Hebron

Hmmm…. Maybe it’s best to start with a little bit of introduction. Hebron is a city in the south of the West Bank and is the second largest. It is a rather holy city, since it contains the Tomb of the Patriarch, which is where both Muslims and Jews believe that Abraham and other founders are interred. For a very long time it was exclusively an Arab city, until a Jewish group petitioned the government to allow them to celebrate Passover there…. And they never left. Now Hebron is a very divided city and is the only city with settlements in the heart of the city.  Half of Hebron is in Israeli control and half is Palestinian. In the Israeli half lives about 800 Jews and about 3500 Arabs. The tension and the violence are extremely intense in this one city, and there are about as many soldiers as there are Jews in the city. Many shops are closed and there are times when the Arab residents are not even allowed to leave their homes. I was on a tour with JStreet who had organized a tour with Breaking the Silence, a group of ex- soldiers that had all served in Hebron and had witnessed the injustice there.  It was really eye opening. Our guide was a great speaker and he really knew what he was talking about. The one downside was that we weren’t actually allowed to enter the city. Our group had to be served a warrant from the commander of the area that forbade us from on entering on the basis that they were afraid for the safety of our group. Basically they were afraid of settler violence and that they would strike out at us for touring the city. The kicker was that there were actually two tours with breaking the silence that day, and the other group got it fairly quickly. The only difference in  our two itineraries was that the group that got in were meeting with a group of settlers after the trip and we were not. As our group leader pointed out, it was disappointing that we weren’t able to enter the city,  but it was also showing us was it was like to live somewhere where you didn’t have complete freedom of movement. We did do a tour of the South Hebron Hills and saw a variety of settlements from illegal to legal, small to huge. We also got to speak to the residents of Susia, a small Arab village that was removed from its land for the settlement of Susia and then were evicted because they were living on an archeological site. The whole trip was rather striking.