Hebron: City of Terror
by
Ran HaCohen
Dissident Voice
February 20, 2003
Israeli
"security analysts" describe the Palestinian city of Hebron as a
"city of terror". This is true: Israel’s state terrorism is nowhere
as brutal. If you wish to see ethnic
cleansing at work, Hebron is a good instance.
Hebron Maps
Take a look at Map 1
Hebron District.
Very roughly, the district
is a circle with a radius of about 10km (6 miles) around the city of Hebron.
Within this small area, the Oslo Accords allocated to the Palestinian Authority
dozens of disconnected semi-autonomous enclaves ("Area B", civil
Palestinian control and Israeli security control). Hebron city itself, with its
130.000 Palestinian inhabitants, is typically surrounded to the north, east and
south by contiguous "Area C", which means full Israeli control, with
settlements, by-pass roads and checkpoints strangulating the city.
In 1997, Netanyahu’s Israel
– the same Israel that argued, when Jerusalem was at stake, that no city should
be divided – divided the city of Hebron in two zones. 90.000 of the city’s
inhabitants came under Palestinian jurisdiction (H1), whereas 40.000 Palestinian
Hebronites remained under direct Israeli occupation (H2), for the sake of about
450 Israeli settlers living among them.
Map 2 shows the division of the
city.
It is taken from the
official website of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Pro-Israeli propagandists repeatedly claim that Israel is missing from
Palestinian maps – a "proof" that the Palestinians do not recognise
Israel’s right to exist. Take a look at the Israeli Map 2. Hebron is
connected to Israeli towns and settlements only: Kiryat Gat, Beer Sheva, Kiryat
Arba etc. Not a single Palestinian town is mentioned.
Hebron was not divided by
chance. It is the centre that remained under direct Israeli control, bringing
the heart of the Palestinian city – the main street, the market, the traffic –
to a complete halt. Map 3 of the city centre shows it quite clearly.
Again, the map is from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs;
typically, almost all the sites depicted are Jewish. From looking at the map,
no one would guess that 99,7% of the city’s population is Palestinian.
Hebron Terrorists
The Jewish settlers of
Hebron are fanatic extremists even by Israeli standards. They regularly ransack
Palestinian shops, cut electricity lines and water pipes, wreck cars, and
attack schoolchildren.
The funeral of Netanel
Ozeri, a Hebron settler shot dead by Palestinians a month ago, gave a good
demonstration of the settlers’ profile. 34 year old Ozeri was killed in his
home in an illegal outpost. Member of the outlawed racist Kach movement, Ozeri
had just returned home after serving a four months jail sentence for attacking
a policemen during a disturbance last July. Ozeri’s father-in-law is a former
member of the Jewish underground who was sentenced to life in prison in 1985
for killing Palestinians in Hebron (and later pardoned). Supreme Court had
ordered several times to evacuate Ozeri and his illegal outpost, following
scores of complaints from the dispossessed and harassed Palestinian owners of
the land. But the Israeli Army and Police, always so efficient in demolishing
"illegal" Palestinian houses, did not enforce the Court decision
in Ozeri’s case.
Ozeri’s 15-hour-long funeral
procession was marked by a series of struggles among his family and followers
over where the body would be buried. Ozeri’s "pious" followers
hoisted his body on a stretcher wrapped in a blue and white prayer shawl, and
pulled back the covering so his face was visible, in clear violation of Jewish
religious law – a spectacle deplored by the chief rabbi as "a disgrace".
Before and after the
procession, Ozeri’s comrades were busy carrying out his legacy in Hebron
itself. The Independent described how "Jewish settlers rampaged through
the West Bank city of Hebron yesterday, smashing the windows of Palestinian
homes and setting cars ablaze" (20.1.03). Even the pro-Israeli New York
Times mildly mentioned "attacks on Palestinian homes by settlers. The
attackers broke windows with iron bars, and at one point a young mother with a
baby strapped to her chest pounded a Palestinian house with a big rock. There
were wild scuffles as the army and the police tried to intervene, and the crowd
taunted the police, shouting insults." (21.1.03)
Settlers’ Terrorism, State
Terrorism
Do not be impressed by
police and army "trying to intervene", as the NY Times carefully puts
it. The 450 Hebron settlers are supported by about 4.000 Israeli army troops,
who are there for the settlers, not for the Palestinians. Since mid-November,
following a clash with Islamic Jihad activists in which 12 Israeli combatants
were killed, the Army has been holding the city under continuous curfew, lifted
for only a few hours in more than two months(!) to allow for shopping. When the
Palestinians do venture out on these rare occasions, they are often harassed by
settlers, who stage violent processions whenever they have a pretext. As one
Palestinian told US activist group Christian Peacemaker Team,
"They lift the curfew so they will have people to beat".
Plans are now underway for
the construction of a "safe passage", a "settlers’
promenade" that would link the settlement of Kiryat Arba on Hebron’s
eastern flank to the Old City like a wedge thrust into the heart the city,
confiscating 64 parcels of private Palestinian property and razing at least 15
houses in its wake. As Ha’aretz journalist Ada Ushpiz recently reported,
"The tourist ‘promenade’ project has never been officially confirmed by
the Army, but every caprice of the settlers soon becomes a military necessity.
The destruction of 15 Palestinian houses for protecting the settlers is
apparently a low price" (27.12.02).
To be demolished are some of
the oldest Palestinian houses in the Old City. Bimkom,
a new NGO of architects and affiliated professionals, warns of this fatal blow
to the one of the world’s most ancient cities. Unlike the Taliban’s destruction
of the Buddha sculptures in Afghanistan, very few people in the West seem to be
concerned about the destruction of this internationally acknowledged cultural
heritage. The Supreme Court has meanwhile ordered the army to reconsider its
plans; but past experience shows that in the long term, almost all Court
decisions regarding the occupied territories are either supportive of the army
or ignored by it.
The Jewish settlers of
Hebron are thus a criminal gang actively nurtured by the State – an extremely
dangerous process not only for the Palestinians, but for Israel itself. To be
precise, it is the ruling
Israeli junta that continuously nurtures these organised and heavily armed
criminal elements. An overwhelming majority of Israelis supports evicting the
provocative stronghold. Following the 1994 massacre, in which a Jewish settler
murdered 39 Palestinians during prayer in Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs,
there was a majority even in Cabinet for evacuating the Hebron settlement. But
Prime Minister (and former General) Rabin refused to discuss the issue in
Cabinet. Similarly, during coalition talks last week, another member of the
junta – Prime Minister (and former General) Sharon – summarily rejected a
request by Labour leader Amram Mitzna to evacuate the Hebron settlers.
War Crimes
Associated Press (20.12.02)
and the Israeli daily Yedioth Achronot have recently quoted Palestinians in
Hebron describing how"Israeli border police have forced detainees to
choose whether to have a nose, arm or leg broken." Rujdi al-Jamal told AP
that he chose his hand, and the policemen broke it with a rifle butt. A
Palestinian student arrested on a different occasion told Yediot Achronot:
"I chose the nose because nothing hurts as much as a broken arm or broken
leg."
While such individual cases
can all too easily be dismissed as rumours or "exceptions", senior
Israeli officers operating in Hebron have now repeatedly incriminated the
Israeli army of an overall criminal policy of applying pressure on civilian
population, in a clear violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. When the army
invaded Hebron in the first week of February, with infantry and armoured forces
on an unprecedented scale, one of the officers leading this invasion, a
Lieutenant-Colonel identified only by his first name Eran, told the evening
news of both Israeli television channels: "It is our intention to apply
strong pressure on the population in order to make it expel the terrorists from
its midst" (Ha’aretz, 6.2.03). The very next day, another senior Israeli
officer told Channel 1 that "the economic pressure is not incidental, but
part of a long process" of applying pressure on the population.
"Pressure" means: "blocking
the streets of Hebron to traffic by piling mounds of earth or huge concrete
cubes at distances of about a hundred metres from each other, effectively
cutting the city into a series of isolated enclaves; the wholesale closing of
local radio and television stations, exactly at the time when the
curfew-imprisoned population needs them most; the invasion by soldiers of
civilian offices of the Palestinian Authority, which fulfill purely civilian
functions vital for the population, the destruction of computers and furniture,
expulsion of the staff and welding shut the doors; the bulldozing of Hebron’s
vegetable market, destruction of at least a hundred stalls, and spoiling of
much food-stuff in an already very impoverished city; and the demolition of
twenty-two homes on one day, mostly on land which Israeli settlers have long
coveted for extension of their armed enclaves" (letter of Gush Shalom to the
Judge-Advocate General of the Israeli army, 4.2.03).
Ethnic Cleansing At Work
So far, the junta’s policy
has proven quite effective. Driven away by economic strangulation and fear of
settlers’ violence, the population of 12.000 Palestinians who inhabited
Hebron’s Old City has dwindled to 5.000 souls since the division of the city in
1997. As for H1 in its entirety, Israeli Channel 1 estimated last week that
20.000 out of its 40.000 Palestinians left their homes. The camera showed rows
of Palestinian houses with windows left broken in spite of the cold winter, a
clear evidence for a successful policy of ethnic cleansing. Deserted houses are
then taken over by settlers, who get the chance to harass the next row of Palestinian
neighbours. Depicting Hebron as a purely Jewish city, the maps of Israel’s
Foreign Office are thus not just a distortion of reality: they express both a
desire and an actual policy of ethnic cleansing, which is carried out with
horrendous efficacy in this terrorised Palestinian city. PS: I am well aware of
standard Israeli propaganda, so anti-Palestinian readers need not bother to
remind me of the 67 Jews massacred in Hebron back in 1929. May they rest in
peace. Their children and grandchildren (none of whom is among the present
Hebron settlers) have repeatedly condemned the atrocities carried out by the
settlers, who claim to be heirs to the massacred, but in fact desecrate their
very memory by their crimes.
Ran HaCohen teaches in the
Tel-Aviv University's Department of Comparative Literature, and is currently
working on his PhD thesis. He also works as a literary translator (from German,
English and Dutch), and as a literary critic for the Israeli daily Yedioth
Achronoth. HaCohen’s semi-regular “Letter from Israel” column can be found at AntiWar.com, where this article first
appeared.