Hebron and Dheisheh

This past Thursday I went with the Alternative Tourism Group on a day tour to Hebron and Bethlehem. ATG is an organization directed and run by multinational Palestinians who want to take tourists to sites you don't get on sterile tours of the holy and historical sites. I wanted to take this tour because while I am very supportive of Israel, I couldn't come here for three months and not see the situation on the ground. Hebron, in particular, was eye-opening; Dheisheh, on the other hand, was troubling in a very different way.

We met across the street from St. George's at the Olive Tree Hotel, where I'd stayed with America Israel Travel. After waiting for people who never showed, we headed out for the checkpoint and through Bethlehem to pick up our guide Samir, who throughout the day was very informative.

From there we headed south, past the Herodian (the fortress-palace where the old king's tomb was recently discovered) to Hebron. Hebron was, particularly, the goal of my tour, as it is the second holiest city in Judaism and contains the Cave of the Patriarchs. Atop this cave Herod the Great built the structure that still serves as the central frame of the sanctuary today. The 'tombs' one sees are not actually tombs at all; they are cenotaphs, memorial structures to commemorate those buried deeper below the surface. Most remarkable of all, however, the structure that stands today is both a synagogue and a mosque (the famous pulpit or minbar, brought by Saladin, and the eastern niche or mihrab, are pictured right), now with a dividing wall between them.

The dividing wall was put in place after the 1994 Baruch Goldstein massacre. The eponymous Jewish settler, a radical Orthodox militant belonging to groups founded by the terrorist-rabbi Meir Kahane, went into the mosque section, dressed in his army uniform to give the appearance of being an on-duty reservist, and began shooting Muslims at morning prayer. About forty were murdered.

The Jewish settlers in Hebron are ultra-Orthodox radicals. They are not economically motivated like many (perhaps most) settlers elsewhere, and they are not normal religious settlers who have a desire to live within the bounds of ancient Judea and Samaria (today the West Bank). They are driven by an ideological commitment to retake the land for Jews and Judaism. As a result, they have placed their settlement within the confines of the Palestinian city. In order to prevent interaction between Jewish settlers and Palestinian locals- the sort that has ended in the Goldstein massacre and an earlier killing of Jews returning home from Shabbat in 1980, the Israeli government (under Netanyahu) and the Palestinian Authority negotiated the 1997 Hebron Agreement. This divides Hebron into two strict zones and established a Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH), foreign troops meant to patrol the zones. We saw zero TIPH troops while there.

Israeli police are primarily responsible for manning checkpoints that divide Jews and Palestinians, with predictable results. In some places, settler homes and facilities are built directly atop indigenous sections. To the right, you can see the open air market has been covered with a net. This net was placed here by the locals because the settlers living in the stories above the market routinely dump garbage and human waste- urine and feces- into the marketplace. You can see the filth in the nets.

This is hardly the extent of what native Hebronites are made to suffer. We had tea with a shopkeeper whose establishment is almost entirely surrounded by Israeli checkpoints and settler-only areas. He cannot serve Palestinian locals, only foreign tourists like ourselves who can pass between H1 and H2. Samir was only able to join us because he holds an American passport.

We also visited what must be the most tragic case in the city, a widowed Palestinian woman with eleven children whose two-story house has come to be entirely surrounded by settler establishments. Her lower floor is accessible from the marketplace, but her second floor peaks up into what the settlers consider their territory. The picture to the left illustrates how intrusive the settler presence has become, with her home to the left, and a settler establishment to the right.

Of course, if their presence were peaceful, this would not be a problem. Palestinians may grumble that 'the Jews' have moved in to their territory, and militant radicals would likely violently harass the settlers as they do elsewhere in the West Bank and, formerly, Gaza. Yet even assuming that the settlements themselves are legal (and there is a strong assumption in international law that they are not), these particular settlers are committing actual crimes. They have routinely invaded her home by walking across from their roofs to hers, using it as an illegal passageway into the market place. In the picture to the right, you can see Samir pointing out a door without a handle or lock; this is because the settlers have invaded her home and shot out the lock. Her attempts at remuneration in court have proved fruitless; the court ruled that although she is entitled to a two-story property, the only lock to which she is entitled is on a single room where she and her eleven children sleep.

Settlers also shoot holes in or puncture the family water tank, which, as in both Israel and the West Bank, is kept on the roof. This causes her family to be without household water until it can be repaired on replaced. The open-air staircase leading down from the roof and second story to ground level also requires a protective netting because, as in the market place, trash and human waste are thrown down from the neighboring roofs. These repeated attacks on her home have, most tragically, caused her two miscarriages; one attack by Molotov cocktail actually resulted in the death of a newborn infant. In that particular case, the Israeli court found the settler guilty; the punishment, however, was house arrest.

This is not characteristic of settlements throughout the West Bank, but it is a clear example of a protected group trying to drive someone from their home through continued violent harassment. And that's the situation on the ground in Hebron.

After lunch, we headed north back toward Bethlehem to see Dheisheh refugee camp. Dheisheh and a score of camps like it were established in the West Bank, then part of Jordan, following the Israeli War of Independence in 1948. The background runs essentially thus: In 1947, the United Nations issued a resolution calling for the partition of the British Mandate of Palestine. Rioting followed under the direction of the Grand Mufti (chief Muslim religious figure) of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who had previously led anti-Jewish riots in 1936-1939, and the day the British withdrew the surrounding Arab nations invaded in order to prevent the creation of a Jewish state (al-Husseini was likely to become head of the resultant Palestinian state).

Things did not go quite as planned. Rather than creating a Palestinian state and preventing the establishment of a Jewish one, the Arab invasion ensured that today, sixty years later, a Palestinian state has yet to exist. The Jewish population of the Mandate, with no supporting army, opposed by the British, and themselves largely refugees of the Holocaust (only two years past, with many just then leaving Allied rehabilitation camps), organized around several militias, including the Haganah, the primary armed force of the Yishuv (Jewish population of Palestine) under the leadership of David Ben-Gurion. The Jewish Agency proclaimed the independent state of Israel the day of the British withdrawal and were recognized (much to everyone's surprise) by U.S. President Harry Truman, eleven minutes after the declaration of independence.

Rather than becoming an independent Palestinian state, the West Bank was annexed to Jordan and the Gaza Strip was kept under martial law by Egypt until their reconquest by Israel in the 1967 Six Day Way. The Arab population in Israel fled. There can no longer be any denying that radical factions of the Israeli armed forces engaged in massacres of Arab villagers, such as at the village of Deit Yassin. Many others were uprooted and relocated in order to keep them away from invading Arab armies in order to deny the enemy the aid and comfort their Palestinian compatriots would likely extend. These massacres and relocations then led to a wholesale exodus of Palestinians from the state of Israel, many of them going to Lebanon, Syria, or Jordan- including the West Bank.

Sixty years later, those Palestinian refugees and their descendants remain in these refugee camps. Israel will not allow them to return to Israel proper, because doing so would tip the demographic balance between Jews and Arabs. Palestinians have the highest birth rate of any people group in the world, at 7% (for comparison, the United States is about 2.2%), and the combined population balance of Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank is already set for an Arab takeover in 2015. Combine this with refugees abroad in camps in Lebanon and Syria, and Palestinians living as citizens in Jordan, as well as the knowledge that the Palestinian people elected Hamas in 2006 in a free and fair election, and the situation for Jewish Israelis becomes dire. Neither a united Jewish-Arab state or a return of Palestinian refugees is a viable situation.

Of course, the representative of Dheisheh and Samir himself both advocated a one state solution. In their eyes, both people groups would live side by side, in peace, with equal representation under the law; in other words, the American system. Yet walking through Dheisheh, I couldn't help but notice this mural:
In case there was any doubt about the ultimate goal, that's a Palestinian flag over the whole of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Lets go back: the Palestinian people elected Hamas in 2006 in a free and fair election. No matter how much anyone wants to believe that a Jewish minority would be safe in a Palestinian majority state, the fact is that it's just not realistic. Now, Samir recognized that while a one-state solution is ideal, a two-state solution is the only practical end; of course, he said this with the caveat that this is because of the Zionists, not Palestinian radicals. Yet talking to the Dheisheh representative, one member of the tour group asked 'What about Hamas?'

His reply was that Hamas was pursuing justice in their own way, and was nothing like al-Qaeda. He couldn't condemn them for resisting the occupation, since all occupations are subject to resistance, even if he preferred resistance through education and dialogue.

Wait, what?

How is blowing up a Sbarro's Pizza in West Jerusalem, killing fifteen including seven children, legitimate resistance? How is blowing up a hotel during a Passover seder, ending in the death of thirty, legitimate resistance?

Of course, we all know that it's not. What amazed me, most of all, was that the Alternative Tourism Group, with it's primary goal of putting the best face on Palestinians and the worst face on Israel, couldn't find anyone more moderate or reasonable than this guy. If this is the best they've got, what's the Palestinian on the street thinking?

Back to Dheisheh itself, I'd like to remind everyone that the refugee camps aren't just for the original refugees of 1948. It's also for their descendants. And, mind you, unlike some other camps in history the elderly Jewish population could tell you about, the residents are permitted to leave. From 1985 to 1995 there was a revolving gate placed at the camp that severely obstructed traffic in and out of the camp, but that's just the point: they can leave. So if the Jordanian government has offered citizenship to the Palestinian refugees, and the residents can make a new life for themselves under the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, why stay?

Two reasons:

First, they're making a political statement. Although they have the opportunity for a new life for themselves and their children, the camp residents are opting to stay in order to bring leverage against the Israeli government during negotiations. Any final status negotiation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority will require settlement not just of issues on land, borders, holy sites, and viability, but, perhaps most contentious, these refugees. If they make a new life for themselves, they won't be an effective bargaining chip against the Jewish state. Moreover, if they leave the camps, they forgo the possibility of ever returning to Israel proper, where their villages no longer exist but to which they have an idealistic attachment.

Second, it's a classic welfare trap. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency provides registered refugees living within the camps (and stateless refugees living elsewhere) with free food, shelter, clothing, health care, and education. Let me break that down: the UN provides these refugees with services many Americans don't have. With all this provided for them, 70% of camp residents don't work, and many spend their time inculcating a radical, ideological hatred for Israel. In one instance, Israeli Defense Forces operating in Lebanon discovered a cache of automatic rifles in the basement of a school! Radical militancy aside, the UNRWA has essentially created a mass of jobless, stateless individuals who could be working toward a better life, but are instead remonstrating about something that happened to their parents and grandparents. Did the Holocaust victims sit in Allied rehabilitation camps for sixty years longing for a return to Germany and Poland? No, they went out and made a state for themselves.

I have to admit, though, refugees are cute!

And that's the situation on the ground in Bethlehem.