#AntiOccupationDelegation Day 2: What’s an analogy for Hebron?
What is a good analogy for Hebron? Something would be helpful to reference what we saw there today: to make it sensical, or accessible, or fit in an image that we already know. Perhaps that’s why some of the anti-occupation groups that bring visitors here call it a “ghost town.” But instead of ghosts, what we saw was decidedly human: made by humans for other humans.
The physical reality of Hebron is where the inventions of occupation concentrate and combine.
To get there, we drove through a settlement gate, permitted by our status as foreigners. We turned on to a road that Palestinians are prohibited from driving, though they may walk to their shops and homes on the same street. We parked at an area where Jews are separated from Muslims, in an area in between the zones for Israelis and Palestinians.
In that historic center of Hebron, illegal Jewish settlement and the Israeli military that supports it has created a mesh of prohibition, where the visible and invisible rules of occupation intersect.
Where settlers have occupied buildings or moved in to military bases, the army has remade the rules of city life. Where there used to be bustling Palestinian market life, we walked down an empty street with shuttered and welded storefronts, where military orders prohibit Palestinians from walking. On roads and footpaths, past guardposts and with military escorts, we the foreign Jewish visitors accessed the connective network of a city whose Palestinian residents no longer can. These areas have been “sterilized” (the official term). And where else is a sterilized street also one where foreigners can walk and document it?
We heard from Palestinian residents how they live in the other spaces. Izzat, a blacksmith, activist, and our guide from Youth Against Settlements, showed us how residents must navigate both physical checkpoints and learn the invisible rules of which paths are forbidden.
But it is not just a separated city, or a neighborhood on the other side of a wall. We know plenty of examples of that. Here, the areas where Palestinians are permitted, they are subject to continued control by soldiers — stops, arrests, detention, and beatings — and continued harassment by settlers. The division is porous: a separation like and through metal grates. It allows settlers to see who is there for them to replace, and what is next for them to take. Palestinian activists and residents in Hebron told us about being attacked by settlers, who destroy their property and throw stones up at the homes remaining on the streets they’ve already succeeded in closing. And still, there were also these Palestinian activists who continue to resist nonetheless.
We looked up at the metal fencing protecting from stones and trash, thrown down from settler’s apartments above the Palestinian market street which exits through an Israeli military checkpoint.
At times Hebron felt like a singular fabrication, an occupation theme park. But there were also images today that were unavoidably rooted in histories we know: abandoned homes; numbers given to Palestinian residents; Stars of David graffiti painted over closed Palestinian shops.
I don’t have a good analogy for Hebron. It doesn’t need one. I know it is not a ghost town, and it is not a normal one. It is emptying and it is overstuffed. It is overwhelmingly foreign and suddenly close to home.
