Jeremy Harding, a writer for the London Review of Books, lately returned to Europe from the West Bank and had this report:
A group of writers based in Britain and North America, guests of the Palestine Festival of Literature, were just in Hebron. It was clear to us after a few hours how tough things still are for the Palestinian majority population in H2, the older part of Hebron that came under Israeli administration in 1997.
The Hebron Rehabilitation Committee now counts 101 checkpoints in an area less than one sq km, making commercial and social activity extremely hard, when it happens at all.
The Committee’s list of stores closed by military order has risen to 512, with another 1300 out of business because the economy is choked off by the occupation. Parts of H2, with its rich religious and architectural heritage, are now like a ghost town.
The HRC has been trying to encourage Palestinians to move back to H2, where they number about 30,000 to 40,000 (against roughly 400 or 500 settlers). As an incentive HRC has ensured that tenants live rent-free and owners can access free utilities as they begin restoration work.
But there’s a big disincentive too: trying to hold down a job while you live in Hebron is very difficult. Newcomers and returnees to a city where collective punishments such as curfews and road closures are commonplace just don’t make reliable workers.
The commuter model, which could give H2 the facelift it deserves, as people leave the city for work and return with income, is too vulnerable to the whims of the military.
The economic and social effects of the occupation in Hebron are obvious, but what about the psychological effects?
The city is a cauldron and the heat is on, both for the Palestinians and for the settlers.
First the Palestinians.
Responding to provocation is off limits, but buttoning up is dangerous too. Despite the many initiatives it has launched against occupation and settlement, this is a community that’s being asked to internalize a great deal of anger.
Garbage gets dumped next to your mosque; a group of settlers stones your house; as you walk through the market, waste water is tipped over you by settlers living above.
And the army is in Hebron to keep Palestinians on a tight leash, not to moderate the actions of the minority. As a member of the Hebron Vocational Training Center explained, "A settler can carry a gun, but I can get six months if they catch me with a fruit knife."
The first law for people living in the old city now is: never lift a finger against a settler or a soldier. If that rule is broken, and it is when anger boils over, residents live to regret it.
Last year, the HRC managed to get a court order to evict settlers from the Al Rajabi building in H2. It was a good day for the legal system, but residents paid the price as vengeful settlers rampaged through the neighborhood for days.
With no law enforcement mechanisms they can trust and no ability to meet force with force, Palestinians are under moral lock and key. And at least two people told me they worried that they’d learned to adjust to their situation too thoroughly. How long would it take them to deal with the normality they long for, if it ever came?
Most people we met seem to handle these issues well, but no one should underestimate the psychological strains.
Second, the settlers.
About half of them are visitors rotated on tours of duty by foreign foundations, but what has the conflict done to the people who stay put?
With the rise of the camera phone, we’re starting to get some answers. Where news crews might have been absent, or only grabbed a few seconds’ footage, discreet onlookers have been keeping records of incidents in Hebron for a while. Palestinian associations in the city, who are still putting this material together, showed some of it to the Palfest writers during their visit.
People reading this post may have seen news clips of settler children taunting Palestinian adults or stoning students on the way to school. That’s not news.
What’s remarkable about the material we were shown in Hebron is the length and intensity of these episodes, the acquiescence of the IDF and, sometimes too, of older settlers.
Slowly but surely, the warning bells start going off as you watch the footage and grasp the full significance of children conspiring with security forces to harm and humiliate defenseless people.
Do these children differ from young Palestinians who throw rocks and chant anti-occupation slogans? Palestinian youth, after all, took part in the first and second intifadas.
But the balance of power in the Occupied Territories makes a mockery of the comparison. Young Palestinians went out to confront an army equipped with tear gas, rubber bullets, live rounds and armored vehicles. Settler children in Hebron face no such threats when they pull at the headscarf of a Palestinian woman or trap a group of students on a staircase and pelt them with stones.
The conduct of settlers in Hebron is a burning political issue, but it’s also a dramatic story about mental health and inhibitions giving way under stress.
Hebron is small. Bigger precedents tell us to heed the warning signs when children take part in racial violence and armed security looks on.
Cut to the ruins of other places where this has been allowed to happen. Check the relief workers, peace-keepers, pathologists, and criminal investigators pouring in. And the psychiatric counsellors – who don’t just work with the families of victims.
You're wrong about the significance of Palestinian children's participation in violence. The common thread is the willingness to hate, a psychological imprint that is equally destructive. Both make an imprint that doesn't disappear when the objective conditions disappear. I am a case in point. In 1971, I participated in the May Day demonstrations in DC attempting to "shut the city down". I did my part by meditating in the middle of a large intersection. Others did so by turning over and burning cars in the same intersection. I had two ribs broken for my sin of sitting in the same place where cars had been turned over a couple hours earlier. I saw the police really mercilously beating individuals who had objectively been immobilized. I concluded from that experience that we lived in a police state, and that I had a reason to fear police even into my 30's, and still some residue. The experience made an imprint. The imprints go both ways. Many Israelis have experienced abuse in Hebron, and many Palestinians have. And there is a history that underlies it. The namesake of Qassam led the Hebron "uprising/massacre" that displaced former mostly elderly religious Jewish residents in 1929. Qassam was a Sufi, known for their spiritual ideology not all that different from Chasidism in ways. (I attended Sufi events in Boston in which we chanted Adonai Echod for half an hour.) 450 of 40,000. Not an unrealistic basis for fear. The better question for all is what do you do with it? Do you note your motivation as a fear, as an anger, and seek to mediate it? Or, do you seek like-minded angry that justify your feelings and your actions?
Witty, Sufism is 18 universes away from Chasidism. There isn't even a basis for comparison between the teachings. None. Zero. Zip. Bigger precedents tell us to heed the warning signs when children take part in racial violence and armed security looks on. Upshot? Israelis are international rednecks.
Would you please point me in the direction of reliable information about the settlement "visitors rotated on tours of duty by foreign foundations"
Would that be the Chassidism of Lubavitch-Chabad, a prominent rabbi of which recently said that "killing their men, women, children (and horses)" constituted "Torah values"? What is it about Sufism that reminds you of this Chassidism? By the way, I wonder if it would be possible for MondoWeiss to put Richard Witty on a maximum ration of words posted per day? Say, 500?
I second that, Mel. I would find it interesting to discover the national origins of those visitors and their supporting foundations, and would support any sanctions against them–boycotts, criminalization of their activities, or perhaps best of all, public shaming and disgrace.
if there are 100 checkpoints in the area of one square kilometer, it means that on average, they are within 100 meters from each other. This agrees with the videos from the area. There is no limit on Palestinian humiliation for the for the convenience of the settlers.
The pogrom against the Jewish population in Hebron in 1929 was horrible and reprehensible, but where do you get off, Richard, comparing the "fear" of 450 of the most fanatic, virulent Arab-haters among all the settlers in the West Bank (who moved there decades after 1929), with the 40,000 Arabs that have lived with constant abuse, humiliation, and the deprivation of their livelihoods, homes, and their fundamental human rights? You were obviously an activist in your younger days. Why don't you get out of your immoral equivalency bubble and go to Hebron and see for yourself the reality there? I am not being facetious here. I would love to see what you report once you get back. Hell, I'll even start the fundraising for you to go.
Witty, Yes the cops suck, I grew up in Berkeley, BHS class of '60 The cops were brutal in the antiwar marches when they could get away with it. There should be safeguards but there really aren't. But there is really no comparison to the situation of children stoning adults with benign non intervention of the IDF. After all so many settlers have units within the IDF. There will come a reckoning when the govt orders the IDF to act and they will refuse. Already they RULE in the territories. It may require foreign intervention. THE IDF IS BEYOND CONTROL
That's what I see too – an entire population turning into rabid rednecks. While the "nice' and 'educated" israelis like to say they have nothing to do with the rabid settlers. But of course, they have everything to do with them. For too many in the "Tel Aviv" bubble, the civilized veneer is ever thinning as they internalize and abet the settlers' pogroms with the only excuses they have left: 1.who, me? 2.I'm just a pro-2-state live and let live kind of guy 3. and besides – I hate the religious nutcases more than I ever did the Arabs 4. I'll light a candle to the nakba everyday, OK? now leave us alone, you silly naive internationals, will you? Reminds one of the fine dwellers in the "civilized" US north who went on about their business as the rednecks and the lynch mobs in Jim Crow's south continued to rampage. Were I religious, I'd say that I can see why the god of the jews might be a tad angry with his flock gone wild.
The chasidism that appeals to me is the prayer life that describes the relationship of humans and Jews' souls to God, creation, society. All of it is benevolent in orientation, cultivating the courage, character, determination to do good fully and constantly. The idea that you are dumping on is in summary the determination to be courageous when in a situation of actually defending one's own, when one knows that mortal threat to person, family, or community is applied in fact. The danger in the philosophy is in the rationalization when it is applied when not a necessity. Its the same problem for Hamas. To defend, rather than offend. As they historically and seemingly addictively had adopted terror as their means of "resistance", they have a long walk to restore their methods to humane approach that deserves the respect that their social service efforts deserve independantly. Qassam was a sufi and a mass murderer. I don't for a minute degrade the Sufi way by association with his brutal ACTIONS.
Read some Sufi literature. The theology is very similar.
The point was on the phenomena of imprinting impressions resulting from traumas. ALL of the parties that cause traumas in the other communities are brutes. To give Hamas a sanction for it in any way historically or presently (thankfully happening far less than in the past), is a crime in the name of opposing crime. Hamas imprints "Jews are threatened". IDF imprints "we are a human experiment".
by dehumanizing others you end up dehumanizing and degrading your soul below the animal level. strange how things work.
This is a very good point. I don't see how imprints of future generations can be changed without a mutual 'standing down' of children's violence. This cannot occur without aggressive parental intervention, and I don't see how that can be arranged when the disparity of power is so great. Equalization of disparity doesn't have to manifest as iterated escalations in the capacity for violence. One step forward would be for Israelis to acknowledge that Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups have some legitimate grievances. I don't think it is reasonable to expect them to understand the fundamental role of the Holocaust, the original grievance, if you will, that started the whole cycle off, unless their grievances are also understood. I realize that the conflict vastly predates 1948, but it is apparent to me that the Nakba utterly intensified what was ongoing. I think the Israelis should go first since they are the ones who committed it. The Nakba was a response to the Holocaust, not its antecedent. The Palestinians and other Arabs had nothing to do with the Holocaust. There were no Arabs among those who rounded up and deported Jews 'to the East'. There were no Arab guards at death camps. There were no Arabs in the Einsatzgruppen. There were no Arabs amongst the monsters who planned it. Palestinian resistance is to the Nakba and subsequent and ongoing ethnic cleansing and colonization. It can in no way be attributed to some kind of 'original sin' of sympathy or support for the Holocaust. The vast majority of the original blame is properly assigned to the Nazis. However, a significant portion of the blame for the longevity and intensity of the conflict can be fairly assigned to American Zionist intervention, to varying degrees both moderate and extremist. We Americans and our government's policies are part of the problem, and changes from us are necessary for a just solution. Those who we Americans call our Greatest Generation helped defeat Adolf Hitler during the Second World War. Our generation must not allow him a posthumous victory, over either Jews or Arabs.
Settler children are the new Lord of the Flies. If their parents are Americans, the parents need to be tried as enemy combatants and their children put into foster care.
Many Israelis have experienced abuse in Hebron… because it is not part of Israel. Hebron was occupied by Israel in 1967. The Zionists settlers are outlaws who deserve legal prosecution. The Israelis should leave Hebron and be required to pay reparations for all of the human suffering and property damage their illegal occupation has caused.
The trauma to Jews in Hebron was not experienced by the Jews who are there now. So it's an invalid comparison, and cannot be used as a justification or even as a mitigation for the behavior of the settlers there.
A similar and weak statement could be made about the majority of Palestinian residents in either the west bank or seeking return to now Israel. The comment is about what gets imprinted from traumas, usually violent. Individuals incorporate traumas, and repeated ones even more profoundly and confusedly, at really a moderate level of violence. In my case, individual violence scared me (I was held up at gunpoint once at 17), but didn't traumatize me. But, seeing 100 police in riot gear using their clubs, and using them on entirely non-threatening me, did imprint a minor trauma. The need for apology does go both ways. The traumatized Jewish refugees that arrived at Palestinian shores after WW2 (and before), were harrassed upon their arrival. They generally were not welcomed, absorbed. Anything they realized, had to be fought for. One can only use the word "I" to have any sincere meaning. It really doesn't have much meaning to apologize for what one's grandparents did. The apology can only rationally be relative to being a beneficiary as a result of a prior wrong. What did I do wrong? What collective wrong did I give my voice to, add to? Did I participate in an unconscious mob approach, inevitably collectively punishing? One step forward usually leads to ten in response.
I didn't know that either. But I think it is a reasonable bet that a donation to one of those foundations is tax deductible in the US.
No similar statement could be made about the majority of residents in the West Bank. The behavior of settlers is not a product of trauma. It is a calculated tactic that is the physical expression of the agenda of forcing the Palestinians to live like dogs so they'll leave.
No. Qassam was not a Sufi. He was born into a prominent Sufi family. He led violent uprisings against the Brits and Jewish forces that wanted to colonize Palestine after the announcement of the Balfour agreement — your idea of being a mass-murderer. He was Palestine's Menachem Begin. Then he settled in Palestine and started a strict, fundamentalist version of Islam….but it was not Sufism. Sufis do not advocate violence under any circumstances. Sufis do not have a 'prayer life' like the chasidism. They work with the dream state.
Witty, stop EQUATING the conflict. It's not a symmetrical. Israel has the entire Western body politic on it's side – and that's what counts politically/economically/militarily. I mean, was anyone paying attention during Gaza when the W.Post or maybe it was the NY Times, ran a cover story where it showed a Palestinian woman grieving the loss of her daughter and on the other side an Israeli woman (obviously a Jew) who was distraught over a rocket siren and holding onto a S'Derot policeman. That sums up Witty's perspective. If you constantly equate the conflict you negate the overwhelming violence and abuse against the Palestinians by Israel (and with the complicity of the Jewish community in the West). Look how he says "Hamas imprints 'Jews are threatened.' IDF imprints 'we are a human experiment'." If we perform a simple experiment in critical thinking here and ask this fucking putz to explain the reasons why a Palestinian would say 'blah blah experiment' and compare it to a Jew who says 'blah blah threatened' – what will sound worse? What will BE worse? Why did the Palestinian say 'blah blah experiment'? What was the back-story? Gaza! The blockade! The Occupation! The constant humiliation and abuse and violence! The discrimination and racism! Yet, Witty keeps equating these experiences as if Jews are experiencing the same violence and humiliation and abuse and discrimination and racism and dispossession and abandonment as the Palestinians. Witty gives NO CONTEXT to his statements -EVER. He will begin by writing a bunch of fluff clap-trap that we've all gotten used to him writing. Then he sneaks in his contrived parallel between the Jewish experience and the Palestinian experience. They are NOT the same AT ALL.
I really wonder how this conflict will ever get solved. Even if there is a solution – Arabs and Palestinians will still be subject to Jewish supremacy and Holocaust worship (racism/bigotry/hatred towards outsiders who do not bow down to 'Jewishness'). I can't imagine how it must be for anyone living next to an entire country full of racist Jews.
The behavior of some settlers is as you describe. In only rare cases is it the settlers themselves that are inflicting violence or restriction on Palestinians. The violence in a few locales is mob settler violence, but the largest concern is the odd hesitance of the IDF to hold settlers to a different standard of law than Palestinians civilians. That and the institutionalization of exclusive roads, checkpoints, etc. The settlers are protected, much much more than they directly instigate. In most cases they are very very separate from the Palestinian communities, even within earshot. Most exposed settlements have experienced threats to their lives. You can say "they deserve it" in some form, but I don't buy that anymore than I buy that Gazan civilians deserve the violence that Hamas provoked.
If an American experienced abuse at a home they owned or even thought they owned in Mexico, it would still be abuse.
Richard – your nonsensical analogies are just so massive fail, we can't even begin to address them. I would have more respect for you if you just came out explicitly on the side of the settler movement. Have the courage of your true convictions here.
The scale is not the same. Israel has large and sophisticated weapons and is able to blockade Gaza, while Hamas has only rockets. But, the firing of thousands of rockets at civilians as a "reduction" in terror, is NOT insignficant in the slightest. You err horribly morally in excusing their application of Gandhi's "the purpose of civil disobedience is to evoke a response" in the use of rockets and shelling (they do periodically shoot mortars at civilian towns).
It will get solved by self-inquiry. "I made a mistake in saying this". "I made a mistake in doing this. I ignored that there were people on the other end, even for a minute." It is a farce that leftists are in the position of defending those that consistently targeted terrorists as means of "dissent". That mode of dissent has been horrible for the Palestinian cause. The virtue and rational acclaim earned by Hamas in providing social services had been dashed to nothingness. The 95% of their work is entirely unknown, while Palestinians are known throughout the world nearly solely by that assocation.
Mimicking Haganah, Irgun and the Stern Gang has been disastrous for the Palestinians. The righteous terrorism of the the European immigrants will not work against them to stop their religious based goal of acquiring more Palestinian and other territory for their Jewish state. The European immigrants are Western supported, organized, financed and armed. They, along with their American supporters, have been able to label resistance to them as irrational and barbaric, despite its roots in Zionist terrorism. Hezbollah has found a better way to resist, which is why Hamas adopting some of Hezbollah's tactics inspires fear in the European immigrants, their descendants and their supporters in America. The carefully crafted image of Palestinians being the aggressors, which cannot withstand too much scrutiny, is finally being questioned by the public of the West, and it is creating hysterical calls to action against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran.
"entire country full of racist Jews"? You clearly have never visited Israel. A country that is 20% Arab-Israeli. A country with Bedouins who befriend American tourists. A country where Arabs can vote, hold political offices, speak out against the government without fear of execution. A country that recognizes ALL religions and where Arabic is one of the official languages Your many comments here show your own hatred, racism, bigotry. You're a sad person, Strahl. I feel sorry for hateful people like you.
The first ethnic cleansing in the Holy Land in the 20th century occurred in Hebron when Arabs committed a massacre against Jews. Arab men used axes on Jewish women and children. You're clearly another one of the uneducated masses if you don't know Hebron's history. Here's an eyewitness account of the brutal Arab massacre of Jews nearly 90 years ago: Raymond Cafferata After the massacre began, the Arab constables deserted, leading the rioters to where Jews were hiding[citation needed]. Cafferata testified: 'On hearing screams in a room I went up a sort of tunnel passage and saw an Arab in the act of cutting off a child's head with a sword. He had already hit him and was having another cutbut on seeing me he tried to aim the stroke at me, but missed; he was practically on the muzzle of my rifle. I , shot him low in the groin. Behind him was a Jewish woman smothered in blood with a man I recognized as a[n Arab] police constable named Issa Sheriff from Jaffa in mufti. He was standing over the woman with a dagger in his hand. He saw me and bolted into a room close by and tried to shut me out-shouting in Arabic, "Your Honor, I am a policeman." … I got into the room and shot him.'[21] The Hebron massacre refers to the mass murder of sixty-seven Jews on 23 and 24 August 1929 in Hebron, then part of the British Mandate of Palestine, by Arabs incited to violence by false rumors that Jews were massacring Arabs[1] in Jerusalem and seizing control of Muslim holy places. This massacre, together with that of Safed, sent shock waves through Jewish communities in Palestine and across the world. The survivors were forced to flee Hebron, and their property was seized by Arab residents and occupied until after the Six Day War of 1967.[2][3] It also led to the re-organization and development of the Jewish paramilitary organization, the Haganah, which later became the nucleus of the Israel Defense Forces. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929_Hebron_massacre... Jews lived there peacefully for centuries until the Grand Mufti urged Arabs to kill the Jews. (a "palestinian" Arab Muslim that later allied himself with Hitler and was convicted as a Nazi war criminal)
A country that… A country with… A country where… A country that… I love that hasbara/travelogue style, don't you?
I'm not excusing Hamas's rocket fire. I am judging relative injustices. And the Occupation and the specifically the blockade of Gaza and the right of the Palestinians to resist their humiliation/abuse/ethnic cleansing/discrimination supercedes Israel's 'right to security' when it's not about security. It's about expansion.
It's not only in rare cases that the settlers themselves inflict violence and restriction on Palestinians at all. It's all day every day. Settler violence and settlers restricting Palestinians is an unrelenting daily experience for the Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They may live separately from the Palestinians, but that doesn't stop them from going out of their way to make the lives of the Palestinians as hellish as they possibly can. And in Hebron, they live literally on top of the Palestinians, and they throw things at them and attack them all the time. Their own stated goal is to make the lives of the Palestinians so miserable that they will leave of their own accord. The settlers themselves say this.
The original squatters in Hebron were Americans. They used deception to get into Hebron in the first place, and resisted efforts by the government to get them out.
PS Calling them settlers is about like calling a gang of robbers guests after they break into your home, steal everything, take your kids hostage, and shoot at you every time you move.
In fact, the squatters (not settlers) in Hebron are unrelated to the Jews who experienced the massacre in the '20's, and have no claim whatsoever on their property. Further, relations between the Jews and the non-Jews in Hebron were generally very good, as reported by members of both groups. They lived as neighbors, and in fact there were numerous cases during the massacre in which Jews were protected, and rescued by their non-Jewish neighbors. The massacre stunned non-Jewish residents of Hebron.
The nature is not the same, the scale is not the same, there is no balance of power, there is no similarity in the actions or the reasons for the actions. It is beyond unconscionable to try to equate the two. Richard Witty, would you make the same comparison between the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto and their tormenters? You have been asked that question numerous times, and I have never seen you address it.
"Mimicking Haganah, Irgun and the Stern Gang …" HUH?!!!!!!