Hebron, the Unfriendly City (Extract)

By DANIELLA CHESLOW
Extract from an article in Issue 11, September 15, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here. As Hebron plays host to bitter confrontations between Jew and Jew, the Israeli courts and security forces struggle to maintain a modicum of public order, safety and free speech in this deeply troubled city On a sunny May morning, Rabbi Simcha Hochbaum shows tourists around his neighborhood in the Jewish enclave in the West Bank city of Hebron. Inside the building known as Beit Hadassah, a large imposing stone structure built as a clinic for Jews and non-Jews in 1893, one room has been set aside as a museum. The only illumination in this small, windowless room comes from back-lit black and white photographs of the bloodied, bedridden Jewish victims of the 1929 Arab massacre in the city. The eerie memorial, established by the Jewish community of Hebron in the 1980s, bears witness to the act that ended centuries of Jewish-Arab coexistence in Hebron. Hochbaum, 41, an Orthodox rabbi who moved to Hebron 13 years ago from New York, leads these tours through the Hebron Fund, which donates proceeds from the $40 tours to the Jewish community in the city. According to the Hebron Fund website, the itinerary gives an opportunity to visit "with your great-great-grandparents, the founders of our nation" and to experience "the pioneering spirit of the Jews who live there now." Jews revere Hebron as the holy city where Abraham made his first land purchase, a cave to bury his wife, Sarah, in biblical Israel; that cave, now known in Hebrew as Me'arat Hamakhpelah (and, in English, as the Tomb of the Patriarchs), is the traditional burial place of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca and Jacob and Leah. King David was anointed and ruled the Hebrews from Hebron for seven years before moving his capital to Jerusalem and his son Absalom began his revolt here. A Jewish presence remained in Hebron, just 18 miles southwest of Jerusalem, for millennia, until the unprovoked 1929 pogrom during the British Mandate, when Arabs killed 67 Jews and wounded 60, and Jewish homes and synagogues were ransacked. In Israel's War of Independence, in 1948, the city fell to the Jordanians, but was recaptured when Israel took over the West Bank in the 1967 Six-Day War. Nationalist religious Jews soon attempted to resettle there and in 1970 the settlement of Kiryat Arba was established adjacent to Hebron. Today, Kiryat Arba has grown into a town of some 9,000 inhabitants. In 1979, a group of 10 women and 30 children lived in Beit Hadassah for nine months without water or electricity until they convinced the Israel Defense Forces to allow them to stay in the city, a decision that led to the establishment of the Jewish community in the heart of the city. Today, Hebron settlers and yeshiva students number nearly 1,000, living among 166,000 Palestinians. To Jews, the landscape of Hebron is covered with ancient sacred sites and memorials to more recent deaths. To Hochbaum, Hebron is a city of horror and miracle, of murder and rebirth. Hebron's history is his own personal history: He has named his daughter Shalhevet, after the infant Shalhevet Pas, killed as she sat in her stroller by a Palestinian sniper in 2001. He leads tourists to the historic Jewish graveyard of the city, where today's settlers fought to bury their dead. And he holds up a bullet-ridden coffee urn to his visitors, evidence of recent times when Palestinians waged continuous gunfire on the Jewish residents of the city. But Hebron is holy to Palestinians, too. Muslims revere the city as al-Khalil, the friend, because according to Muslim tradition, Ibrahim (Abraham) is the "friend of God." Palestinians refer to the Tomb of the Patriarchs as the Ibrahimi Mosque and also believe that Abraham, father of Islam, is buried there. According to Christian tradition, Hebron was one of the three cities in which Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, is said to have lived. Palestinians, too, mark the streets and sites of the city with attacks by the enemy, particularly the area around the Ibrahimi Mosque, where, in 1994, Baruch Goldstein, an American-born and -trained physician and resident of Kiryat Arba, killed 29 Muslims and wounded some 150 while they were at prayer, before he was killed by a mob. Of all the flashpoints between Israelis and Palestinians over the past 100 years, Hebron has always been one of the hottest, filled with emotion and violence. But more recently, Hebron has also become a flashpoint for conflict between Jew and Jew, epitomizing the deepest rifts between the left and the right, both of whom see in Hebron the chance to shape Israeli policy and public opinion regarding the city in particular, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in general, and the borders and character of the Jewish state. When compared to internal politics in other countries, "the level of hostility that exists between the left and right in Israel is higher than the hostility between similar camps in other countries or in other places in Israel," says Yair Sheleg, a researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute and a columnist for the Haaretz daily newspaper. And, in Hebron, especially, the conflict is much more than "an argument. It's an issue of life and death. Each side really thinks the other side is endangering the existence of the state." And as Hebron plays host to some of the bitterest standoffs between Jew and Jew, the Israeli courts and security forces struggle to maintain a modicum of public order, safety and free speech in this troubled city. When Yehuda Shaul visits Hebron, he walks the same streets as Simcha Hochbaum, but sees a very different city. Shaul, 25, a burly Jerusalemite and, like Hochbaum, an Orthodox Jew, looks at the main road connecting the Jewish points in Hebron, known to Palestinians as the Street of the Martyrs and to the settlers as King David Street, and he says he sees the doors he helped seal shut when he served there during his stint as a conscript in the IDF, from 2001 to 2004. The green steel doors, many spray-painted with Jewish stars and the word "revenge" in Hebrew, once opened onto Palestinian shops and homes. According to Shaul, the Palestinian families who live on the street may not walk out of those front doors; instead they enter and exit their houses through the back windows and clamber onto their roofs. Metal netting stretches over their balconies - a vital defense, he says, against rocks the settlers throw at them. For the past two years, Shaul has also been leading tours to Hebron, as head of a group known as Breaking the Silence (BTS), a non-profit organization of former soldiers that he founded three months after his discharge from the army in order to collect testimonies from soldiers about abuses they say they committed during their military service. The organization's first act was a June 2004 exhibit of photographs that Shaul and his friends took while serving in Hebron. The purpose of BTS's guided tours to Hebron is, according to the group's website, to "introduce our audiences to the complexities of the occupation" and to "force Israeli society to address the reality which it created." In 2007, BTS, funded by diverse groups including the Moriah Fund, the British Embassy in Tel Aviv, the European Union and the New Israel Fund, brought 3,000 people into the city. This is Shaul's Hebron: the burial site of Baruch Goldstein in Kiryat Arba, which once held a shrine for his admirers; a walk through the Street of the Martyrs that shows the five Jewish settlement areas and the shuttered Palestinian commercial district, and a visit to a Palestinian family surround by hostile Jewish settlers in the Tel Rumeida neighborhood. As a follow-up to the Oslo Accords, in 1997, then-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat signed the Hebron Protocol, which divided the city into two zones: H-1, encompassing some 80 percent of the city territory, was given to Palestinian control; the remaining 20 percent, including the Jewish enclaves, was given to the Israelis and is called H-2. The separation ostensibly aimed to ease tensions between the conflicting communities, but Shaul and other left-wing activists contend that the situation of Palestinians has worsened significantly since this division. In 1997, Shaul claims, 35,000 Palestinians lived in H-2. He says the IDF and the police, responsible for both security and public order, have allowed the settlers, who reject the division and seek to undermine it, to wreak havoc and destruction on the Palestinians in H-2. Michael Sfard, legal council to BTS, accuses the military of issuing "all kinds of orders" to disrupt Palestinian life in H-2, "so Palestinians left by the thousands." The Palestinians, he says, "can't use cars and can't walk in the street, so the settlers basically got their desire, which is to have the city clean of Palestinians. The next wish is to clean the city of left-wingers." The settlers counter that the BTS tours constitute political demonstrations, provocative support for the Jewish people's worst enemies and a stab in the back to the Israeli security forces. As the BTS tour bus rolled into Hebron on a hot, dry Wednesday in early August, Shaul tells his group, mostly secular Israelis from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, to imagine the center of a city comprising almost 170,000 people. Whatever they came up with, the reality that confronted them was a stark, dusty square, populated only by settlers and police. Shaul pointed out what used to be a wholesale market and vegetable shops, holding up photographs of the area in the 1990s, when it was still a bustling commercial district. But it was a challenge to hear Shaul from more than a few feet away because settlers dogged his group from the moment they got off the bus. "Welcome to Hebron, city of the fathers!" one yelled into a megaphone. "Yehudaleh," another called, using the diminutive for Yehuda, "I see you've changed your shirt from Breaking the Silence to Breaking an Egg!" yelled another, referencing a past tour when Shaul was pelted with raw eggs. The 24 tourists made their way down Street of the Martyrs / King David Street, surrounded by at least 100 policemen, who formed a buffer sometimes two or three officers deep between the leftists and the settlers. Each time Shaul wanted to stop or start moving, he signaled to Gush Etzion Police Substation Head Moshe Moshe, who called out to his men, who marched in step with the visitors. Some settlers, police and leftists held cameras, recording each other warily. The police kept the settlers and leftists physically apart, but they allowed the settlers to use their megaphone. Just making sure that the tourists remain physically safe - protected from the angry Jews more than from the hostile Palestinians - requires tremendous effort, according to Hebron Police Superintendent Danny Poleg. "This has no parallel anywhere else in the country, that 150 guards have to come to a demonstration of 15 people," says Danny Poleg, superintendent of Hebron police. In an e-mail to The Report, Poleg further elaborates that "the absence of adequate security, in the circumstances that this organization [BTS] has created would likely lead to large-scale destructive damage and therefore we must bring in special backup forces to the area." But Shaul and BTS co-director Mikhael Manekin say that the police protection is provided only because the organization petitioned the High Court of Justice against the police and army in May. BTS claimed that the security forces canceled nine tours between April and May, often declaring the city a closed military zone or removing Shaul and Manekin from the area because they were "disturbers of the public peace." BTS further charged that the army and police were caving into settler violence and restricting access to the city based on political beliefs, rather than arresting the people who, Shaul and Manekin claimed, threw bricks, eggs and tomatoes at the leftists, slashed their tires and sometimes lay under their buses at the entrance to Hebron. Extract from an article in Issue 11, September 15, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here.