Gideon Levy, The real uprooting is taking place in Hebron, Haaretz, 11Sept.2005

Hey folks,

The following two articles come to me via the Seidels in Bethlehem. They are very disturbing but I think important because we need to know what is happening now, these days, in this "Holy Land." I think that it is our responsibilities as peacemakers and people of light to peer into the darkness. Please don't let these articles cause hatred in you; that only feeds the evil. Let them anger us and challenge our thinking; let them make us more aware of suffering and of our places of power and privilege in this world. What can we do, in response? I suppose it starts with a plea to "don't believe the hype," that western media gives us. Anyway, enough of me talking, let these articles speak for those whose voices need to be heard.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/623227.html


Last update - 09:48 11/09/2005

The real uprooting is taking place in Hebron

By Gideon Levy

Israel cannot be considered a state ruled by law, or a democracy, as long as the pogroms continue in Hebron. A state is judged by what takes place in its own backyard, and in the case of the "City of the Patriarchs" this is a particularly dark yard. What is involved here is not a political-diplomatic issue touching upon the existence or nonexistence of a particular settlement, but rather the character of the regime in Israel. This abscess should be uprooted immediately, unconditionally, before its malignancy spreads.

What is happening in Hebron is different than everything else in the occupied territories. In Hebron, the most severe atrocities of the settlement enterprise are being perpetrated. While the settlers are lamenting "their uprooting" from Gush Katif and the knights of sorrowful tears are preaching for reconciliation with them and empathy for their plight, the expulsion of Palestinians from Hebron is continuing at an alarming rate. There can be no reconciliation with these people, kin and kindred of the settlement enterprise, who treat their neighbors this way.
Anyone who calls for compassion for the settlers evacuated from Gaza, yet remains silent about the action of the settlers in Hebron, exposes a distorted and sanctimonious sense of morality.

But the brutal behavior of the settlers is not the main thing that should be raising a storm, but rather the behavior of the state that does not stop them and even lends them assistance. Now there is talk about anarchy in Gaza? In Hebron, anarchy reigns under the malevolently closed eyes of a state that possesses sophisticated mechanisms for enforcing the law. The focus now is on the tragedy of uprooting people from their homes in Gush Katif? The act of uprooting and expulsion in Hebron is incomparably crueler. The number of people expelled is much larger, and they remain without anything. No one is worrying about their plight.It is a bit difficult to believe that the reality in Hebron is hidden from the eyes of most Israelis and is not rocking Israel to its very core. During the past five years, some 25,000 residents have been transferred from their homes, less than an hour's drive from Israel's capital. And daily harassment continues under the auspices of the IDF and Israel Police, disregarded by the media. This harassment is aimed at expelling the remaining Palestinian residents from an area that until recently had a population of about 35,000 Palestinians and 500 Jews.

Those who have not visited the city in recent years would not believe their eyes. In the territory under Israeli control - H2, or Israeli territory, according to the Hebron accord - they will discover a ghost town. Hundreds of abandoned homes, like after a war, dozens of destroyed stores, burned or shuttered, their gates welded closed by the settlers, and an all-pervasive, deadly silence. According to unofficial assessments, no more than 10,000 residents remain in this place. The rest have left their homes and property after no longer being able to bear the harassment from the settlers and their children. This is the largest disengagement in recent years; this is the real expulsion.

Every day the settlers torment their neighbors here. Every walk to school for a Palestinian child has become a journey of harassment and fear. Every shopping outing by a housewife is a journey of humiliation. Settler children kicking old women carrying baskets, settlers siccing their dogs on the elderly, garbage and feces thrown from the settlers' balconies into the courtyards of Palestinian homes, junk metal blocking the entrances of their houses, rocks thrown at any Palestinian passerby - this is the routine of life in the city. Hundreds of soldiers, border policemen and cops witness these actions and stand by idly. They occasionally exchange jokes with the rioters, and almost never stand in their way. Residents' attempts to file complaints with the police are rejected outright under various and sundry pretexts. Even when there are mass pogroms with hundreds of settlers participating - as was the case about four months ago when hundreds of settlers entered the home of Dr. Tayser Zahadi in Tel Rumeida and destroyed everything they could lay their hands on - the security forces stood on the sidelines without intervening. The rioting was documented on videotape, but no one thought to broadcast it on Israeli television.

In the Tel Rumeida neighborhood, where only about a 10th of the Palestinian residents remain - 50 out of 500 families - this reality takes on monstrous proportions: The residents walk hunched over in their back yards, keeping close to the walls, whispering for fear of being heard. Children sprint home in a mad dash and neighbors move from house to house on rickety ladders. It is a haunted ghetto life - all because of a handful of rioters who live above them at the top of the neighborhood.Ultimately, they have succeeded: The settlers' violence has proved itself, and Hebron is becoming more Judaized. To be more precise, Hebron is becoming emptier. Five-hundred violent residents have demonstrated that they have the power to expel tens of thousands of their neighbors thanks to the sponsorship the state has extended to them. None of the Yesha Council leaders has ever spoken against this phenomenon, and Yesha has thus become a partner in crime. The awful mistake of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, who lacked the courage to uproot this settlement immediately after the slaughter in the Cave of the Patriarchs, continues to bear its rotten fruits. Ever since then, each day that the wild settlement in Hebron continues to exist is another day of shame for the State of Israel.


http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/622803.html

Last update - 21:12 08/09/2005
Twilight Zone / Mean streets

By Gideon Levy

It ought to be mandatory in the school system: an annual field trip to Tel Rumeida. This is where every student in Israel - every citizen, in fact - should be brought. This is the place to bring all those who felt compassion for the settlers and preached their cause, all the good people who cringed at the "trauma" of the disengagement, all those who were anxious to console the evacuees, all those who voice empty calls for a national reconciliation. They should all be brought here, to the Tel Rumeida quarter of Hebron. This is where civics and social studies lessons should be held.

About 500 Palestinian families once lived here; now barely 50 are left. What is going on here, far from the public eye, isn't just a cruel 'transfer,' but a reign of terror imposed by the settlers on the handful of residents who haven't left yet. This is where they built a settler stronghold that grew to frightening proportions, a multi-story building constructed with state sponsorship, surrounded now by a virtual ghost town, save for the small group of residents still clinging to their homes despite all the horror visited upon them by these violent lords of the land, these unwanted neighbors.

Here is where Israeli schoolchildren should be shown the dark side of their country, their state's violent and law-flouting backyard. A military barracks under whose cover exists the purest evil that the settlers inflict on their neighbors. There is no other neighborhood like this one. Not a day passes without violence, not an hour passes without the throwing of stones, garbage and feces at the frightened neighbors cowering in their barricaded houses, afraid even to peek out the window. Neighbors whose way home is always a path of torment and anxiety. All this is happening right under the noses of the soldiers and police, representatives of the legal authorities, who merely stand by.

For the average, reasonable Israeli, to visit Tel Rumeida for the first time is be to have your picture of the world turned upside down. This is the gutter of the settlement enterprise, whose leaders have never disavowed it, and to which many have even paid glowing tribute in recent weeks.

All the grapevines in the garden have been cut. The entrance to Hashem al-Gaza's house is blocked with piles of garbage and junk tossed by his neighbors from above. For several years now, he hasn't been able to enter his house from the street. He has to take a rocky path up a hill that is hidden from the neighbors, hurry inside through the back door and hope for the best. Every trip outside to the yard is rushed and anxious. Talking is done in a whisper, lest the neighbors hear.

Al-Gaza is the chairman of the neighborhood committee, or what's left of it.He shows his guests a videotape filmed here four months ago. You won't see it on any of the Israeli television stations: The images are those of a pogrom. Here a row of schoolgirls from the Cordoba elementary school is returning home, young girls dressed in the same school uniform, while young settlers - female ones in particular - wait in ambush for them every day to violently attack them. You see the schoolgirls fleeing, and the settler girls kicking them and throwing stones and garbage at them. The soldiers watch the scene with bored expressions, though one can see them smile sometimes.

Now the mini-pogrom arrives at the home of Dr. Taysir Zehadi. Hundreds of settlers in white Shabbat shirts, as befitting the festive occasion, break into his house and wreak havoc and terror. The desperate doctor tries to call for help on the telephone as hundreds of settlers close in on the house. Finally, they break down the gate and burst inside. Soldiers from the Nahal Brigade and a company of Border Police look on without lifting a finger. Now the settlers are inside, wrecking whatever they can get their hands on, as the doctor watches and hoarsely describes the mayhem as he speaks into the telephone receiver. "Everything is destroyed," he says quietly from inside his home, which a gate and iron gratings couldn't protect.

After the settlers vent their anger in the doctor's house, they leave, smiling, on the way to the next target. No one stops them. Except for the iron door of neighbor Ayoub Awawi. The door doesn't give in to them and they remain outside. Meanwhile, the camera shows the destruction in the doctor's home: From the solar panels on the roof to the potted plants in the living room, everything is smashed and shattered.

The movie ends and we come back to reality. Al-Gaza's daughter comes running into the living room. A third-grader in pigtails, on her second day of the school year, she looks terrified. She always crosses the road at a run. Yesterday, on Saturday - the day of the Sabbath Queen - the settlers threw stones at them. One student was hurt in the arm. But today she completed the trip in peace. A small group of international volunteers escorts her and her friends to school and back every day. This morning the IDF issued an order declaring the neighborhood a "closed military zone" in a move aimed at the international volunteers two American women and a British citizen in their 20s, who came to live here as brave human shields. The IDF claims they constitute a "provocation."

Yesterday the settlers threw stones at the residents until 9 P.M. The summer vacation actually passed quietly: The settlers were busy with the anti-disengagement struggle. But now Al-Gaza is very worried: Maybe they've come back frustrated.

We are sitting in the room where Al-Gaza's father used to stay. The elderly man was moved out of here long ago. The elderly and the sick can't live here anymore, in a building that can only be reached by ladders and up steep hills, where a sick person could not be evacuated by ambulance or obtain equipment and supplies except by means of an exhausting journey on foot. Most of the houses in the neighborhood are abandoned. Stone houses once surrounded by lovely gardens stand empty, like most of the houses in the parts of Hebron that are under Israeli control. The houses are empty; the occupants took out all their belongings and fled, out of fear. Which was exactly the goal of the settlers, who do everything for the sake of the Land of Israel.Baruch Marzel is the upstairs neighbor.

From the Marzels' mobile home, right over our heads, we can hear the voice of a woman speaking on the telephone. "I'm Baruch's neighbor," Al-Gaza mumbles with a bitter smile. The screensaver on his computer shows a routine photograph: a settler boy of about six or seven attacking an old Palestinian woman carrying baskets in Gross Square, adjacent to the Avraham Avinu neighborhood, as smiling soldiers look on from their post.

When Al-Gaza's wife was ready to give birth, he had to take her down the steep hill behind the yard to get her to the city by the back way. The garden of his house is strewn with junk like old washing machines that the neighbors have put there. What they won't do for the Land of Israel.

A family visit: We go to see Hashem al-Gaza's brother in the house next door. You have to keep your voice down and stick close to the stone wall that offers a bit of protection from the settler's quarters above, and walk quickly under cover of the grapevines. An IDF position has been placed on the roof of the brother's house, so the owners of the house are of course forbidden from going up to the roof. The way to the house of the closest neighbors, a short distance away, passes over a ladder. One must climb this rickety ladder in order to pass through, in the shade of the trees and the grapevines, out of the neighbors' line of vision. We walk hunched over.

The brother isn't home, so we go to the home of the Sharbati family next door. Wa'al opens the door and greets us warmly. She has six children. Her husband works at a gas station. There's an IDF position on her roof and mobile homes visible out the window.

She never opens the window in the children's room. An iron shutter protects the window. The rest of the windows in the house are protected with iron latticework and bars. Wa'al opens the window for just a moment, to show us the garbage that the soldiers in the position on the roof throw into the yard. Sometimes they urinate in there, too.

The yard, which once held a grape arbor, is now strewn with empty bottles and leftover scraps of IDF rations. Wa'al says that this morning, she heard the soldiers trying to pierce a hole in the water tank on the roof. "Most of the soldiers are nice," she emphasizes, "but there are always bad soldiers, too.?Every three months the unit is replaced. The previous group was kinder than the present one maybe as a consequence of the lessons of the sensitive evacuation in Gaza.

Yesterday, they urinated into the yard again. Wa'al and the other residents all have more horror stories to tell than could fit into this column. The house's windows have been shattered by the settlers' rocks. The household dwells in dimness because the shutters are always kept closed. They hang the laundry on the balcony and sometimes the settlers soil it there, too. Tonight, the soldiers on the roof were making a lot of noise.

When we go out into the yard, a rock lands beside us, thrown from the settlers' homes above. No one except us gets excited. It's routine. Only the registered residents can enter this neighborhood, and only on foot. No spontaneous visits from friends or relatives. The road passes by an electronic inspection station. If the washing machine goes on the blink you can't bring in a technician, nor can you drag a new machine up by the ragged back road. Lately there have also been problems with getting gas canisters past the checkpoint, and cooking gas is running low.

The home of the Sa'ad family, the next house in line, is protected with tin barrels filled with cement the kind of fortifications you see only in war zones. The Sayaj family's house was expropriated by the IDF to serve as a defense position for protecting the settlers. The settlers' permanent structure four floors of concrete and green iron shutters, looms like a fortress above the neighborhood homes.

We walk through the ancient vineyard that goes down the slope toward the city's Muslim cemetery. The vineyard is in ruins, its soil dried up. It's impossible to work it; the settlers don't allow it. Al-Gaza is also worried about the planned route of a new road to be built here for the settlers; it will pass through this vineyard and the old cemetery. These plans have got everyone here upset, but they all know that this battle, like all their battles, was decided long ago.

"From here, it's dangerous to go any further," says Al-Gaza. I'm reminded of the escape paths I trod in besieged Sarajevo in 1993. The noise of the city on the other side of the IDF checkpoints grows louder, as if defying the deathly silence that envelops the area under Israeli control, which has become a ghost town. Volunteer Luna Ruiz from the United States asks softly what could bring the Israeli media to give some coverage to the horrifying reality here."If one of us were to be killed, do you think it would shock anyone in Israel?" She asks dryly. She says she is very frightened.

It is as though the children on the street that leads to Tel Rumeida are playing Russian roulette. They cross the street barefoot in a mad race. Avihai Sharon of the Shovrim Shtika (Breaking the Silence) organization, which has been working here for a while to protect the residents, says that it has been months since he has seen any Palestinian children dare to cross this deserted street, which is open to Jews only. A woman peeks out of her yard, an anxious expression on her face.

A few people walk up this desolate street that leads up from the Avraham Avinu neighborhood to Beit Hadassah. This is the Street of the Martyrs, about which long and exhausting negotiations were conducted, with the involvement of the U.S. administration, with the aim of restoring and rehabilitating it. The agreement went the way of all such agreements: All the doors of the renovated shops are now locked and soldered shut, the work of the settlers, and the street is deserted. Every so often, a settler child passes by. Every so often an armored military jeep cruises the street.

The group of three people comes closer. "How do you do? My name is Mario Vargas Llosa,?says a tall, elegant man. In fashionable Prada sunglasses, and an equally fashionable photographers' vest, he looks younger than his age. Accompanied by his photographer daughter and Yehuda Shaul of Shovrim Shtika, the acclaimed Peruvian writer, author of ?The City and the Dogs," has come to see these streets of fury and disgrace.