Sunday, July 6, 2008

Khalil/Hebron

































































Israel: Equality and Justice for All*

*Some restrictions may apply. Offer not available in all areas


Hebron is home to some of the nastiest settlers in the territories. They are proclaimed as some of the most religious people in the world, when in reality these people are monsters. (Stop me if I'm wrong, but isn't it very un-Jewish to try to kill your neighbors?) In the market, the Palestinians have put up metal grids above them so that the settlers living in the buildings the story above won't throw trash, bricks, and crowbars on them (they aim to kill).

The Israeli authorities have a perverse sense of “justice”. When they want to close a Palestinian shop for whatever reason, they weld the door shut. Palestinian fruit vendors carry their fruit in wood and wire baskets... one day a vendor was walking down the street and there was a wire sticking out from his box... he accidentally scratched a settler woman's arm as he passed her. She went screaming to the nearest IDF soldiers that this Palestinian had tried to stab her, and they closed the market down for two months.

The photos of the crumbling structure that used to be a house mark the border between the Israeli-controlled and the PA-controlled side of town. Hisham, our guide, joked that since different parts of the former house were in different territories, if the IDF wanted to arrest someone from the PA-controlled side they'd “wait til he was in the bathroom,”--i.e., on the Israeli side of the house.

We visited a man in Tel Rumeida, a partially seized village, who had settlers living above him next-door. His yard was full of trash they threw at him and his children, including a WASHING MACHINE. They call his children whores every time they try to go to school, and scream at the Arabs to die—there are videotapes of settler riots, of these people tearing down gates, going in to trash Palestinian homes—and the soldiers are just standing there! HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN THE HOLOCAUST SO SOON?! “For me, this is Krystallnacht,” said Dunya. The similarities are so uncanny, that Israel's excuse for taking over a country is because the Jewish people were terrorized in the Holocaust does not hold up any weight at all. For anyone who calls me an anti-Semite for saying this, do you remember the pilgrims who landed here in 1620 escaping religious persecution? I don't think that gave them a right to drive the Indigenous population off of their land and contribute to a genocide. For me, Israel is America is ethnic cleansing, 1492 is 1948. It didn't have to be this way.

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