Hebron. The Unending Siege.

06/12/09 7:36 pm Nablus, Palestine

Last weekend Gioel and I, along with a small group of other volunteers here at Project Hope took a day tour to the city of Hebron in southern Palestine with a Palestinian tour guide. The tour was part of the “Breaking the Silence” tours, meant to show the travesties that the Palestinian people face due to the Israeli occupation; a first hand view, the images that they won’t show you on the nightly news. I think that it is the most important thing that we have seen in our time here, yet it has taken me sometime to figure out how to put it into words.

Hebron is a city under siege. The city has always had great significance to Jews, Christians, and Muslims. It is called “The City of the Patriarchs,” the place of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, and Jacob. Their cenotaphs are now located inside the Ibrahimi Mosque in the old city center. Problems began here when a group of Jewish residents were massacred in the market in ‘29. After the ’67 war, the Jewish settlers began returning to Hebron, bringing with them an attitude of militant solidarity. One way or another, they would colonize this city. Currently there is a population of about 400 Jewish settlers inhabiting the old city center at the expense of the previous Palestinian residents.

It works like this: the settlers slowly bought out those Palestinians that would sell. Those that wouldn’t they used force and intimidation to force out. They came in the night, moved in and took over. Naturally, the IDF followed to secure the safety of the settlers. As if they are the ones needing protection. The army cut the city in half, closing the main road and therefore markets to allow safe accuse for the settlers to their housing in the city center. The Israelis also took over the mosque, turning half of it into a synagogue. It’s not even that the Israelis want to be there either. They’re supported by the government who provides to most hardcore and fanatical of the settlers with stipends and incentives to live in Hebron in two-year shifts, replacing families leaving with new immigrants in order to maintain the 400 population. It’s like a game to them.

But lets be fair here. The Arab residents haven’t exactly been saints either. There have been attacks from both sides resulting in deaths and injuries of many. That said, the settlers are hardly innocent: heavily armed and filled with a fanatical militarism, they take the law into their own hands. We visited the home of a Palestinian family that is the last hold out on a now Jewish block. The settlers have attacked their family, throwing rocks, abducting children for periods of time, and even firebombing the house. The soldiers use the Palestinian rooftop water tanks in the Old City as target practice, forcing the Palestinian residents to walk across the city to carry their water back. Below the settlers houses the Palestinian market streets still exist. The shop owners had to construct makeshift nets and fencing above the street to protect from garbage, stones, bricks, bombs, even feces thrown down from the settlers above. This improvised ‘ammunition’ piles up on the nets, rotting above the heads of the Palestinians below. The sight and smell almost made me sick.

I understand that I am only seeing one side of the story here. Yes, there have been terrible acts from the Palestinians as well in the struggle, but what I have witnessed here really makes it hard to imagine that the Israelis can come up with a good, logical, ethical reason for their actions. The problem with Hebron is that I really want to stay impartial in this conflict. I really want to feel, to think that there is another side to this. Well, there is another side of course. But a meaningful side. An actual reason for them to do this. Of course I speak of the Israelis when I speak of ‘them.’ I want to know, to maybe understand why they would do something like this, but when you go there, when you see it first hand all you can feel, all you can think, is the pain, the hurt, the suffering… the desperation that the Palestinians feel. It is tangible. You can feel it in the streets, in the air around you. When you walk through a checkpoint in the old city center, just to get to the great Mosque for prayers, you see the hatred, the fear.

Nablus – A City of Action [Some More Thoughts on the City]

06/12/09 2:30 pm Nablus, Palestine

Nablus is the most important city, outside of al-Quds (Jerusalem), in Palestine. The city is a large, vibrant urban spread of dense urban blocks, welcoming green space, and breathtaking hillside panoramas. But most importantly, Nablus is a modern, functioning, living city.

Nablus, a city of about 134,000 inhabitants is a center of Palestinian culture, industry, and identity. An ancient city, also home to the Jewish Samaritans and Christians alike, Nablus was at the center of the second Intifada. As a launch pad for rockets and resistance fighters, Nablus felt the full crackdown from the Israeli Defense Force, cut off by checkpoints, host to a military occupation of the city center and nightly security raids in the refugee camps. Through all this, however, Nablus has survived and carried on. Today, one must almost look for the signs of the previous struggles, as the vibrant pulse of the cities energy is the first thing noticed on the step out of the taxi.

The people are a friendly and hospitable people, always excited to practice their English and invite visitors to sample their exotic flavors or view their beautiful wares. Nablus is known for its olive oil soap industry as well as a special sweet made from cheese call kanafeh. But anything else can be found in the Nablus markets as well: clothes, toys, candy, meat, spices, electronics, and furniture; anything you desire. Walking through the markets is a festival for the senses.

Everywhere, colors, smells, sights, sounds. Some familiar, some shockingly new, some repackaged but you know the game. I found the markets of Nablus strangely representative of Palestine as a whole, a place of extreme constrasts. Oddly new, yet comfortably traditional; at one time frighteningly intimidating yet wonderfully accommodating. A place of beauty and extreme desolation, but always the place of a great People.