To Hebron and back again - to Israel

Published in Israel Horizons, Meretz USA, Autumn 2007.

Until this summer, my dozen or so trips to Israel have all been spent in the central coastal plain of the country. Neither politically or religiously ideological, my family would take me to Herzliya beach or on tours of the Galil and the Dead Sea. Sometimes we would speed along Route 90 from the former to the latter, with Jericho and the Judean Hills in the distance, in preference to the three-hour journey circumventing the West Bank via the coastal plain. Nevertheless, the Israeli settlements and Palestinian communities there remained uncharted territory. Making aliya this summer gave me unlimited time to explore both sides of the Green Line.

My first trip into the shtakhim [territories] took me to one of the tensest flashpoints in the West Bank and home to some of the most radical settlers – Hebron. The city evokes strong feelings due to the ancient religious significance as well as recent violence that has scarred it throughout the last 80 years. Uniquely, Hebron is the only Palestinian city with Jewish settlers actually living inside it. “The situation in Hebron is emblematic of all that is wrong in the occupied areas,” according to the Meretz USA Website. “Israeli citizens maintain a privileged existence, alongside Palestinians denied fundamental civil and human rights.”

Blurred vision
Travelling to Hebron is easy these days. At Talpiot in south Jerusalem we boarded bus # 440, a gender-segregated line destined for the haredi [ultra-Orthodox] settlement of Betar Illit. In ten minutes it dropped us of at a junction in what seemed like the city limits – it was difficult to ascertain the exact location as our vision was blurred by the bulletproof windows. All of the buses here travel to settlements: to Gush Etzion, Efrat and to Kiryat Arba, directly east of Hebron. In contrast to the mix of religious and secular Israelis, tourists and Arabs at the first bus stop, everyone at this junction was conspicuously religious. Our co-travelers waiting for Egged bus # 160 to Kiryat Arba were all speaking American-accented English, including a family of six on vacation from Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Soon we boarded our bus – occasionally catching a glimpse of the biblical hillsides, villages and the separation barrier through the hermetically-sealed glass – and in less than an hour we were there.

At Kiryat Arba, we joined the Brooklynites on a tour led by a Chabad [Lubavicher chasid] member of staff who lives in Hebron itself. After seeing the foundations of a new three-storey Chabad Center under construction, we drove past the grave of Baruch Goldstein to the tomb of Rebbetzin Menucha Rachel Slonim which overlooks the city. There too, building was continuing apace in the form of a prayer room in the style of an ancient cave. The site, surrounded by fences, sits in the shadow of an army watchtower, casting a dystopic mirror image of the minaret just metres away in the adjacent Arab neighborhood. At 4.40 PM, the muezzin’s call to prayer reverberated through the hills. “It is their time to pray,” said Simcha, aged 17 and sporting a green ‘Moshiach’ baseball cap. “They need an alarm clock; they are too stupid to remember.”

Navigating Hebron
If getting to Hebron is straightforward, navigating the city itself is another matter. Eventually we were dropped off at the Chabad House in the Avraham Avinu neighborhood, less than 10 minutes walk from the Maarat HaMakhpela, the Cave of the Patriarchs. The children from Crown Heights ran around the playground as if they were in Central Park – only here a concrete security wall towered over their sandpit. “This little fellow doesn’t have a clue where he is,” said my friend. “Neither do I,” I replied. Walking the deserted streets it is difficult to figure out where you ‘should’ and ‘shouldn’t’ go, let alone the political situation. Like most matters in this part of the world, it depends who you ask. Settlers began to arrive in 1968 and describe themselves as ‘pioneers’ who have simply ‘renewed Jewish life in Hebron’ after Arab riots prompted the British Police to evacuate the Jewish community in 1936. It is estimated that around 600 settlers currently live in the city itself in addition to 7,000 in Kiryat Arba.3 More settlements have sprung up at locations on the route from Kiryat Arba to the Machpela in an attempt to assert territorial contiguity, and therefore sovereignty, over strategic parts of the city. We passed Hebron’s newest settlement, a four storey building on the road from Kiryat Arba that was taken over by settlers on 19 March. The settlers renamed it Beit HaShalom (House of Peace), which became known in the media as Beit HaMeriva (House of Contention), given the question mark hanging over the legality of their ownership. Amir Peretz ordered the eviction of the settlers in 30 days. That was on April 11th.

The boundaries between Jewish and Arab neighborhoods are blurred. Under the 1997 Hebron Protocol, the city was divided into area H1, with 130,000 Palestinians coming under the Palestinian Authority, and H2, under Israeli control, encompassing 600 Jewish settlers among 35,000 Palestinians. “Jews, with their religious fervor and strong desire for peace, continue to live next to some Muslims who are full of violence and hatred,” say settlers, some of whom have suffered attacks from Palestinian terrorists. Today, Hebron settlers don’t have many Muslim neighbors. They live in a ghost town where army curfews and forced closures of shops have brought life almost to a standstill. Many Palestinian families were forced to leave due to frequent settler violence and intimidation. In H2, we saw a few tenacious Arab families who have remained in their homes in the otherwise deserted streets. The following week of photographs of the same Hebron streets appeared by my merkaz klita [absorption center] in Jerusalem and the nearby Germany Colony. Taken by the activestills.org activist photographers’ project, they compared the ghost town of 2007 with bustling Arab markets and communities in 1990 that populated the Jewish Quarter.

Hebron must be an uncompromising place to live. This is reflected in the attitudes of some Jews towards the place. Back at the merkaz klita, the faces of religious immigrants lit up when I told them where I’d been. For me, the trip was like going to another country, separate from, yet strangely connected to, the State of Israel. They referred to Hebron as being in Israel, but in some ways the city and the West Bank are in another country for them too: Eretz Yisrael [the land of Israel], as distinct from the State of Israel. “But Hebron isn’t an ‘Israeli’ city, it’s an Arab place,” I said. “Don’t you know who is buried there?” asked one girl. “It’s our place, the Arabs will realize one day. The Arabs can have every other country in the world, but Israel is ours.” Commentators are increasingly noting the dichotomy emerging between an Israeli state and a theocratically Jewish state, where Judaism is co-opted by a nationalistic political movement. This reflects the issue facing Israel and many of its neighbors: to choose democracy or theocracy.

“This is Zionism”
The trip stirred unexpected controversy at a family gathering the following week. At a Moshav well inside the Green Line, my Israeli uncle asked why I wanted to go to Hebron. “Because I’m interested,” I replied. “But what is there do to there, what is there to be interested in?” My relatives failed to understand why anyone, let alone me, would want to go there. “I want to see the matsav [situation]. I’ve heard about Hebron from the TV, the newspapers and the radio and I wanted to see it with my own eyes,” I explained. “But what is there to see there? What did you learn?” The purpose of the interrogation was unclear, possibly a mixture of concern for my safety and genuine bewilderment. “The [Jewish] people who live in Hebron are crazy,” said my uncle. “My son served there in the army for eight months. They would spit at him and call him a ‘Nazi’; the next week they would bring cake and Coca Cola for the soldiers. They are crazy.”

As the conversation turned to Jewish history and Zionism, I noted that, “The settlers in Hebron don’t consider themselves Zionists. They are just ‘Jews’.” Perhaps my rudimentary Hebrew made my interest in the settlements appear like solidarity: “Why do you need to go to there to be a Zionist?” asked my uncle. “You can go to the Galil, to the Negev, to Eilat; so why go there?” As night fell, the temperature cooled at the moshav near Ashdod founded by my cousin’s grandparents in 1929 – the same year that Arab rioters massacred 69 Jews in then British-controlled Hebron. Over 20 of us, spanning three generations of sabra Israelis as well as myself, an oleh khadash [new immigrant], sat on the grass to watch a slideshow celebrating my cousin’s 16th birthday. My uncle leaned over and whispered in my ear, “This is Zionism.” “Nakhon,” I agreed.