedom for both sides, and maintaining
quiet for them as well,” a task that requires allowing both sides to have access
to the entire site on their major holidays, a division that calls for compromise
when Jewish and Muslim holidays overlap.
For Shaanan, a 48-year-old
Galilee Druse and father of three, the border police isn’t what critics decry as
a paramilitary occupation force abusing Palestinians and preserving the status
quo in the West Bank, rather, it is an essential line of defense ensuring
Israelis can live a normal life, and that no acts of terror by Palestinians, or
by Jews, will spark a new wave of violence. Furthermore, to Shaanan, the
diversity of the border police is a model of how other Israeli organizations and
Israeli society as a whole should operate, with Jews, Christians, Muslims and
Druse serving side by side.
Shaanan said that over 300,000 people visited
the holy site in 2012, without any major international incident, even as he
counted some 52 arrests of Palestinians carrying knives in or around the
complex.
Keeping the peace also requires a rather peculiar ritual for
Shaanan, where he walks to the office of the Ibrahim Mosque imam, deep inside
the Jewish half of the complex, and escorts him through the synagogue to the
mosque for prayers.
The commander said that though there are always
extremists looking to disrupt the delicate balance, “both sides understand that
they have a lot to lose if there is another major terror attack which would
force us to close the site.”
Shaanan added that the border patrol in
Hebron is under the command of the IDF in the area, and that in addition to
their other duties, they are meant to be “the right hand of the army in Hebron.”