Hebron Life

I am writing from Jerusalem. I came in on Saturday night by myself, because I just needed some alone time. Saturday night I sat on the rooftop of a pizza place in the Christian quarter of the Old City sipping wine and enjoying the view of Jerusalem. I think it was the first time that I really felt I was in the Holy Land. Of course, the scenery is better at night because you can't see the dust... The wine was a treat, because there is no alcohol in Hebron. The pizza was pretty bad, but I also had a salad with lettuce in it! I have really been missing the lettuce. Then I took a hot shower.

Sunday I went to West Jerusalem, the Israeli side. It was my first time visiting this section of Jerusalem. We just don't get over there because we are here for such short time periods, and our business is in East Jerusalem. Going to West Jerusalem felt like going back to the West, with modern shopping malls and fast food. I ate at a vegetarian restaurant and had my second salad with lettuce in it. I also had spinanch lasagne and some tofu on the side! Later we took a service van (pronounced servees, with the accent on the second syllable) to Tel Aviv to visit the beach, and I swam in the Mediteranean in my underwear (forgot a bathing suit).

This morning I ate at my favorite pastry shop next to the internet cafe in the Arab section of the Old City. I would never usually eat so much pastry, but they do incredible things with pistachios, and I have been losing weight, so it probably doesn't matter. I can't think why, because it seems like all I do is eat, and falafel is not exactly low-fat.

Hebron is still pretty well locked down, except that now the Jerusalem service vans are getting all the way through, making getting to Jerusalem much simpler. Somebody dug out a pass through one of the blockades so that the service vans can pass, but no other vehicles are going through. I'm not sure I understand the system; the van driver paid 5 shekels to a Palestinian guy minding the blockade when we went through. There are still "flying checkpoints" on the way, and at one point we were stopped and all the men had to get out of the van to be searched and ID checked. It must be so humiliating for them.

Last week several of us went to visit the Jabbar family. One brother, Atta, has suffered 2 home demolitions. Now he is in his third house, but last year some nearby settlers took over the house at gunpoint and claimed it was their synagogue. After several months the family got a court order and was able to move back in. But the settlers had done much damage to the home and they had to reconstruct parts of the inside. The couple is about my age, but they look older than my parents. The last few years have taken a huge toll.

Another brother, Jaudi, spent twelve years farming a hillside belonging to his family. Then the army came with orders to seize the land for the nearby Jewish settlement, and they built a wall separating him from his land and preventing him from farming it. A few years later he tried to build an extension onto the family home to give more space to his family (he has 7 children and is living with his parents and sister), and the army bulldozed it. They are all living together in a 3-bedroom house.

After the home demolition, someone from CPT lived with the family for three months. Jaudi talked to us about how much that meant to him, just the moral support. He said we have been important to him to talk to, because he needs to talk about it or he will go crazy. He said that with those two actions, all his dreams died, and nothing in life is sweet for him any more. He wanted the farm for his children. There is some farmland left, but now, because of the closure of the entire West Bank, he can't sell any of his produce in Israel, which was the main market.

Last week we set up a regular check point watch at the army check point near our apartment (called Beit Romano). We live between two checkpoints, Beit Romano and Ibrahimi Mosque, and the army base is just behind us. We are spending two hours every day monitoring and recording what the soldiers do. This means recording ID checks, searches, and detentions,and monitoring whether their behavior is appropriate to the Palestinians they stop. The soldiers do not like it, and seem rather intimidated by our presence. Once, when I was there, they repositioned themselves so we could not see them. The Palestinians are pleased that we are there, and the fact that the soldiers are intimidated makes me think it is a good idea.

I had an unpleasant encounter with a soldier the other day. I was doing a street patrol with my teammate on Rosh Hashanah, when there is a lot of settler traffic through the Old City and a higher possibility of confrontation. When we were returning through a checkpoint called Gate 5 a soldier stopped us and said we couldn't pass, that we would have to wait because there was some kind of military exercise going on. In other words, we couldn't walk back to our own home.

Usually I try to be civil to the soldiers but not exactly friendly (why should I be nice to someone who is pointing a gun at me?) because I don't want there to be problems for the Palestinians they are detaining. But this time there were no Palestinians, and he was detaining me. So I told him that he was violating my rights by detaining me. He said he was only doing his job, and I told him that he did not have to follow orders that are illegal. To make a long story short, the encounter upset him, so he decided not to let us pass at all. If we were Palestinian we would probably still be there. As it was, we walked away from him and entered by a different gate, where there was no trouble.

I feel that since confronting the soldiers is something that Palestinians cannot do, but I can do, then I should do it, to try and encourage them to have some kind of conscience. They are still human beings, first and foremost.

Also during the Rosh Hashanah holiday my teammate and I decided to walk along Worshipper's Way. This is an ancient path that leads to Abraham's Cave, now the site of a synagogue on one side and a mosque on the other. The path leads to the synagogue side, and it is said that it is a path that Abraham probably walked. There are ancient houses and ruins of houses there. Recently the soldiers dumped fill dirt on the path in order to widen it, and some think, to pave it. In places the dirt is so high it covers over the doorways and windows of Palestinian homes. When we were there, the place was infested with soldiers, and I was saddened by it. A lot of settlers from a nearby settlement were walking the path that day, and the soldiers were there to keep the Palestinians away.