In Silwan, a neighborhood of East Jerusalem adjacent to the Old City, Palestinian families sometimes demolish their own homes when the notice comes because they can’t afford to pay the fines levied upon people after the army bulldozes their houses. Sometimes the eviction notice gives them days, and other times a few hours to pull out several generations’ of possessions before the house is demolished. Sometimes people are given 15 minutes to get out of their house before tear gas is fired through the windows.

Israel has occupied East Jerusalem since 1967, “transferring” thousands of Palestinians from West Jerusalem, which legally obliges the Israeli government to follow the Geneva Conventions that prohibit destruction of housing and property of occupied people. Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem is internationally unrecognized, as is Israel’s claim to all of Jerusalem as its unified capital. But Jerusalem, the Palestinian capital known in Arabic as al-Quds, is a key battleground in the demographic war that Israel is waging to “reduce density” of Palestinians, with housing struggle as a primary weapon. The goal is to create a solid Jewish majority throughout Occupied East Jerusalem, with contiguous connections to the massive illegal settlement blocs spreading out into the West Bank. Half a million Israeli settlers currently colonize the West Bank, with more than a third of those in East Jerusalem.

One November morning, we sat in a protest tent built atop the roof of one of the 88 houses scheduled for demolition in the center of Silwan. The walls are hung with banners reading “We will never leave our home,” and renderings of olive trees with deep roots. Organizers from the Bustan local committee explained to us that this area of Silwan has been targeted for demolition to make way for a religious theme parky site. The private rightwing corporation ElAd, which has been developing the “City of David” tourist site in Bustan, while digging unpermitted tunnels under the Old City, gained control over Silwan’s archeological sites when the Israeli Antiquities Authority became dependent on its funding. Just as religious sentiment was used to tear down the Old City neighborhood that was demolished to create a plaza much bigger than the worshipping area adjacent to the Western Wall, ElAd and other settler corporations use religion to access public support (and sometimes public funding).

The plan is to level every house in the Bustan district, leaving1500 Jerusalemites homeless. But East Jerusalem’s Palestinian families, most of them refugees already from the Nakba of 1948, are fighting to keep their homes.

A father of 7 who helps coordinate Madaa (Horizon) Silwan, the protest/community-building center, explained to us his choice of nonviolent struggle. He talked about the challenges of teaching tolerance and peace to kids who watch the demolitions of their own and friends’ houses, and grow up angry. How internal social issues like family violence are exacerbated, and then often not dealt with, as people fight for survival. Several protest/community centers in East Jerusalem prioritize youth programming, against the Israeli restrictions that have even disbanded soccer clubs for Palestinian kids. He talks about feeling robbed of the possibilities that other people experience, struggling for the basics while children in other parts of the world have so much more opportunity.

“The world has to move forward together,” he says. “It’s not just about my happiness, but everyone’s.” He discusses how it benefits everyone for families to be happy, healthy and warm. And then he explains how important it is that there are Israelis like Maya Wind, our shministm friend who’s brought us here and who has formed deep bonds with families in these neighborhoods through her work with the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions and Rabbis for Human Rights. “It’s so important for my children to meet her– someone from the other side– to work together, to know some Jews care.”

Learn more about the Center at http://www.madaasilwan.org/, and please consider donating to them– they operate the only library in Silwan, and are looking for donations of good-condition childrens’ books in English and Hebrew.

After visting Silwan, Maya took us to Sheikh Jarrah, the neighborhood where police and settler violence has been reaching new heights. We went to meet the Ghawis, a family who were evicted in August and still sleep outside their home, across the street. The mattress they sleep on under a tarp must be stood on end every day, or the police will tear the tent down as they have many times already. Private security guards, unsurprisingly dark-skinned as Israel exploits every possible method of divide-and-control based on race and ethnicity, guard the Israeli settlers in the Ghawis’ house. As with another family in this neighborhood, Israelis and internationals slept with the families for the last months before their displacement, until finally on August 2nd the soldiers came before dawn, broke their windows, cuffed the adults and threw the children around, and took their house. The Ghawis are already refugees of the Nakba. They were driven from Haifa, a hilly city where Zionist militias rolled barrels of explosives downhill into Palestinian neighborhoods. The Hannouns down the street were similarly evicted on August 2^nd, when “small charges” blew up their doors at 4:30 a.m. A company called Nahalat Shimon International plans to demolish the homes of the Hannouns, Ghawis, and others in order to build 200-unit settlement.

Sheikh Jarrah was built by Jordan and the United Nations after the Nakba to house displaced Palestinians. Rightwing settler movements have targeted East Jerusalem as a key area to colonize, are claiming land ownership from British or Ottoman times, predating the homes. Courts collaborate with racially discriminatory policy by upholding settler claims, often on criminal pretexts– one resident told us of settlers breaking into a funeral to fingerprint his grandmother’s corpse to manipulate their claim’s proceedings. The policy is clearly racist in its absolute one-sided application; Palestinians who still hold keys and deeds to homes they were born in have no ability to claim their houses or return home. Yet the Israelis who are colonizing homes in Sheikh Jarrah are not descendants of previous residents, and have no previous connections to these houses (many Israeli settler/colonists throughout the West Bank are recent immigrants, often from the U.S.), while Palestinian claims of house ownership in West Jerusalem moulder in court, never ratified.

How will the precedent set by Israeli courts here evolve the struggles over land and housing in Israel/Palestine? While courts order Palestinian families onto the streets of Sheikh Jarrah, based on spurious ownership claims by Jews, international negotiations have broken for years over the questions of Jerusalem’s identity and on the right for Palestinian refugees to return to their actual homes. Umm al-Kurd, after being evicted, said she’d be willing to give her Sheikh Jarrah home to settlers if she could move back into her original house in Talbiyeh, West Jerusalem. So will Israel reverse its policy and begin honoring the deeds and claims of Palestinians?

A few days after our visit, news broke of approval to build 900 new housing units in Gilo, one of the biggest settlements adjacent to Jerusalem, where 40,000 colonists already live outside the Green Line. In the same week, more Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem were demolished, despite attempts by neighbors to block the entrance to the neighborhood. Just after we returned home, the al-Kurd family was evicted yet again, and the mural painted on their long low garden wall was painted over with stars of David. They are confined to a section of their house, sharing the yard and entrance with the settlers, who burned out in the yard everything flammable from the section of the house they moved into, and who make death threats against the al-Kurds.

Since the DAM delegation arrived back in San Francisco, we’ve been keeping in touch with Israeli activists in al-Quds/Jerusalem who are involved in the housing struggles. As we were preparing for our first reportback in December, we heard stories of the weekly protests in Sheikh Jarrah on the street where the Ghawis and al-Kurds live outside their houses. All 28 families in this neighborhood are under real threat of eviction; 500 people are slated to become homeless.

On the first night of Hanukkah, the border police broke loose in waves of violence on the Palestinians, Israelis and internationals who were assembling nonviolently, with a police permit, on the street. 23 people were arrested, held illegally for 40 hours including a stint in the al-Kurd’s house where the settlers are living, and then released with an order barring them from entering Sheikh Jarrah for a month.

We heard that in the middle of the violence, police beating, pepper-spraying the face of a handcuffed professor, dragging people across the stones, a typical Palestinian moment occurred. An elder from one of the evicted families had prepared a trayful of strong, sweet coffee in little cups. He went through the crowd offering coffee to the protestors, in the manner of extending hospitality that our delegation experienced so many times while in the West Bank, as the police swarmed and struck people all around him. This struggle is not new to people whose experience of displacement began when they were children, and who know they belong on the land, despite what the police, army, courts and colonists say.

Now, in late December, as police continue to arrest protestors every Friday outside these families’ homes, we hear that Israel’s housing ministry has approved plans to build almost 700 new apartments in three Jewish settlements in east Jerusalem. Ideologically motivated settlers (as opposed to settlers whose primary motivation for becoming colonists is the government subsidies of the settlements) brought their anger into the streets earlier this month when a toothless “settlement freeze” was announced– ten thousand marched in West Jerusalem, houses and cars and a mosque were burned, and settlers threatened to invade al-Aqsa Mosque. Despite the “freeze,” construction continues on thousands of West Bank units. Many of these units are built on privately owned Palestinian land, often seized first by the military for “security purposes” before being turned over to settlement contractors.

Now settlers are expanding what they call a “price tag” campaign– to raise the cost of any slowdown on settlement expansion by targeting Palestinian civilians. On Christmas at midnight, 30 settlers broke into the Sabbagh family’s home, knifed and punched teenagers, and kicked a pregnant woman’s stomach. Later in the day, 20 settlers attacked the Ghawis with stones. When an Israeli ambulance finally arrived, the medics refused to treat or transport the injured Palestinian children. The combination of street violence by rightwing radicals, in collaboration with policies of racial discrimination enacted by state institutions and upheld by its officials on every level from the courts to the police, is not unfamiliar to us as U.S. citizens. We recognize this toxic blend in our home too, just as many elements of Israeli society, which is so heavily militarized it’s hard to call it “civil society,” recall our own.

Palestinian residents of different East Jerusalem neighborhoods and Israeli activists with organizations including the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, Anarchists Against the Wall, and Rabbis for Human Rights are strategizing together and marching together. Every week, more people are arrested, settlers attack Palestinian adults and children on the street, and homes are demolished or seized. And every week the protests have grown larger– from 50 just a few weeks ago to 500 this past Friday. New videos of each protest post on Youtube each week. Last week, we saw one of the cofounders of Breaking the Silence being marched by the police into the temporary holding area of the occupied al-Kurd house, tossing off a “Shabat Shalom” to the camera.

In 2002, the year the Ghawis and Hannouns endured their first eviction (they were later “allowed” to return to their homes), then-Tourism Minister and member of Knesset Benny Elon described the intention behind colonizing Sheikh Jarrah. “Our strategic plan for the city is a belt of Jewish continuity from East to West,” he said while leading a press tour through the neighborhood. Elon helped begin this colonization the year before, leading a group of settlers under police escort into Sheikh Jarrah to invade homes and place settlers, in a nighttime invasion during which a two-year old baby was thrown out a second-story window. The focus Elon describes of ethnically cleansing Palestinian neighborhoods adjacent to the Old City is a logical strategy to divide East Jerusalem from the West Bank and connect it to the existing rings and arms of settlements.

Statistics of homes demolished (24,145 since 1967) and new settlement units approved create on-the-ground obstacles to democracy and peace. The continued use of the army to destroy homes and evict families is a continuation of the Nakba– the militarized displacement of Palestinians as part of a plan to control the demographics and establish a fully Judaized Israel, with its capital city cleansed of Arabs.

I first heard about the weekly protests at Bil’in and Nil’in on a cold and gray March day in 2008 while standing outside the Israeli consulate in San Francisco. I was told that for close to five years, first in Bil’in and then later in Nil’in, weekly protests were being organized by village popular committees against the building of the separation wall that was cutting off Palestinian villagers from their land. A fellow rebel against the empire had been critically wounded by Israeli soldiers while participating in one of these weekly protests at Nil’in near Ramallah, Palestine. I was on the streets that day because I needed to say publicly with the presence of my body that violence against protesters, the building of the separation wall, and the occupation itself are not acceptable with me.

The consulate demo ended with police whacking people with batons and a few arrests.

When D.A.M. was invited to attend the Friday protest in Bil’in on Nov. 13^th it was accepted with little question that we needed to see with our own eyes what happens there. D.A.M.’s research prior to us leaving pointed to a few areas that seemed to act as flashpoints of direct confrontation between the IDF and settlers against Palestinians, Internationals, and Israeli activists. Along with Hebron and East Jerusalem, it was decided that Bil’in was a place that needed to be visited for a deeper understanding of the effects of militarism.

In the past two years there have been five murders of civilians by IDF troops at these weekly demos. Over a dozen people have been left in wheelchairs, maimed, shot with live ammunition, or are dealing with the effects of brain damage. Dozens more have been injured by rubber coated bullets and rocket propelled gas canisters. Hundreds if not thousands have been gassed.

When we got to the house of Iyad Bournat, a Bil’in Popular Committee member and the one who invited us to the protest, I met an Irish activist who produced from the bookshelf a high velocity teargas round. These palm length inch and a half diameter rounds are supposed to be fired from great distances and not at individuals. I was told that the particular round that I was holding in my hand was the one that killed Bassem Abu Rahme, the last death to occur at Bil’in in April 2009. He was shot in the chest from a few meters away with this “non-lethal” round. It was said he got up off the ground after the initial impact, took a few steps and collapsed suffering from hemothorax, or blood filling the lung cavities caused by blunt force trauma. This is the same type of round that struck Tristan Anderson and brought me to the consulate that gray March day.

After a series of speeches by local activists, Knesset members, PLO functionaries, and D.A.M., we marched to the fence. Alcohol wipes were passed out to help protesters breath during gas attacks. The smell and sting of tear gas is unforgettable. Even a few parts per million can be felt on the tip of the nose, in the back of the throat, or in the eyes. Besides the acidic twinge of gas was the sulfur undertone from the rocket propellent used to push the gas grenades faster and higher.

As the march rounded the village and opened up into what remained of the agricultural land, it was met by a small skirmish between the IDF forces and masked “shabab” – young men from the village. Over 60% of Bil’in was annexed by Israel when they began building the wall, meaning that the village has lost most of its access to the olive trees and other agricultural land. This was what the villagers were fighting for. The rocket propelled gas grenades produced their first injury of the day. An American had been hit in the head and was bleeding. He would be fine, later taken to a hospital for stitches.

We had heard that it was preferred for Internationals to go to Bil’in first before going to Nil’in. This way folks can acclimate somewhat to the nature of protest in Israel and Palestine. Bil’in’s protest has been going on for some time and because the fence was already in place the protest has turned into a contest of wills. Palestinians, Internationals, and Israelis endure gas attack after gas attack while trying to get to the gate of the fence. A squad of soldiers stands at the ready with rifles, shields, and gas grenades just incase any protester gets to close to the gate. On the hill above the gate more soldiers with rifle fired gas canisters stand prepared, firing in unison, trying to push the protesters back. Rocks are thrown by masked youth presumably from the village. Most hit the fence and bounce off harmlessly, others ricochet off of shields. Soldiers have been known to get injured but none that day.

If people weren’t killed on a regular basis it would almost seem a game. Under fire from multiple grenades one man was able to post a small Palestinian flag on the fence. As soldiers attempted to remove the flag he was met by a shower of stones. The army responded by using the vehicle-mounted gas delivery system that launches 30 canisters at once. Falling from the sky like rocks they blanket the area with thick smoke. Most of the internationals and Israelis had fallen back and the protest was called off. Those two hours seemed to go by like a snap of the fingers. Tea was served at various houses and stories of near misses by rocket grenades were told.

The next week I found myself in Nil’in. I was alone as the rest of D.A.M. was meeting individuals in the Golan Heights. I wasn’t totally sure why I’d decided to go to Nil’in. I hoped it want a silly sense of bravado. I really just wanted to see what it was like for people to truly put themselves on the line for what they believed in.

Two weeks, before activists had torn down one of the eight meter high concrete slabs to mark the fall of the Berlin wall. Last week, two activists were shot with live ammunition. The same was going to happen that day as well. The atmosphere at Nil’in was solemn. A hundred Palestinian males were praying together in an olive grove overlooking the protest sight while another hundred internationals and Israelis stood behind them. There were rumors that the Israeli secret service was going to arrest internationals. The night before the Israeli SS kidnapped a Palestinian activist from Bil’in.

The concrete wall separating Nil’in from the Israeli settlement of Modi’in Illit could be seen on the horizon. I understand now why Internationals are asked to go to Bil’in first. The protest at Nil’in covers a larger area that spans a kilometer of the wall. So while the action is dispersed across a larger area, that action takes a much more sinister form. The crack of live ammunition is unforgettable. The twang and pitch of the sound lets you know how close it came to you. While the wind was with us that day it did not stop the canisters from flying. The falling canisters from the vehicle-mounted systems were raining down on us. Huge plumes of gas were wafting into the settlement on the other side of the wall. Sections of the wall were billowing black smoke either from Molotov cocktails or burning tires. The Red Crescent was rushing into action with stretchers and gas masks as the live rounds fired into the crowd were meeting their marks. It was intense. I left after 3 or 4 hours. It went on longer. In the end people just started to go home. The protest was over.

A Jerusalem-based Israeli activist who has been going to these weekly protests since they began in 2005 told me why for the past few months he’s been training a team of medic to operate as support for the Red Crescent. “The injuries being sustained,” he said, “are horrible, but they can be planned for. They are the injuries that people get when they get shot by bullets or rockets. Some of those who’ve died did not have to. So we train people and supply them with the things they need to keep people stable until they can be driven to a hospital.” Later over drinks this same activist told me about his feelings about the weekly protests. “We’ve made Bil’in and Nil’in into symbols that can be understood by all people, including Israelis. People are fighting for their land in a real direct way. So yes, we’ve made symbols out of Bil’in and Nil’in, the walls were still built, and we’re still out there saying no. But people died creating those symbols, the walls are still wrong, and we’ll be back next week. We all fought to have people pay attention and the people in those villages have earned it.”

http://www.flashpoints.net/?p=479/

At the surface level, many times upon first meeting me people in the West Bank told me they had perceived me to be Arab. We’d smile, I say thank you, and then when asked my family’s origin  I would reply, “Mexican.”  After that, I would even start to get introduced as “Doesn’t he look Arab?” or “This is Eddie from the other village over…” jokingly in Arabic.

On the flip-side, is what treatment comes from being a person of color by the colonizers. Like when soldiers gave me the eye, asked me questions, not in English, off to the side, and came around to watch my back side after private security called them and locked us in the parking lot of a check-point with Machsom Watch while interviewing Palestinians crossing the border on their way from work in Israel back to their homes in occupied Palestine. Or like when in the Hebron marketplace an Arab woman and myself had sand thrown on the both of us by a settler. Coincidence? Or how about being stopped by the police “randomly” on the streets of Tel Aviv in broad day-light and asked where I was from in different languages. Who else in this so-called civil society would you ask that question?

On a deeper level, after discussing and seeing the walls in Palestine and at the US-Mexico border, racism, exploitation of resources, land and labor, prisons, targeting of youth, home raids, the effects of militarism on society, etc. I think when Shadi the guide at Dheisheh Refugee Camp told me ”We have similar roots” pretty much sums it up. As I’m sure that all people of color, share similar roots.

Yes, we do have roots in being colonized and having our land stolen. Roots in fighting against high walls and concertina-wired fences that prevent freedom of movement to work the land and to see our family. Rooted in struggle as being used as a cheap source of labor for the will of white bosses, corporate greed, or state interests. Sharing roots of being profiled, policed and imprisoned due to poverty , racism, and the violence of citizenship laws as second-class citizens. United in keeping our precious roots alive through culture, customs, and heritage in an ever-growing mono-cultural world. Our roots, through struggle have grown into beautiful and thriving communities and we aren’t going with out a fight!

After the damage I have done to Arab communities in the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, I am fortunate and glad to have been here taking a stand with the people of Palestine as a natural ally, instead of a foreign enemy.

 La Lucha Continua y Viva la Puebla Palestina.

Eddie Falcon

If it’s Sunday night chances are Susan Laurenco is having a hard time getting to sleep.  She’s a volunteer for Machsom Watch who has been monitoring checkpoints in the West Bank nearly every weekend for 5 years.  Members of Machsom (Hebrew for “barrier”) sign up for shifts to witness and document the struggles Palestinians face every day.  The work has an emotional weight that can induce insomnia.

Susan tells us that Qalqilya, a city in the area we monitored this week, was once called the “City of Peace” by its inhabitants.  Since the Second Intifada its people dropped the nickname as it became completely surrounded by the wall and bottle-necked into a single checkpoint restricting movement, impeding everything from daily life to emergencies that might involve an ambulance or fire truck.

Contrary to what most people think the checkpoints that cause the most strife are not on Israeli-Palestinian borders, but within the occupied territories.  Qalqilya has had to go through an economic overhaul since checkpoints were erected.  These barriers separate people from work, children from school, and families from each other.  Like most cities in the area, Qalqilya created an agricultural-based economy using the beautiful and fertile land.  Today these places suffer because the barricades have also divided the land in ways that interfere with developing the soil for farming and animal movement for grazing.

One reason people probably believe the cross-border checkpoints are more disruptive than those within the West Bank is the visual contrast.  Unlike the prominent walls designed to physically and mentally imprison Palestinians on the border, the barriers within the West Bank are wire-link fences which are comparatively invisible especially from the settler colonies in the distance that are designed to “protect”.  Israel is one giant military base and the occupied territories are its brigs.

In 2003, when I spent time in the brig for being the first public conscientious objector to the occupation of Iraq, I went from being imprisoned by wire fences to being held behind large concrete walls.  Traveling around Israel and Palestine during the Dialogues Against Militarism (DAM) delegation, it has felt like I’ve transferred back and forth from military base to prison several times.  In both the brig and in the West Bank the walls were more ominous but in many ways I felt more free than when I was stationed on a base or while in Israel.  My liberty was restricted severely but I did have the liberty to follow my conscience; I was free not to kill or die for an immoral and unjust war.  While in Israel I felt burdened with the knowledge that by spending sheckels I was somewhat contributing to an oppressive occupation.

When I talk about being imprisoned I usually say that it really wasn’t that bad.  In the end it was much better to serve six months in the brig than spend six months+seven months+ nine months… on multiple tours in Iraq.  Some Marines have spent over 36 months total on their third or fourth tour due to extensions, and war is a hell that imprisons far longer than after a tour of duty ends.

Palestinians suffer more from the occupation, but Israelis suffer as well.  To cope with the guilt of being governed by a nation that occupies their neighbors, some Israelis choose to remain ignorant about what’s happening in their own backyards, others are compelled to develop religious excuses for setting up apartheid systems.  All the while generations are growing up under unjust treatment breeding anger and resentment and ironically making Israel less safe.  Much like in the U.S. other Israelis choose instead to take responsibility and work against the crimes being committed by their government.

Susan and other volunteers at Machsom Watch may not be able to sleep at night, but their important work along other activists we have met during the DAM delegation are vital pieces to solving the puzzle of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

On Shahuda Street, Hebron, children behind screened-off windows to protect them from stones thrown by settlers.

A father follows his daughter into their house, which means scaling a rope up the back as their front door, facing Shahuda Street, was welded shut by the military years ago.

Soldiers patrol a Palestinian marketplace. Screens cover the walkways to protect Palestinian from objects thorwn by settlers. You can see some of those objects that got caught in the screen.

One of the many murals lining the streets of Dheisheh Refugee Camp

View from the rooftop of Ibdaa Center.

Family portrait, Ibdaa Center, Dheisheh

I walk the haunted halls of Hebron
A cage within a cage
Tiers of cells
Cold and dampened by the tears and blood of village ghosts
Metal bars upon metal screens
The silenced screams of children
Scarred by spikes and stones
Thrown from the balconies of stolen homes
Little boys and girls skirmish
Laughter echos the gauntlet
Painful passages etched and carved through concrete walls
But cannot escape the prison
They gather and gaze across welded, wounded windows
Searching for a horizon of hope
Only to stare unto a hollow hill of broken bones
With broken hearts
Imperial sentinels in the fortress of phantasms
Torment and terrorize the vestiges of villagers
From dawn
Until dusk
A time when they must climb back into their sorrowful cells
Sleeping and dreaming through the darkness
Ghosts chained to a memory
Forgotten
Feared
Forced into a cage within a cage
The settler slings sand at my face
For my face is just as the phantom’s face
Her eyes
My eyes
Our eyes are many mirrors over
Sharing the vision of a world
Without prisons
And living ghosts.

Metal screen covering Palestinian marketplace to protect from objects thrown by settlers.

The word “Revenge” is scrawled in Hebrew on a Palestinian school in Hebron. The windows are covered with screens and the play yard obstructed with more screens tipped with barbed wire, to obstruct the stones regularly pelted down by Jewish settlers. The space between the school and the neighboring building is blocked off with large, wooden slabs, to ensure that Palestinian school children do not encroach into settler territory. Nearby checkpoints and cameras placed on rooftops serve as constant reminder that these kids’ every movement is monitored and contained.

This schoolyard scene, on an empty weekend day, illustrates the separation and containment that has become written into the architecture of Hebron. In this city where 1,500 Israeli soldiers are stationed on any given day, the 170,000 Palestinians living here are kept under constant watch, their movements restricted while their safety is under constant threat. The Jewish settlers who have been moving in since the late ’70s, now numbering 800, are known for repeatedly attacking Palestinians while Israeli soldiers sit idly by.

Walking into Hebron literally feels like a nightmare. Shahuda Street, one of the main roads, is traveled only by settlers on foot or in speeding cars, soldiers and police, and packs of fighting dogs. Palestinians living on this street have to climb into their houses from the rear, either cutting across neighbors’ rooftops, carving holes in their walls, or, like one little girl we watched, scaling a rope to the second story. Their front doors have been welded shut or barricaded with rusty metal, like the countless shops in Hebron, closed by military order. Streets are sealed off with concrete and bales of ribbon wire.

“Security is the magic word here,” says Hisham Sharabati, a journalist who has been living in Hebron for most of his life, gesturing towards an Israeli military checkpoint at the entrance of the Abraham Mosque, in the middle of the Old City. “Israel uses that word in any way it likes, so that it can justify denying Palestinian human rights.”

In 1994, a settler named Baruch Goldstein opened fire in the mosque at Abraham’s tomb, a sacred site to Muslims, Jews, and Christians. We saw the torn marble, bullet holes in the arch that points towards Mecca. 29 Palestinians were killed while praying, then more when the military opened fire on people trying to run out of the mosque. The response? Palestinians were placed under 30 days of curfew, the fruit and vegetable market was shut down, and the “system of separation” developed. Since then, Palestinians living in Hebron have been controlled by the military and attacked by settlers – a “security” structure that many say was intended to push out Palestinians to make way for settlers. The city was carved up into the H1 Area – controlled by the Palestinian Authority, and the H2 Area, controlled by the Israeli military. Within the H2 area, Jewish and Palestinian quarters were cordoned off by a matrix of roads, many of them off-limits to Palestinian use. Vibrant marketplaces and city centers were shut down, some of them slowly taken over by Jewish settlers, others turned into ghost towns guarded by military checkpoints. Israeli soldiers now patrol every street in the H2 area, in a tactic that serves as a constant reminder of the Israeli military presence.

Jewish settlers claim that they have rights to the land, invoking a bloody massacre in 1929 that left 67 Jews dead. There are varying accounts of this tragedy: Mikhael Manekin from Breaking the Silence, a group of former IDF soldiers who now speak out about what they witnessed and acts they perpetrated, told us that many of the murderers had come in from surrounding villages. He claims that several Palestinian locals risked their lives to defend the Jews, and some of them were granted certificates of appreciation by Jewish organizations for doing so. Local settlers have used the 1929 massacre to justify pushing Palestinian Hebron residents out of their homes, with a sign placed in the middle of a settlement that reads, “These Arabs are living on stolen land.”

What happened in 1929 is horrible, but it does not justify mass displacement and systemic degradation of a people. The massacre is being used to target Arabs and perpetuate racism in a way that has not been directed towards European populations guilty of massacring Jews on a far larger scale. The painful landscape of Hebron is an example of how trauma can beget trauma: a population of Jews, traumatized by a history of violence and discrimination, has turned around and traumatized another people, and in doing so, is causing untold damage to their own community. Settlers here occupy a city that has become a hotbed of religious/ethnic tension and blatant racial discrimination. This is not good for anyone who grows up in such an environment, whether Israeli or Palestinian.

Hisham guided us through the city all morning; in the afternoon, we met with Mikhael, who as an Israeli, could take us into the areas Hisham is prohibited from entering although he’s lived in Hebron his whole life. Mikhael explained that there are 2 or 3 soldiers per settler, a ratio clearly intended to control the large Palestinian population. Rather than correlate the military presence to the amount of settlers; the logic is based in military containment and control of the “enemy,” under the guise of protection. Mikhael served as an officer in Hebron, and now is one of the Breaking the Silence members who leads tours there for Israelis and internationals.

The settlements within Hebron have been declared illegal by the Geneva conventions. The official city maps, which are the documents used by Israeli courts, are wildly inaccurate. They claim that ghost streets, long sealed off by concrete and metal, are functioning thoroughfares and marketplaces. Walking through the streets of Hebron, you find a city carved up by the violent military presence and constant threat of settler violence.

Some roads have a concrete barrier running along the edge, leaving a few feet for Palestinians to walk along while two wide lanes are reserved for settlers. The souks, Old City markets, have wire screens or makeshift netting overhead: insufficient protection for attacks from settlers living on the floors above. The wire screens are heavy with trash, bricks, giant concrete chunks, and exploded plastic bags that contained sewage and urine when they burst onto the people and racks of goods below. Hisham told us one young man was in a coma after a sharpened metal rod came through the screen and penetrated his skull. Now, when you look up, you can see piles of objects that got caught in the screen: crowbars, bricks, stones, chairs. While walking through a market, we saw a settler woman throw sand from her third story apartment down at a crowded market where Palestinians were shopping. It fell on a Palestinian woman’s head, as well as on one of our delegation members, Eddie, who because of being Mexican-American has often been perceived to be Arab on this trip.

An older man who lives at the edge of Shahuda Street, in the last meters Palestinians living on that block are allowed to walk up to, explains that he has to apply for permits if his children or grandchildren want to visit his home. He is not allowed any other visitors, like every Palestinian who remains in their home in H2. On the other hand, settler children take field trips on his street. We watched a group of elementary school-aged settler children walk down Shahuda, accompanied by a few adults including with some with assault rifles strung over their shoulders.

Standing on a rooftop overlooking the old city, we could see concrete and stone buildings, punctuated by military bases in the center of the city, and on opposing hills. These military installations have either expelled or built on the rooftops of people living in top floor apartments. Many of the rooftops held water tanks, important storage for a neighborhood whose water is diverted to the nearby settlements and sold back at higher prices to Palestinians.

In the hills south of Mount Hebron, settlers attack Palestinians going to graze their sheep. A friend told us about a village that was expelled in 2000, and until a few weeks ago, was living in caves near their lands. The Israeli court actually ruled that they could go back to their village, and on Friday settlers attacked their flocks and killed a lamb. When Israeli solidarity activists called the police, who came hours later, the police accused the elderly Palestinians of having killed their own animal to frame the settlers. Olive harvest accompaniment is prioritized not only because the olive trees sustain many people, but also because legal loopholes are used to take away peoples’ land if they aren’t able to reach it for a certain period of time. It is reminiscent of the eminent domain laws used to steal people’s land in the lower 9th ward: if displaced New Orleanians weren’t able to return to the city to cut their grass regularly the city would claim their plot– often an overgrown lot with only the foundations left where the house was blown away by the wall of water.

Solidarity work in this area sounds like it mostly takes the form of accompaniment, whether it’s escorting children to school to protect them against stone-throwing settlers, or walking with people to their grazing lands. Settler children throw stones at Palestinian children on their way to school- children under 14 cannot be held responsible, Mikhael told us, so they are careful about who throws the stones. One school finally had to change its hours and days so that the children would not be walking to school when settler children were home to attack them- they’re the only Palestinian school not open on Saturdays, and the kids have no recess so they can leave early enough to get home safely. Every day. “The Palestinians are the ones who take the burden of the separation policy into their lives,” Hisham says.

Palestinian residents of Hebron have been organizing to revitalize their communities and challenge military occupation and settler violence. The Hebron Rehabilitation Committee fixes up battered neighborhoods to encourage people to come home, planting gardens and repainting dilapidated storefronts. Youth Against Settlements has organized creative direct actions: a recent protest involved setting up mock checkpoints next to Israeli ones, getting arrested after five minutes but still drawing attention to the conditions they live in.

Hebron is situated in the center of global power struggles and alliances situated around Israel. This city is the logical conclusion of a religious/ethnic state – a city where military occupation is woven into the fabric of daily life and residents are forced to build screen fortresses to protect themselves from stones and bricks. From the shut down city centers, with welded doors and security cameras pointing towards the emptiness, to the settlement military bases that sit in the center of town, this is the reality of the current state of Israel. This is what we, as U.S. citizens are supporting, when our government sends military aid so that Israel can buy tanks and weapons to patrol these streets.

By Haitham Al Katib