The Great Debate UK
A Visit to Hebron
-Robin Yassin-Kassab is the author of The Road from Damascus, a novel published by Penguin, and co-editor of PULSE, one of Le Monde Diplomatique’s five favourite websites. The opinions expressed are his own.-
There’s no pretty way to describe what I saw in Hebron, no tidy conceit to wrap it in.
I visited as a participant in the Palestine Festival of Literature, the brain child of the great British-Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif. I was in the company of many wonderful writers and publishers, among them Python and traveller Michael Palin, best-selling crime novelist Henning Mankel, Pride and Prejudice screenplay writer Deborah Moggach, and prize-winning novelists Claire Messud and MG Vassanji.
Our first stop was Hebron University, where I ran a workshop on “the role of writing in changing political realities.” The students were bright and eager; the only discomforting note was struck by a memorial stone to three killed while walking on campus, by rampaging settlers, in 1986.
After lunch we visited Hebron’s historic centre. The usual way on the West Bank is for Israeli checkpoints, towers and settlements to encircle Palestinian population concentrations. But here 400 gun-wielding settlers, guarded by 1500 soldiers, also occupy the centre of the Old City.
The delight of any Arab old city is the sensation of freedom it offers; you can disappear under arches, around corners, through dark passageways. But Hebron’s freedom has been robbed by iron gates and concrete blocks. There are military positions and “Jews-only” roads. Such slogans as “Gas the Arabs” are daubed on the green-shuttered shops. Some 77 percent of Old City shops are closed by military order. Settlers squatting the upper storeys throw excrement, kitchen rubbish and stones at pedestrians in the souq.
Hebron’s Arabic name is al-Khalil, meaning “the friend”, referring specifically to God’s friend Abraham, buried here with his wife Sarah and son Isaac. The tombs are sacred to both Jews and Muslims, and in quieter times were shared, but the struggle between Zionism and the Palestinian natives has changed that. In 1994 Brooklyn-born settler Baruch Goldstein shot dead 29 Palestinians at prayer in the Ibrahimi Mosque, injuring 150 more. Rather than compensate the community for the massacre, Israel imposed a two-week perpetual curfew while it confiscated 65 percent of the mosque for use as a synagogue. Which means a physical wall now divides this historic building, to add to the other walls shadowing the towns and refugee camps of Palestine.
David and Neighbour
You are quite right about the massacre of Jews in Hebron in 1929. The fact that the massacre happened in the context of the struggle against Zionist plans to turn Palestine into a Jewish state does not change the fact that the massacre was a terrible crime. I should have mentioned it, but didn’t because I was given only 600 words. I stuck to what I saw, to what is happening today. I speak as as somebody who is very aware of Arab sectarianism and its negative effect on Jews, Shia Muslims and other minorities. Sectarianism is one of the things that make Arabs weak, and I and many Arabs revile it. (It so happens that I have a Syrian Jewish aunt). However, the anti-Jewish feeling amongst most Palestinians and other Arabs today is directed not at Jews in general but in the faces of the Jewsish state that has dispossessed the Palestinians.
Neighbour says the child settlers are not gun-wielding. True, but I have been shown many films (they’re on Youtube) of settler children hitting, kicking and throwing stones at Palestinian men, women and children. When they do this, they are protected by gun-wielding adult settlers and by soldiers. Again, I should have mentioned this, but was stopped by my 600 word limit.
As for Jews only having access to 3% of Hebron – Israeli Jews are forbidden access to the rest of the city (unless they are soldiers, who move in at will) as a result of Israeli laws. However, I met French and American Jews (pro-Palestinian activists and academics) who live and work in Hebron, Ramallah and other West Bank cities. The apartheid system was brought in by Israel.
Then there’s the small matter that according to international law, there should be NO Israeli civilians living in occupied territory. The Palestinian leadership (which I’m not a fan of) has in any case said that in the event of a two-state solution, any Jewish settlers who will accept to live under Palestinian sovereignty can stay on the West Bank.
And, yes, I am biased. I was also biased against apartheid South Africa.; If this was the 1930s, I’d be biased against Nazi Germany, and also aginst the pro-Zionist but anti-Semitic immigration policies of the US and British governments. (which blocked access to fleeing European Jews, forcing them to go to Palestine instead).