The Hebron Tour -- Police Guard, Settler Harrassment

So today I went on the "official" Hebron tour, led by Breaking the Silence, the group of IDF veterans who themselves did military service in Hebron. The group has been given this tour for a few years now.

This time it was different. (See video below)

Twenty-three Israelis and a few members of the Breaking the Silence were encircled by over a hundred police and border police -- to protect them from the Hebron Jewish settlers. That works out to over six policemen per tourist. And the settlers were there, albeit not in full force. In fact, there were only about twenty of them, but their leaders had megaphones. So the planned chaos went on for two hours, as Yehuda Shaul of Breaking the Silence and the tour's participants was verbally harrassed ("Homo," "Nazi,", "You sleep with terrorists"), while the police watched and did not interfere.

Each group did what it was supposed to do. The police can now tell the High Court that it accompanied the tour, as agreed, but at an enormous cost of manpower. The Breaking the Silence folks succeeded to have at least part of their "tour". And the settlers -- well, they were there to verbally harrass, and they did a good job. No rocks, no eggs, just a lot of insults at high decibels.

Have you ever seen the footage of blacks in the US South during the 1950s entering =schools and universities under heavy police protection, as they are being taunted by the crowd? Well, that's a bit how we felt. We weren't allowed by the organizers to say anything, to respond to the harrassment, to get off a good crack or some bon mot. We were stony-faced silent.

By the way, on the bus down, we were given a balanced portrait of Hebron that stressed its importance in Jewish history, and we were told of the settlement there, and the 1929 massacres. None of the Breaking the Silence leaders called for removing the settlers. On the contrary, the guides said that the settlers had legitimate security claims in Hebron. But what has happened on the ground has gone way beyond security. It is all about making life hell for the Palestinians so they will leave the area under Israeli jurisdiction.

Many have.

The video takes around five minutes of your time. I apologize for the poor quality. It's from my camera. All the noise you hear is from the settlers.

My Trip to Hebron Yesterday

There haven't been many tours to Hebron run by Breaking the Silence or Bne Abraham lately. Sure, the High Court upheld their right to conduct tours, but trips to Hebron take place, surprisingly, in Hebron and not in a courtroom. And in Hebron the bosses are the army and the police, which have close ties to the settlers. So while the army and the police cannot officially ban the tours, they can "dry out" the groups by delaying them, or by calling for clearance, etc., etc.

I saw this in action for myself yesterday. I did not go on a tour but on a private visit arranged by the Hebron activists. We went in an Israeli taxi from Jerusalem, driven by a Palestinian cab-driver who spoke Hebrew, English, and a little Yiddish. I hadn't been in Hebron for two years, and things have changed for the worse. The road to Hebron is mostly tunnel and wall; the tunnel reminded me of the famous Agnon story, "The Tale of the Goat," in which a Jew follows a goat into a hole in Poland and emerges in the Land of Israel. Only this time I did not emerge in the Land of Israel but rather in the Land of the Settlers, the land where there are two sets of laws, roads, and lives for two sets of people. Efrat epitomizes Settler Sprawl; what was once a relatively small growth on the landscape of the Land of Israel gets bigger, uglier, and more out of place every year. And Efrat, one huge illegal outpost, now has its own illegal outposts.

The Separation Wall completely hides Beit Lechem from the view of the Israeli-only road. I must congratulate the wall designers, though; the wall (from the Jewish side) is more aesthetically pleasing than the concrete slabs one generally sees in the pictures (or the the-much photographed wall along Highway 443, where somebody actually painted a landscape without Arabs.) Of course, I couldn't see how it looked from the Palestinian side.

We emerged from the car park near the Cave of the Machpelah, when we were met by our escort, a Settler Goon named Ofer who recognized one of us as the Enemy. When he found out that we going to take a tour on foot, he attached himself to us, filming us on his video camera, talking, and in general harrassing us. Part of the parasitical nature of the Hebron Settlers is to do everything that they think the human rights activists do. You know, they will take a law suit and then submit the same one, changing the names. If the human rights activists have video cameras, they will also have a video cameras. They don't actually do anything with the videos, and I am not really sure that he turned it on. He was, afterall, a Goon.

Of course, the next thing that the Goon did was to complain to the soldiers, who asked us what we were doing there. The soldiers then asked us for identification and told us to wait, which we did. When nobody showed up, we continued our journey. Mind you, these streets are open to Jews, and we saw other Jews walking along them. But the other Jews were dressed like Haredim, and so nobody bothered to ask them for identification. I guess we looked like Israelis. (Note that in the picture below, the Palestinians have to walk on the left side of the fence. That's not apartheid; that's hafrada.)

We then made our way through the streets that have been shut down since the Goldstein massacre. The way things work in Hebron is that a Jew massacres lots of Arabs, and then the Arabs are, "for their own protection," not allowed to open their businesses near the Jews. Aaron Miller's book opens with him measuring the Shuhada Street in Hebron to see where the border will be….needless to say, all this is a buffer zone that a) makes the Arabs suffer, b) makes the Jews feel good, and c) provides the possibility for expansion.

And suffer they do. We then went to visit some Palestinian friends who told us how the latest brigade of soldiers have been harrassing them. Of course, if Israeli soldiers harrass Palestinians, they get to complain to…Israeli soldiers. (That, in a nutshell, is the difference between the suffering of Jews and Arabs in Israel – not who blows you up, but who you turn to turn in order not to be blown up.)

We then went to visit Palestinians who are living in the house that the activists helped renovate a year ago. The settlers had recently smashed windows, part of which the Palestinian occupants had filmed on their cell phone.

By the way, we were stopped several times by soldiers who wondered why we wanted to go to visit Palestinians. Once again, we were told that we could not go "for our own protection." But at least once, a higher up instructed the soldiers to escort us for our own protection (presumably from the settlers, not from the Palestinians, although I must say that because there were only a few of us, not many settlers besides the Goon even noticed us.

At the end of the trip, we went to visit some of the souvenir salespeople who have been doubly hit by the cancellation of the tours because the haredim won't by from them. But they were very friendly to us, even though, when you think about it, they have tsuris from the settlers because they are nice to the activists.

Police: Leftists in Hebron More Dangerous than Right-Wing Counterparts

The police, working in tandem with the settlers, are doing their best to demonize "Breaking the Silence" and "Bne Avraham" as outside agitators and provocateurs.

Why do I say "working in tandem with the settlers." Consider this:

Ynet has a video documenting the "illegal" demonstration in April. From the narration, it appears that the video was shot by the police. Aside from the fact that it merely shows a sit-in and nothing more, the video was shot by settlers, not the police.

In the Ynet article,a "senior Shai District Police official" is reported as saying,

"Organizations such as Bnei Avraham (which is committed to 'disturbing the occupation, disrupting the segregation and apartheid regime') and Breaking the Silence are wolves in sheep's' clothing",

Now that's a picturesque metaphor, isn't it? And wouldn't you know, it is taken almost directly from the Hebron's settlers' petition last Thursday to the High Court of Justice. You can read the appeal here

אנחנו טוענים שהמשטרה יודעת אל נכון וגם הפרקליטות יודעת אל נכון, שאנשי השמאל הקיצוני הם בעצם נמר בעור של כבש

All right, so the settlers' appeal has "tiger" rather than "wolves". But it is hardly coincidental that the "senior Shai District Police official" uses the same language as Orit Struck, the settler's spokesperson and legal representative.

And now a curious fact about the settler's video of the Breaking the Silence demonstration:

Surprise! None of the leaders of Bne Avraham or Breaking the Silence are in the video! You see, the famous "demonstration" that took place in April was really a the end of a tour organized by the BTS folks for other activists groups against the Occupation. The people who staged the non-violent sit-in were none other than the Anarchists! (In the article the police say that BTS are worse than the Anarchists. Actually, what they meant to say was that the Anarchists are worse than the Anarchists!)

All right, so maybe in retrospect the idea of holding a tour for all the leftwing activists in Hebron was a bit de trop. But if you have to kick anybody out of Hebron for being a nuisance, at least kick out the right guys! (Don't get be wrong; I am a big fan of the Anarchists. Look at what they have done in Bil'in)

There is a simple and reasonable solution to all this. The Breaking the Silence organization has agreed to do tours, and no demonstrations, in coordination with the police. The State's Attorney's Office agreed. That was the compromise. (By the way, the April demonstration only became one when the police would not allow the tour to continue.) You know what else? Limit the number of people who can tour. You know what else? Make sure that the people on the tour are not anarchists or other leftwing activists.

The police/settlers don't want this, of course, And can you blame them? I mean, if you lived in a town like Tombstone, where the bad guys are in charge, and can do what they like with impunity, would you want to allow the good guys to have tours for the world to see what you are doing?

Anyway, as I have written before, this has got to be win-win for Breaking the Silence. If the guys are allowed to have the tours, they win. If they are prevented from having the tours, they win. They are getting more publicity for less effort than they have had in the three years they have of getting the tours.

Last but not least, a big yashar koah to Meretz MK Zahava Galon and to Peace Now for speaking out against the police. Peace Now's Yariv Oppensheimer has called for the suspension of Avraham Peled, the Hebron District Commander and the settlers' unofficial spokesperson.

Stay tuned.

Settlers, with the help of the Police, Stop “Breaking the Silence” Tour Again

Once again, the Hebron settlers proved that, in the Wild West Bank, they are the bosses. After the High Court of Justice ruled that Breaking the Silence can conduct their tours, provided that they are coordinated with the police, the settlers said, "Ain't no way they are coming in here" and blocked the bus for two hours. The police arrived and did not interfere, except to shorten the route of the tour to 500 meters. The BTS guys said, "Forget it," and they turned around and went home.

The settlers, for their part, have appealed to the High Court of Justice to disallow the tours. I should point out that the tours do not go on the settlers' property, nor do they involve, generally, more than small groups (There was one exception to that.) As a matter of fact, the tours have been conducted for several years, without incident. The trouble started after the settlers attacked a group of visiting German parliamentarians last spring, calling them Nazis, which prompted a diplomatic incident and an Israeli government apology.

Of course, if the rule of law prevailed in Hebron, the police would remove the settlers who are protesting, arrest them (or at least warn them), and allow the tour to go on. But let's face it – at the end of the day, the settlers are the law, and the police their lackeys. You can read about it here in Hebrew.

By the way, all of this plays into the hands of "Breaking the Silence." I have been on one of those tours. Basically, they take you to empty Palestinian streets which have been closed because of the settlers. With all due respect, it is not the most exciting thing in the world. Sometimes I think that Barukh Marzel, Itamar Ben Gvir, and Noam Federman are being paid by "Breaking the Silence" , in addition to their regular jobs as Shin Bet informants. After all, what better "action" can you have for foreign journalists, human rights activists, American Jews, and the other people who go on the tours, than having a lot of crazy settlers verbally abusing the "Breaking the Silence" folks, preventing their tours, while the police and army stand idly by, in violation of the High Court of Justice's ruling?

Now the Hebron Settlers Are Attacking the Road Map Implementation Monitor

Haaretz is reporting that the Hebron settlers successfully disrupted the visit to Hebron by General William Frasier, the new road map implementation monitor. They managed to get one of their jeeps into his motorcade, whereupon his security people's car hit the jeep and a fight broke out between the settlers and the security people. The general and his people left the place immediately.

Apparently the settler hooligans don't discriminate -- or they believe that General Frasier is a crazy leftwing self-hating Jew.

Police Bar "Breaking the Silence" Tour Group From Entering Hebron

This just in from Haaretz: The Israeli police in Hebron (a.k.a. the military wing of the Hebron settlers) have prevented Bne Avraham/Breaking the Silence from giving tours of Hebron. These tours have been going on for three years without much incident. But emboldened by their violence last week, the Hebron settlers (a.k.a. the pseudo-Jews, or the Judaeo-Nazis) have convinced the police that the balagan the settlers make can be avoided by barring the "outside agitators."

I know, I know, this is small potatoes compared with some of the other stories from Haaretz, such as the millions of liters of raw sewage that are polluting and poisoning the water of the Gazans, due to the ongoing siege of Gaza, or the humiliation of Palestinians by Border Police.

The Hell only gets worse. Happy Birthday.

Still, with any luck, Michael Sfard will get a court order instructing the police to allow the tours to go on. And if the courts rule against the group, well, heck, I will be back at the end of May, and I will be happy to drive to Hebron and give the same tour.

Leftist group: Police barring us from monitoring Hebron settlers By Mijal Grinberg, Haaretz Correspondent

The group "Shovrim Shtika" (breaking the silence) said that the police have recently begun barring the organization from touring Hebron to monitor the actions of settlers. The main reason for this, according to the group, is the fact that the police has surrendered to the policies of the settlers in Hebron and Kiryat Arba.

The police, for their part, describe the "Shovrim Shtika" tours as a "platform for extreme left-wingers to enter the Jewish territory and create an imbalance in the area." The police maintain that they have not done anything that deviates from the law.

An altercation erupted Thursday between activists and settlers from Hebron and Kiryat Arba. Yehuda Shaul of "Shovrim Shtika", who has been organizing tours of Hebron for three years, said that he arrived in Kiryat Arba and turned with his group to show them an outpost outside the settlement and was then stopped at the entrance by a group of settlers who surrounded the vehicle he was in.

The right wing activists tell a different story: Noam Arnon said he and his friends were among the few people at the scene who did not surround the vehicle. He said that the car shaul was in had driven backwards in efforts to run over another activist.

A police officer who arrived at the scene forbade the group from touring Hebron, even though the tour was already coordinated with the Israel Defense Forces and the police, and despite the fact that the settlers can travel freely anywhere in the area.

According to Shaul, this was the third such incident this week. He explained that this kind of restriction was a part of a growing trend. Attorney Michael Sfard said that the police behavior in these incidents has become "the executing arm of the Jewish settlement in Hebron, and if this behavior doesn't change, legal action will be taken."

More News from Hebron

On one side of Hebron, the police allow settlers to attack leftwing activists. See Meron Rapoport's article here. That is nothing compared to what the IDF is doing elsewhere in Hebron....

Last month Gideon Levy wrote a long piece in Haaretz about the IDF's war against the Islamic Charity Movement in Hebron. Basically, the IDF wants to destroy the ICM charities, which provide important social services. The stated aim is to undermine Hamas, but since these groups are not affiliated with Hamas, the real aim -- admitted by the IDF -- is simply to destroy Islamic charities to make way for Abu Mazen and the PA, who have been talking about alternative social services (but not providing any).

Richard Silverstein had a good post on it last month at Tikun Olam here.

Of course, one would assume that Israel, as an occupying power, would at the very least pick up the tab and support all the institutions and schools whose funding they have cut. Of course, that is not likely. Better to simply send the kids on the streets, where they will become suicide bombers, blow up Jews, and then give Israel more justification for taking land on the West Bank.

No, I don't believe that the IDF thinks that diabolically. It barely thinks. That's just what happens.

Anyway, this item below is from the Palestine News Network. Thanks to Miriam Adams for giving me a heads-up about it.

Hebron / PNN - Israeli forces stormed the sewing factory of the Islamic Charitable Society in Hebron Saturday morning.

The Israelis issued a mandate in the occupied southern West Bank city that the employees must evacuate within two days. Ownership will be overtaken and the Israelis will close the factory.

A number of workers report that Israeli soldiers also stormed the house of the operator which is also an orphanage. Israeli authorities are confiscating the orphanage and closing it as of 28 April for three years.

Israeli soldiers threatened personnel and workers that if they maintained a presence after this date, they would be arrested for five years.

It is noteworthy that Israeli forces stormed the orphanage and sewing factory weeks ago, detained workers and confiscated equipment. The same situation occurred in the charitable bakery.

The factory opened in 1985 and supplies clothing for more than 4,000 orphans, while other pieces are sold in the markets bringing in needed revenue.

The Israelis have been widely condemned for such a blatant attack on the Palestinian people, leading to student demonstrations and statements by political parties. “This is considered a crime against property, facilities, and charities, yet the international community has remained silent,” the People’s Committee stated.

The campaign to save the orphans and charitable institutions has appealed to human rights and humanitarian organizations for assistance.

Confrontation between Activists and Settlers in Hebron

Y-Net is reporting that around 50 leftwing activists who were on a weekly tour given by "Bne Avraham" organization had a confrontation with ultra rightwing settlers. According to the activists, the settlers attacked the group without any provocation. According to the settlers, the very presence of the group in Hebron constituted a provocation.

Y-Net also reported that the activists complained that the police stood by and did nothing to help them.

Bne Avrham's tours, which are open to all visitors, are the best way of seeing the effect of the Hebron "Jewish" settlers on the Palestinian residents. This week's tour was a rather large one, perhaps because of the publicity surrounding the publication of the "Breaking the Silence" booklet about soldier abuses in Hebron. (See post below)

If videos of the settler violence and the police inaction become available on youtube, I will publish the links.

Israeli MK proposes bill to expel Palestinians from Hebron

Aryeh Eldad, a rightwing member of the Israeli Knesset, presented a private-member's bill on Monday calling for the expulsion of the Palestinians from Hebron. Bill no. 3361/17/פ can be downloaded at the Knesset website here

Here are some snippets from the explanation of the law:

"The aim of the law is to lead to a better security, political, and economic reality for Israel and for the occupied territories."

Please note that Eldad, one of the Greater Israel proponents, calls Judea and Samaria the "occupied territories." I will reveal the reason for this later in the post.

"The price paid by the State of Israel for the continuation of Arab settlement in Hebron is enormous. From the security standpoint, a great array of personnel and economic measures are needed to ensure the security of the Israeli citizens living legally in the city. These security measures include a system of separation between the Jewish and Arab populations, which restricts systematically the lives of the Israeli citizens. The closure of most of the city to Israeli citizens constitutes a serious infringment of the their human rights and the status of Israel in the eyes of the Jewish world."

Etc., etc.

The bill instructs the Israeli government to evacuate all the Palestinians from Hebron, as well as the Palestinian Authority's offices, etc., to seize all real estate from the Palestinians, including infrastructure.

Who will pay for all this? Why, the Palestinians of course.

The Palestinian inhabitants are entitled to compensation and to be resettled elsewhere, according to the decision of the Israeli government. The Israeli government is entitled to substract this payment from the payments that it collects on behalf of the Palestinians."

Etc., etc., etc.

So what is this about? Well, Eldad is in the running for the coveted award of the MOST IMMATURE MEMBER OF THE KNESSET. It seems that he took his bill word-for-word from Yossi Beilin's bill, which called for the evacuation of the Jewish settlers from Hebron, and just substituted "Palestinian Arab" for "settlers".

So careless was he about his "ma'aseh kundas" (youthful prank) that he didn't change Beilin's use of the term "occupied territories" to the ultranationalist "Judea and Samaria." That is a mistake that his glatt kosher fascist father, Israel Eldad, would never have committed.

Or perhaps Eldad fils views Hebron today as occupied territory...occupied by the Palestinians.

His bill does change Beilin's reference to the massacre of Barukh Goldstein to the massacres of Arab terrorists from 1929 until today. So he wasn't entirely asleep.

I suppose that most people's response will be: nu, big deal. This is Eldad, and even he is not serious about the bill; it's just a dig at Beilin's bill.

I mean, who can get upset about an Israeli member of parliament calling for the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes?

It's not as if that hasn't happened in the past.

Hebron Watch -- Beginning of the Redemption?

Worth quoting in full...

Last update - 09:34 09/08/2007 Evacuation orders issued to settlers in four Hebron stores

By Nadav Shragai, Haaretz Correspondent

The Civil Administration has issued evacuation orders for four more Hebron stores where settlers squatted two years ago. The stores are located in the "triangle market," not far from the wholesale market from where two Jewish families were evacuated by Israel Defense Forces on Tuesday.

The evacuation order, which was issued following a petition by Peace Now, will not take place immediately as the settlers have appealed to the Judea and Samaria Appeals Committee, and their case will be heard in two weeks.

The stores in question are on Jewish-owned land that was inhabited by Jews until 1929, when Arabs massacred many members of the local community and the survivors fled.

But the settlers argue that aside from being on Jewish-owned land, the stores are an integral part of the Jewish Avraham Avinu neighborhood: They share common walls with the houses on the edge of the neighborhood, and the neighborhood's access road passes between them.

Between 1948 and 1967, when Jordan controlled Hebron, the stores were managed by the kingdom's custodian of enemy property. After Israel captured the territories in 1967, it upheld the leases that Palestinian shopkeepers had signed with the Jordanian body and gave them the status of protected tenants.

In 1994, following both Baruch Goldstein's massacre of Muslim worshipers at the Cave of the Patriarchs and a stabbing in the area, the IDF closed both the wholesale and triangle markets and forbade Palestinian merchants to enter. Some time later, after the squatters moved in, two of the merchants who had rented the stores asked Peace Now to approach the Civil Administration for an eviction order on their behalf.

The Civil Administration granted the order, ruling that the army's closure of the market did not cancel the tenants' rights to the stores, and that the Jewish squatters had no rights to the property. "This was a deliberate, planned and illegal act that challenged the rule of law in the city of Hebron," it wrote in its submission to the appeals committee.

Orit Struk, one of the leaders of Hebron's Jewish community, said the army prepared a defensive plan for the Hebron settlers "whose goal was to reduce to a minimum the number of [closed] Palestinian stores in the vicinity of the Jewish community," and this plan was approved by the military prosecution, the state prosecution and "every professional and political echelon."

Hagit Ofran of Peace Now retorted that the squatters were following the settlers' well-known recipe for "taking over properties in Hebron. The authorities see everything and know what has been done, but choose to ignore it and do nothing until a complaint is filed. Only when we threatened to go to the High Court of Justice did the system begin to move, and I hope that in the end, the squatters will be evacuated, as happened in the wholesale market."

What Hebron Needs is Jews

When will the government evict the people who are masquerading as Jews in Hebron?

According to the reasoning of the Rambam (Maimonides), many of the Hebron settlers are not halakhically Jewish; well, to be precise, one has to suspect their lineage. I say that with respect to the ones who act immorally and cruelly towards their Palestinian neighbors. For whoever acts cruelly, his Jewish lineage is suspect. (Mishneh Torah, Matanot Evyonim 10:2)

When people ask me, "Why shouldn't Jews be allowed to live in Hebron?" my answer is bevakasha, let Jews live in Hebron. But not the pseudo-Jews living there now. And only when it is a Palestinian city in a Palestinian state.

Shabbat Shalom, y'all

Jerry