What We Saw in Hebron

About 10 years ago, I saw an Israeli film called “What I Saw in Hebron.” a powerful film made by a descendant of a Jewish family that had lived in Hebron for generations until they fled after the riots in 1929. One layer of the film were the reminiscences of Jewish survivors of the massacre, people who were young children at the time. The other layer was a cinema verité style documentation of the intertwined lives of the few hundred current Jewish settlers and the almost as many soldiers who guarded them from the more than 40,000 Palestinian residents of the city. One of the most powerful moments of the film for me was when the filmmaker asked a young Jewish woman who lives in tiny Jewish enclave surrounded by Palestinians and soldiers what she thought about the Palestinians. “I don’t really see them,” was her reply.

Until 1929, a small, pious community of Sephardic Jews had lived in relatively peaceful coexistence with their Arab neighbors in Hebron for hundreds of years. The late 1920s was a period of unrest between Arabs and Jews that began in Jerusalem and spilled out to other areas, including Hebron. In August of that year, Arabs murdered 67 Jews and injured several hundred others in several days of rioting. After the riots were quelled, the survivors left Hebron and settled elsewhere in the Yishuv. Hebron is in the West Bank and was beyond the 1949 armistice line after the War of Independence. It was re-taken in the 1967 Six Day War and Jews began to resettle Hebron in 1970s. But, it was not the descendants of these original families who came back. Rather, the new settlers who chose to renew the Jewish presence in Hebron were among the most right wing of the Ashkenazi religious Zionists. Perhaps most notorious of them was Dr. Baruch Goldstein, a member of Meir Kahane’s extremist Kach party that openly advocated the expulsion of Arabs. In February 1994 on the Jewish holiday of Purim that was also during the month of Ramadan that year, Goldstein entered the Cave of the Patriarchs, gunned down 29 Muslim worshipers, and wounded dozens of others. Today, his grave is in the Meir Kahane memorial park of Kiryat Arba, a Jewish settlement that overlooks Hebron. The park was built and is maintained by Israeli tax shekels.

Hebron is an ancient and sacred site to Muslims and Jews because of the Cave of the Patriarchs that Abraham purchased as a burial site for his wife Sara, the first real estate transaction in the Bible. According to Jewish tradition, all of the Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and three of the four Matriarch, Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah, are buried there. The only one not, is Rachel, who died in childbirth on the road, and is said to be buried just outside of Bethlehem. Today, Rachel’s tomb is virtually encased by the security barrier that creates a kind of giant cul-de-sac to allow Jewish access and prevent any Palestinian threat. Of course, the barrier also includes a few Palestinian households and land that is cut off from the rest of their community.

But, that’s small potatoes when compared to Hebron. During the Second Intifada, Hebron was a particularly hot spot. Arabs regularly shot at Jewish settlements, and Jews were killed. Jewish settlers often responded in kind. As a result, the military establishment decided the best way to deal with this ongoing cycle of struggle and violence between Arab and Jew was to “cleanse” the city center of Arabs. Today, what was once a bustling market place, filled with merchants and residents, is now virtually a ghost town. There are long stretches of main thoroughfares where Palestinians are forbidden to walk or drive. Streets are barricaded by concrete blocks. Homes are closed in by heavy metal sheets bolted onto the front doors. Balconies are lined with wire-mesh cages to protect against stones and bullets. The only access and egress for the few remaining Palestinian families on this main corridor, is by ladder up and over the rooftops.

One of the most unsettling parts of this Kafkaesque place is a stretch of road leading away from the Cave of the Patriarchs that is divided by jersey barriers. The wider expanse is for Jewish foot and vehicular traffic. The narrower band is for Palestinian pedestrians. Indeed, Jew and Arab can walk side-by-side on this separate and not at all equal road.

“What I saw in Hebron” stayed with me over the last decade, but last week I decided not to rely on my memory of the film but to actually see Hebron for myself. I went on a tour with Breaking the Silence (http://www.shovrimshtika.org/index_e.asp), an organization founded by IDF veterans who served in the occupied territories during the Second Intifada. Breaking the Silence’s principal mission is to collect and publish testimony from former and current soldiers who are witness to and participate in acts of abuse and violence towards Palestinian people and property. As they say on their website, they do this try to force greater accountability regarding Israel’s military actions in the occupied territories and “in order to force Israeli society to address the reality which it created.”

In 2009, Breaking the Silence brought over 8,000 people (mostly Israelis) to Hebron and to a Palestinian village in the South Hebron hills. About two-thirds of the people on the bus the day I went, were high school students from a youth group in Petach Tikva. The other 15 or so people had signed up as individuals. They were mostly young adults. Indeed, there were several times during our tour that hugs were exchanged between one of the members of our tour group and a friend in uniform, doing military service in Hebron. Another irony of this place.

I often think about that young woman in the film who said she just “erases” the Palestinians from her landscape. The remark is stunning especially when you think about the unnatural life led by these tiny numbers of Jews constantly guarded by soldiers so that they can live among such a large Arab minority. I want to distance myself from this woman in all ways, but I can’t completely. In some ways, she isn’t so different from the majority of Jewish Israelis who live in Modi'in, Tel Aviv, Petach Tikva or Jerusalem who go about their daily lives ignoring the Palestinians in their midst. I do it too much of the time. Life is rich and good here for the Jews (well, not all the time as I’ve noted elsewhere). It’s natural to want to preserve that goodness and easy to say the best thing we can hope for is peace and quiet – keeping the Palestinians out of sight and out of mind.

Breaking the Silence says that price for the peace and quiet is too high if it means denying the basic civil rights of our enemy and neighbor, the ability to drive home with groceries, to walk into the front door of your home, to move freely in your own community without fear of being detained or beaten while the authorities look the other way. And they say we have to look, to witness, and to act.

As part of our tour, we met with a Palestinian activist who works with Breaking the Silence. He told us a bit of his own story and then gave us a long list of accounts of the daily abuses Palestinians receive from both the Jewish police and Jewish civilians. Most hurtful was a short video clip of Jewish school children shouting vicious slurs at Palestinian school children as they walked home from school. Before we left, he said despite how bad things are for his people, he is actually feeling optimistic these days. There’s growing momentum for non-violent resistance among the Palestinians and that, he said, is what will bring about change. I hope and pray that his optimism is warranted and that both sides open their eyes, give witness and start acting so that what we saw in Hebron last week doesn’t continue for another decade and another decade beyond that as well.