Without a warrant, Israeli soldiers surround and raid the Karamah house in Hebron at 4AM on 20 Sept. 2018, assaulting and violently arresting Jamal and Hanaa Karamah. “My young daughter Tasnim now panics every time someone comes to visit us,” Jamal told B’Tselem. “I don’t understand why they harassed our family. Why terrorize us like this and arrest us?”
Malika Qafisha, 38, a mother of six, lives near the Ibrahami mosque in Hebron, which is holy for Jews and Muslims. Jewish settlers have occupied many Palestinian homes, and Qafisha and her family face daily harassment, in which settlers are backed by Israeli armed forces who shoot at Palestinian homes.
Israeli leaders suggest that the UNESCO resolution to include Palestinian sites as world heritage sites is ‘anti-Semitic’ and that it denies Jewish connection. But UNESCO says the cave of the Patriarchs has Jewish significance, just that it’s in Palestine! That’s the problem.
Youth Against Settlement’s Issa Amro writes about signs settlers have posted inside of Hebron, “At the front of Shuhada street in the old city of Hebron is a street sign pointing multiple directions: Chabad Cemetery, Old Jewish Cemetery, Ancient Tel Hebron. The words are in Hebrew and English only. The purpose of the sign is not to provide directions but to erase Palestinian identity, and even the Arabic language, from the area. For more than a decade Israeli settlers have been installing these types of signs throughout Hebron. Over the past two years, the installation of these signs has increased exponentially.”
According to a recent New York Times op-ed, Israel today is “nothing like” South African apartheid. Yarden Katz, an Israeli, abandoned the warnings about visiting the West Bank and toured a housed in Bethlehem trapped by the wall, and a ghost town in Hebron, “If we only dare look, we see that there’s apartheid and much more.”
While Richard Gere was in Israel and the occupied West Bank promoting his film “Norman,” he was recorded in an unguarded moment wandering the desolate streets of Hebron’s Old City. A dumbfounded Gere is near at a loss for words in the clip, which aired on Israel’s Channel 2 network. “I mean it’s like…it’s exactly like what the what the Old South was in America. Blacks knew where they could go, they could drink from that fountain, they couldn’t go over there, they couldn’t eat in that place. It was well understood. You didn’t cross it or you’d get your head beat in or lynched,” Gere said.
“I hadn’t been shot at in seven and a half years. In the week prior, some tear gas cans were fired by the Israeli army at my fellow Veterans For Peace members and me in the Palestinian town of Bil’in. But for a former tough guy Marine, that doesn’t count. Hebron was different.” Matthew Hoh from Veterans for Peace shares his experience during the annual Open Shuhada Street march in Hebron and the importance of grassroots Palestinian leaders like Issa Amro.
Palestinian activists say life in Hebron has become unbearable, and that international intervention is the only hope to ease the daily tensions and violence carried out by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the city. “We are fighting a just cause, we are trying to end the occupation and get our human rights, our city, and our country back and bring the occupation government to justice for their illegal actions and crimes, but we need international support,” activist Farid al-Atrash tells Mondoweiss.
Haaretz reports that Goldman Sachs has a “clear pattern” of giving to Israeli settler and rightwing groups through their Charitable Gift Fund. Of course, Hebron settlers aren’t the only ones experiencing Goldman largesse. Bernie Sanders has made an issue of the $675,000 Clinton received in speaking fees from the investment house just in 2013.
Overnight Tuesday Israeli special forces killed two Palestinian men who were suspected of kidnapping and slaying three Israeli youths abducted in June while hitchhiking in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc of the West Bank. Amer Abu Aisha, 32, and Marwan Qawasmeh, 29, had evaded Israeli forces for over 100 days hiding out in their home city of Hebron no more than five miles from the site of where the remains of Eyal Yifrah, 19, Gilad Shaar, 16, and Naftali Fraenkel, 16, were discovered over the summer.