Tag: Open Shuhada Street 2012

When it is illegal to use your front door: Freedom of movement in Al Khalil

by Andreas

23 February 2012 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank

Al-Khalil (Hebron) is a divided city. As a result of the Oslo agreements negotiated in the 1990s – the people of Al Khalil  became familiar with two new terms – H1 and H2. H1 refers to 80% of the city, which is officially under control of the Palestinian Authority, while H2 makes up the remaining 20% and falls under full Israeli military control.  In area H2 Palestinians are daily exposed to human rights violations to an extent that can hardly be overestated. Israel severely restricts Palestinian freedom of movement in H2 in the name of  “separation,” but in practice this is a policy of segregation.

Passing through Checkpoint 56, one of eleven permantly staffed checkpoints betweeen H1 and H2,  the consequences of this policy can be heard, seen, and smelled. Passing through the checkpoint, the scents, sounds and sights of the vibrant commercial city center give way to a deserted area where the only people to be seen are a few settlers strolling down emptied streets and Israeli soldiers posted on rooftoops and street corners.

 Punishing the victims

Abed, resident of Shuhada Street

According to the latest UN report on freedom of movement in the West Bank, there are 90 different closure obstacles in the H2-area, that all interfere with freedom of movement for the Palestinians living in or having errands in H2. Closure obstacles can be staffed checkpoints, roadblocks, electric fences with barbed wire, and more.  Along with these closures, Israel has imposed a ban on all Palestinian vehicular traffic on Shuhada street, which was once the vibrant main street – connecting the North with West of Al-Khalil.  In large sections of Shuhada Street, the Israeli army also enforces a ban on pedestrian traffic.

The Oslo Agreement gave Israel the chance to normalize and justify military emergency conditions and zones, already in place since 1994.  That year a known member of the settler community of Khalil, Baruch Goldstein, walked fully armed into the Ibrahami Mosque and killed 29 people – injuring a over 100. Israel’s response to this act reveals an important principle in Israels policy applied in the H2 area –  collective punishment of the victims. Israel’s immediate response to the massacre was a 14 days of round-the-clock curfew – followed by stern restrictions on freedom of movement – with the argument that these measures would prevent reprisal against settlers.

As human rights worker Hisham Shabarati from Al-Haq laconically notes “If an Israeli kills a Palestinian – we will be punished – if an Israeli kills an Israeli  – we will be punished.”

Israel used a situation of emergency to deny Palestinians basic human rights. With the argument of protecting a community of about 650 settlers they imposed, according to Shabarati, disproportionately harsh policies that far exceed any needs for security. Denying inhibatants of Shuhada Street to use their front door, for instance, serves an agenda of making life impossible for Palestininans in H2.  As Shabarati stated  “Israel is looking for excuses rather than reasons for imposing the policy of segregation. ”

Childhood on Shuhada Street during the Intifada

Abed is a young man living on Shuhada Street, who at the moment studies English at Hebron University. Remembering his childhood during the Second Intifada,  week-long curfews and being denied entry/exit through his front door comes to his mind.   “Often times,” he said, “the school would be closed for ten days and then open for one day and so on – the curfew was announced from jeeps driving around the city. We didn’t know for how long the curfew will last.”

According to statistics from B’tselem, Israel imposed curfews on Palestinians for a total of 377 days during the first three years of the Intifada (over 1/3 of the time). The Israeli military used every excuse it could find or devise to tighten an iron fist around the Palestinian population . Although the Israeli military excused repression of civilians during the Second Intifada in the name of “military emergency” –  few restrictions on Palestinians’ freedom of movement in H2 have been removed since then.  Given that the number of Israeli soldier and civilian casualties by Palestinians has been at a minimum since the end of the Intifada, these ’emergency measures’ cannot be justified.

Israei military checking IDs along Shuhada Street

There have been limited improvements. Some inhabitants of Shuhada Street have been allowed intermittent vehicular access to their houses, and in recent years Abed and his family have won the opportunity to receive guests in their house.  However these regained freedoms are not anywhere near to the normalcy Palestinian residents of H2 expect.  For Abed part of the struggle lies in not normalizing this situation of denied freedom within his own city.  “Just three days ago,” he said, “I was detained for three hours on my way to the University.  For me the situation feels somehow normal – but it is not!”

The 90 closure obstacles and thousands of soldiers stationed in Khalil are every day delaying and denying access to inhabitants of Khalil. Severe restrictions on freedom of movement, combined with direct military closure of over 500 shops, have successfully drained the H2 area of life and business. The Palestinans residents of Khalil have an obvious right to freedom of movement and to access Shuhada Street. Open Shuhada Street!

Andreas is a volunteer with International Solidarity Movement (name has been changed).

Settler Violence: Broken Glass on Shuhada Street

by Silvia

21 February 2012 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank

Five years ago Abed Seder’s wife, Kefah, was shot five times in the chest by Israeli soldiers as she went onto her roof to check her water tank. She was 23 years old and left three sons motherless. He tells me his sons are afraid to go on the roof, which overlooks the illegal Zionist settlement of Beit Hadassah. To an international community, Abed’s struggle is one of trauma and loss, but he tells it with shockingly familiar regularity.

Israeli military is seen often in Palestinian neighborhoods in Al Khalil

Abed´s home is sandwiched inbetween Beit Hadassah and Beit HaShisha settlements, from which he receives regular torrents of abuse and violence. Rubbish and broken glass bearing Hebrew writing litters the path to his front door, bypassing the nets which attempt to catch the used nappies and toilet roles. His windows have been boarded up from the outside by Israeli soldiers in an attempt to prevent settlers from throwing molotov cocktails into Abed´s home. Abed shows me the view from his caged bedroom window, which looks directly onto a neatly planted playground, complete with basket ball court where the children of immigrant Zionists can enjoy the sunshine. As one of them raises their middle finger, Abed tells me that they regularly throw water and beer bottles so they try to keep the window closed.

Perhaps the saddest victim of this has been Abed´s 6 year old son Wadia, who was left blind after Abed´s neighbours threw chloric acid from their rooftops two years ago. He was just four years old.  Wadia has since been seeking treatment in a hospital in Jordan while Abed and his wife can only afford to visit him once every three months.

Shards of glass reflect the hatred of extremist, illegal settlers

In 1967 Israel occupied Hebron along with the rest of the West Bank. The settlement of Kiyat Arba was established on the outskirts of Hebron in 1968, later allowing for communities of settlers to illegally occupy properties such as the Hadassah Hospital and other Palestinian neighbourhoods such as Tel Rumeida. Hebron is currently home to over one hundred thousand Palestinians, who are suffering at the hands of some 500-800 settlers protected by a constant Israeli military presence.

Since the Second Intifada, settler violence has escalated in the city of Hebron with illegal settlers routinely attacking and violating the rights of their Palestinian neighbours. B’tselem has recorded incidents of physical assaults, including beatings, stone throwing and hurling of refuse, sand, water, chlorine and empty bottles. Settlers have destroyed shops and doors, committed thefts and chopped down fruit trees. Settlers have also been involved in gunfire, attempts to run people over, poisoning of a water well, breaking into homes, spilling of hot liquid on the face of a Palestinian, and the killing of a young Palestinian girl.

“Price Tagging” has become a coined phrase for the violent, illegal, Zionist settlers “struggle” as they continue to illegally steal land throughout the West Bank. On 24 July 2008, after Israeli security forces removed a bus that had been placed in the Adey Ad outpost, the head of the settlers’ struggle headquarters in Yitzhar was quoted in Ha’aretz as saying,

“The police have to understand that there will be a very high price tag on any event of this kind.”

He described the harm to Palestinians as “a display of good citizenship that is intended to help the police enforce the planning and building laws in the area on Palestinians, too.” Collective punishment is illegal under international law and is a violation of the Geneva Convention.

B’Tselem has investigated many incidents of settler violence and stated to have found that “Israeli forces intervened late, usually when Palestinians begin throwing stones at their attackers. The late response cannot be justified, as these incidents are part of a pattern and can be predicted.  They conclude that “the security forces must prepare in advance in a way that will enable them to prevent harm to Palestinians.” B´Tselem stated that the authorities have systematically failed to enforce law and order against violent settlers attacking Palestinians.

Abed Seder stands before his home in Al Khalil

Human rights worker Hisham Shabarati explains the relationship between the soldiers and the settlers as a kind of role play, where by “settlers are able to make the actions the military can’t.” He describes settlers as a political instrument able to carry out random and brutal attacks under the protection of Israeli soldiers.

“They have the same agenda; to make life unbearable for the Palestinians.”

Abed Seder’s home in the Old City of Hebron is four hundred years old. His brother and four children live above him and his great-grandfather lived here before them. For Abed, the act of resisting occupation stretches for as far as he can continue to live in the home which he legally owns. Its traditional arched doorways and original winding stairways make his home a desirable target for many settlers looking to move into an area which former Prime Minister David Ben Gurion described as “more Jewish even than Jerusalem.”

As long as Israel protects the rights of illegal settlers in Hebron over the rights of the Palestinian people, Abed and his family will suffer.

 Silvia is a volunteer with International Solidarity Movement (name has been changed).

The massacre of 1929 and the War of Narratives

by Aaron 

21 February 2012 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank

If you ask an Israeli settler in or around Al-Khalil (Hebron) what calls them to live on contested land, most will speak to a religious connection to the city and the Cave of the Machpelach (“patriarchs”), where Jews, Muslims, and Christians come to revere the biblical figures believed to be buried there. A series of signs posted nearby along Shuhada Street, the once-main road and market district now closed to Palestinians, tell a story of Hebronite Jewish habitation dating from biblical times, brought to a sharp and bloody end with a 1929 pogrom, which resulted in the deaths of 67 Jewish residents and the displacement of the survivors. Citing this narrative, many of today’s settlers justify their occupation of the old city as a rebirth and continuation of this community, a story echoed in publications distributed by the Gutnick Center (a Jewish cultural center) and soldier-escorted weekly tours through the Palestinian market. The problem with this narrative is that no one, not even the survivors’ descendants, agrees on it.

Competing narratives of the 1929 Pogram – Click here for more images

On Monday, February 20th, the Jerusalem Post published an article presenting the conflict between the survivors’ descendants as a microcosm for Jewish public opinion, some of whom support the settlements and a growing number who oppose Hebron’s especially active settler community, one  which Yair Keidan calls “a loaded bomb that can blow up peace altogether.” Both sides have signed petitions to the Israeli government, asking variously to maintain, evacuate, and/or halt settlement activity, and both groups claim a right to the legacy of their parent community.

“You can’t bring back the dead,” said Ya’acov Castel, a survivor from 1929, “but there are people living here now who are carrying out the dream of the Jews who lived here for hundreds of years.” Yona Rochlin, whose family went back many generations in pre-1929 Hebron, argues the opposite—pointing out that the majority of settlers are US immigrants, who have settled in a foreign city unfamiliar with the customs, language, or neighborly habits of the people they claim as spiritual forebearers. Unlike the predominantly Sephardi and Mizrahi (Spanish/North African and Middle Eastern respectively) Jewish minority that coexisted with a Muslim majority for five centuries, she says that today’s settlers “came to the city to take revenge for the 1929 massacre and their main idea was to drive out the Arabs and turn Hebron into a Jewish city.”

Hebronite settlers have many claims to fame, including the first West Bank settlement Kiryat Arba (founded 1968, pop. 7200) and the only settlements within the bounds of a Palestinian city—Avraham Avinu, Beit Hadassah, and Beit Romano, which lie at the heart of the Old City and fall under Israeli military control. They are also known to be among the most violent and hardliner, with many claiming allegiance to the Kahanist, Gush Emunim, and other extremist Jewish political and religious sects. Particularly infamous Kahanists include Baruch Marzel, founder of the Jewish National Front, and Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994 massacred 29 and injured over 150 Muslims at prayer in the Mosque al-Ibrahimi. Today Goldstein, who was killed during the attack, is venerated as a hero and martyr—and his tomb in Kiryat Arba continues to draw extremist pilgrims, even though his shrine was removed in 1999.

Rochlin, a politically active parent and child of conservative Jewish parents, in 1996 coauthored an open letter to the Israeli government, “Message from the original Jewish community of Hebron: Evacuate settlers,” which stated, “[Hebronite settlers] are alien to the culture and way of life of the Hebron Jews, who in the course of generations created a heritage of peace between peoples and understanding between faiths.” She sees evidence of this tradition in the fact that Muslim neighbors intervened to save her family and over 400 more when the Jewish community was attacked in 1929. Who exactly did the killing, and from where, is uncertain—but there is surprisingly little disagreement over the 19+ Palestinian families that sheltered and defended Jews. Although some Palestinian community members invited their neighbors to stay or return, by 1936 the British Mandate had relocated the remaining Jews to Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and elsewhere.

Curiously, although the Israeli Jews’ narratives tell radically different stories, many area Palestinians also know a great deal about the pogrom and mourn the loss of friends and neighbors. For Muhammad, head of the Abu Aisha family who live in the famed ‘caged house’ on Tel Rumeida, where their home is surrounded by settlement homes, it is a matter of family pride that his father is named among the Palestinians to save Jewish residents. Nonetheless, the Abu Aisha family struggles with daily harassment at the hands of settlers, who occupy land all around the home. Hajj Yussef, one of the few surviving Palestinians who responded in 1929, talks about “our Palestinian Jews,” who dressed and spoke like non-Jewish neighbors. To Yussef, like the children of his refugee neighbors, the obstacle to peace in Hebron lies not in difference but attitude and actions: “I have no problem living with the Jews, like we lived many years ago. But today’s settlers are not Palestinian Jews, they came here from abroad. And I have a problem if the Jews live in my country as occupiers and settlers.”

Open Shuhada Street, the international campaign to end Israeli Apartheid in Al-Khalil/Hebron will continue February 20th through 25th, with actions and cultural events in Khalil and around the world. Each day, we will cover a different aspect of the Occupation’s effects on Shuhada Street and the city generally.

Continue to follow www.palsolidarity.org throughout the week for more stories and analysis.

Aaron is a volunteer with International Solidarity Movement (name has been changed).

Closed shops, empty pockets: Israel’s policy of economic strangulation in Hebron

by Paige L

20 February 2012 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank

Walking down Shuhada Street in occupied Hebron (al-Khalil) is an eerie experience even during peek commercial hours in the rest of the city. Nearly empty streets are framed by rows of closed Palestinian shops, doors welded shut under Israeli military orders. Armed religious settlers walk freely through the streets, while Palestinian vehicular and pedestrian access is severely restricted. Signs in English and Hebrew assert a purely Jewish heritage in Hebron, telling a narrative that simultaneously erases the Palestinian history and rightful ownership, in an attempt to forge Israel’s illegal settlement in city center.

Palestinian shops have been forcefully closed by Israeli military due to illegal settler presence in Hebron.

The sight of closed shops is also common in the old city, as is the sound of young Palestinian children asking five shekels for the small tourist items they are selling from small plastic bags; perhaps beaded bracelets the color of the Palestinian flag or packs of chewing gum. Some are not selling anything but ask passersby to “give me one shekel.” Palestinians are a proud people, so the occurrence of begging, especially in the economic center of the southern West Bank, illustrates the extent of the economic devastation caused by Israeli policies.

Hebron is the largest city in the West Bank with a population of approximately 170,000 people. Known for its limestone, shoes, leather, dairy products, and glass blowing industry, Hebron is responsible for around one third of the West Bank’s GDP. Despite its reputation as a commercial hub, the city center of Hebron has suffered severe economic consequences since the closing of its main commercial artery, Shuhada Street in 1994. The closure followed the Ibrahimi Mosque massacre, when a far-right settler from the nearby illegal settlement of Kiryat Arba opened fire on a group of Palestinian Muslims at prayer, killing 29.

Since the Hebron Protocol of 1997, the city has been divided into two sections, H1, which is home to 140,000 Palestinians and under the control of the Palestinian Authority, and H2, inhabited by 30 ,000 Palestinians and 500 illegal Israeli settlers and under the control of the Israeli military. The H2 area includes Shuhada street, the Ibrahimi mosque, and the historic old city of Hebron.

Palestinian movement and economic activity is severely restricted in this area under an Israeli regime based on the “separation principle” – a policy of legal and physical separation for the benefit of the Israeli settlers at the expense of the Palestinian majority. These policies include the imposition of a number of permanent and temporary checkpoints, and the creation of a strip of road in the city center on which the movement of Palestinian vehicles is forbidden. Along Shuhada street Palestinian pedestrian access is forbidden as well. The closing of Shuhahda street is therefore a microcosm of a larger Israeli policy.

The economic consequences of closure have been devastating. A 2011 report by the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimated that more than 1,000 Palestinian homes in the city center had been vacated and over 1,800 commercial businesses shut down. According to a 2009 study by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), 77 percent of the Palestinians in Hebron’s Old City live below the poverty line. Though many shops were closed by military orders, a significant number have closed because the Israeli separation regime makes economic activity impossible.

Nawal Slemiah and her sister Leihla run a shop in the old city called the “Women in Hebron Cooperative” selling keffiyehs, and hand-embroidered dresses and bags made by local women from nearby villages to a dwindling number of foreign visitors. Though the store has managed to stay open despite crippling Israeli policies, being a shop-owner in the old city proves extremely difficult. Leihla points out that her customers have only one route open to them to reach her store, and must pass through checkpoints in order to shop there. Last year the military told her she must close her shop in 5 minutes for “security” reasons or she would be arrested. During the annual campaign to open Shuhada street, the Israeli military closed 3 shops, and threatened to close all shops near Bab al Baladia, the opening of the old city market. “If you support the demonstrations” she says, “they will close your shop.”

As the 2012 Open Shuhada Street campaign begins, it is important to remember the fight to re-open Shuhada is not about one street, but a larger Israeli policy of separation and the collective economic punishment of the residents of H2. It is about the right to live, work and move freely in the city center, basic human rights that have been routinely denied to Palestinians.

Paige L. is a volunteer with International Solidarity Movement (name has been changed).