At the end of February, Leila and Karim both advised me to move on to Al-Khalil (Hebron) slightly sooner than I had planned. By then the PA police were beginning to take an unwholesome interest in my movements – innocent movements as far as I knew, but were there too many ‘suspects’ among my friends? Also, on the practical level, my room had of late suffered from a water shortage and a sewage embarrassment; the drain-away hole in my loo corner tended at intervals to regurgitate all the household sewage and spread it around, creating the sort of stench to which one does not become accustomed.
Balata doesn’t do farewell parties and that sewage stymied the gathering I had hoped to organise in my room. As I toured the camp, saying my goodbyes one family at a time, several of the husbands and sons who hitherto had avoided me joined their womenfolk to say farewell.
The husband of my closest Balata friend (a devoted disciple of Edward Said) said, ‘You’re leaving us all in a trap. Being bullied three ways – by Hamas, the PA, the Zionists.’ He asserted that to most Palestinians Tehran’s support for Hamas looks as bad as Washington’s support for the PA. His wife disagreed, arguing that Iran’s interest in matters Palestinian was fickle and its material support probably greatly exaggerated, another symptom of the Zionists’ paranoia about the Iranian threat to global survival.
An older husband, Abdul, with whom I had never before spoken at length, discussed the one-state solution with an exhilarating mix of pragmatism and imagination. He could foresee, ‘a long time away’, the defeat of political Zionism and religious nationalism. And then the emergence, by evolution rather than revolution, of a multicultural democracy, tactfully renamed and encompassing all of historic Palestine including Jordan where the population is more than half Palestinian.
I asked, ‘What about political Islam – Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic Jihad?’
Abdul had a ready reply. ‘We don’t like that sort of thing. It wouldn’t interest us if we could live normal and peaceful. Our tradition is moderate, we’re good Muslims but not politically religious. Some imams say good Muslims have to be political, Islam should control all of life. Maybe they’re right, talking as scholars. I’m only telling you how it’s been for us before now. Changes began when settlements grew and military rule got worse and being moderate did us no good. In some mosques hardliners began preaching hatred and violence and much bigger crowds listened, specially youngsters. Now the first lot of those have kids themselves – out throwing stones aged three, with poor chances of a real job. That’s the Zionist game, keep us so poor and hopeless we’ll give up and go. But we won’t. People here all their lives aren’t the sort to give in. Maybe we look scared and hungry and sad but under it all we’re proud. What was bad was suicide bombing, making us look like the Yanks, the way they kill civilians in their wars. The difference is our martyrs are brave enough to die! Yankee pilots flying over Afghanistan and Zionists over Gaza know they’ll get home safe! If they use any pilots – the Yanks like using drones when they’re killing an ally’s citizens. Or is Pakistan an ally of the US? It wouldn’t be if its government listened to its people.’
I agreed that suicide bombing was both the Palestinians’ biggest mistake and worst crime – worst since the bloody old days of Abu Nidal and his like. Many outsiders thought it justified Zionism’s retaliatory excesses and the resultant loss of Palestinian jobs. How else to protect Israel, with Palestinians queuing to blow themselves up?
‘Our only crime!’ said Abdul. ‘It’s not crime to kill soldiers and settlers on occupied land. But today – isn’t it chicken and egg?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘it is not. The colonial seizure of your land laid the suicide bomb egg.’
‘That’s going far back,’ said Abdul. ‘I think inside my own lifetime – once it took six months to get a bomber psyched up, then repression increased and that came down to six weeks. More were supporting them emotionally, though we’d never feel good about helping in practical ways. Now, long after that campaign stopped because Hamas saw it harming us, we’re still being punished with permits and checkpoints.’
At an al-Yaseen farewell gathering all my An-Najah friends were enraged – quietly enraged, as is so often the Palestinian way. For the next 25 days all males from Tubas, Jenin and Tulkarm, aged between 16 and 35, were forbidden to enter Nablus where hundreds of them studied. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Is there another Intifada brewing?’
‘We’re never told why,’ said a first-year language student from Jenin who would now have to doss down in Nablus. ‘Not explaining is part of it. You needn’t explain to dumb Arabs, only make sure they obey.’
Leila added, ‘Orders like that can come from junior officers, don’t have to be written down and read out officially. As an occupying force the IDF is decentralised, not like a normal army. It’s free to oppress on a whim.’
Dalal spoke then, a third-year medical student from a nearby village. Two days previously, when no taxis were running because of a flying checkpoint, she and two friends set out in mid-afternoon to walk home. They met only one vehicle, an IDF prison van from which four soldiers emerged to surround them, shouting incomprehensibly in Hebrew. The officer pocketed their IDs and mobiles and told them to kneel on the ground. Then the four smoked cigarettes and chatted among themselves – before suddenly ordering their captives into the van. When the girls argued the officer threatened to destroy their ID cards and detain them. Terrified, they scrambled into the van, were driven a mile or so to the foot of a low but steep hill and ordered to climb to the top. There they again had to kneel and for half an hour were questioned about their neighbours, ‘with mixed Hebrew, English and Arabic’. Next they were told to sit on a boulder and remain still or they’d be shot. The four returned to the van to play Hebrew folk-music while smoking and laughing. As darkness fell they shouted to the girls to come down and walk back to Nablus – not to go home. Their IDs were returned but not their cell phones.
‘Write all that down,’ said Leila. ‘It’s a fine example of a decentralised army making its own amusement.’
I had mixed feelings about leaving Nablus/Balata: a lot of sadness, some relief at the prospect of getting away from the camp’s tangled stresses and strains, some anticipatory excitement at the thought of three weeks in Hebron’s Old City where the stresses and strains would be different. Raja warned me not to be ‘too influenced’ by Hebron’s vibes, to remember that this city is (happily!) unique. It didn’t take me long to appreciate what he meant. However, the repercussions of various events in Hebron, from the 1920s onwards, have been so widespread one can’t really regard its vibes as merely ‘local’.
In seven weeks one accumulates an unwieldy amount of printed matter. Therefore, being still lame and stick-dependent, I had to take a private taxi from Huwwara to Beit Jala near Bethlehem, from where many collecteeves depart. On arrival in Hebron I was to ring Faisal, a UN agency employee who would pick me up in a 4 x 4 and deliver me to my Old City destination.
I now had to study Hebron’s geopolitical idiosyncrasy. When the IDF partially withdrew on 15 January 1997 it left a divided city. Sector H1 (80% of the municipality) is autonomous (sort of) under the PA. In Sector H2 – the Old City – live some 40,000 Palestinians and 600 fanatical settlers being controlled (sort of) by 4,000 or so soldiers. According to the Alternative Information Centre in Beit Sahour, ‘Israel’s settlement policy, which supports the presence of radical Jewish fundamentalists with a strong anti-Arab ideology in the middle of a Palestinian city, is the proximate reason for the high level of violence in Hebron.’
The Old Testament has quite a lot to say about this tortured place near the south-eastern edge of Palestine’s central mountain range, some twenty miles south of Jerusalem. See Genesis 13:18 – ‘So Abram removing his tent came and dwelt by the vale of Mambre, which is in Hebron: and he built there an altar to the Lord.’ In those days, too, local tensions ran high. Abram moved his tent because his herdsmen and Lot’s had been quarrelling about grazing rights. Then Lot chose to dwell in nearby Sodom where the men were very wicked and the Lord had to do some collective punishing to sort them out.
Jews flourished hereabout in 1730BC when, as many believe, Hebron was founded. Excavations on Tel er-Rumeida in Sector H2 put its foundation even earlier – around 2000BC – when there was a surge in city building throughout what we now call Palestine. (In Ireland in 2000BC our more innovative ancestors may have been seeking a bigger cave.) A millennium later, David was anointed king in his first capital, Hebron (see 2 Samuel 5:3). When Babylon brought down the Kingdom of Judah, sending many Jews into exile, the way was clear for the pro-Babylonian Edomites, based in the Negev and Sinai, to take over the land as far north as Hebron. In Persian times (sixth century BC) Hebron controlled most trade routes between Arabia and the Mediterranean and had become one of the region’s main cities. The Jews returning from exile in sophisticated Babylonia were unimpressed by primitive Jerusalem and many chose to settle in Shechem (Nablus-to-be) or Hebron.
Towards the end of the second century BC John Hyrcanus forcibly converted the Idumeans, as the Edomites came to be known, to Judaism; as a result of mass-circumcision, general septicaemia killed many adult males. Despite the ruling that all converts should be welcome ‘to shelter under the wing of the Divine presence’, anti-Idumean prejudice persisted. Around this time Aristeas wrote to Philocrates, ‘The lawgiver fenced us about with impregnable palisades and walls of iron, so that we should in no way have dealings with any of the other nations.’
The Romans nominated Hebron as capital of Idumea and the Jewish Herod the Great, whose mother was a Nabatean Arab, had a special feeling for Abraham as the ancestor of Jews, Idumeans and Arabs alike. He believed in the ancient tradition that Hebron’s Macpelah Caves contained the bones of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob and Leah. To honour them he built a massive monument; today its awesome remains form the outer wall of the Haram al-Ibrahimi.
By the fourth century AD Hebron had dwindled to a mere village but then the Emperor Justinian paid attention to the Caves’ contents, built a church and proclaimed Hebron a Christian pilgrimage destination. Three centuries later another Prophet – Mohammad – came on the scene. In his Journeys, Ibn Battuta quotes from the Hadith: ‘The Messenger of God says – “When the angel Gabriel took me on the Night Journey to Jerusalem, we went over the tomb of Abraham and he said to me, ‘Get off and execute two rak’ahs of prayer, for here is the sepulchre of your Father Abraham.’ Then we went over Bethlehem and again he said, ‘Get off and pray two rak’ahs, for this is the place where your brother Jesus was born.’ Then he brought me to the Rock.”’
Islamic tradition identifies Hebron as the first human settlement, established by Adam and Eve when they became refugees from the Garden of Eden. The city’s Arabic name, Al-Khalil er-Rahman, means ‘the Beloved of the merciful One’ and ever since that Night Journey Muslim pilgrims have been praying around the Cave of the Patriarchs – everybody’s Patriarchs, which is why today Hebron feels almost unbearably sad. To those who believe in the power of accumulated vibes, this city carries far too heavy a load of history.
The Crusaders came, drove out all non-Christians and turned the Haram al-Ibrahimi into a church. Quite soon they went, leaving behind many blue eyes and not much else. Under the Ayyubids and Mamluks Hebron regained its importance, became a major textile trading centre and by the fourteenth century was celebrated for that blue glassware still being blown in a factory on the H1–H2 boundary – seven centuries after Venetian cotton merchants introduced the art.
At the end of the fifteenth century the Iberian peninsula’s Sephardic Jews fled Catholic persecution for the safety of Muslim lands. Hundreds of those refugees were made welcome in Hebron. The city had lacked Jews since the first century AD – though many fifteenth-century residents must have been descended from those who did not adhere to Judaism when the Romans overcame all Jewish resistance. Henceforth, in Hebron, the followers of the three monotheistic faiths lived together quite peaceably until the decline of the Ottoman Empire coincided with the birth of political Zionism.
During the second half of the nineteenth century several groups of immigrants in retreat from Eastern European and Russian anti-Semitism settled briefly in Hebron, once again a favourite of refugees. Many newcomers sought protective alliances with the Great Powers, then establishing institutions throughout the Holy Land in preparation for carving up the Ottoman corpse. But in 1920 Hebron’s Jewish community numbered only 600 or so, mostly devout, defenceless non-Zionists, part of the Old Yishuv.
In Mandatory Palestine, as political Zionists methodically laid the foundations for a Jewish state, Palestinian unease and suspicion festered. Hebron became particularly fraught; its ultra-religious immigrants were openly hostile to Arabs and condescending towards the Arabic-speaking Old Yishuv. Their refusal to integrate, or even be civil to other communities, was noted but not officially criticised by the British authorities.
In August 1929 trouble broke out in Jerusalem, the catalyst a long dispute about who should control which holy place. Many Jews were attacked with stones and knives and seriously injured. On 24 August the rioting spread to Hebron where 66 Jews – men, women and children – were slaughtered by a hate-fuelled mob and 50 suffered serious injuries. Many more would have died had their Muslim neighbours not courageously protected them. Next day, in Safed, 45 Jews, also part of the Old Yishuv, were murdered within a few hours. The week’s death toll was 133 Jews dead and 339 wounded, 116 Palestinians dead and countless wounded. The British at once evacuated the surviving Jews from both towns.
Then, foreshadowing the initial Zionist reaction to the Holocaust, some Israelis-to-be condemned the riots’ Jewish victims as a disgrace to Zionism, ‘sheep’ who ‘died an utterly immoral death’ because they tried to flee instead of fighting back. So wrote Avraham Shvedron, a Zionist ‘thinker’. Ben-Gurion used the massacres to unite the Workers’ Party and reinforce the paramilitary Haganah. He declared, ‘Our spilled blood cries out not for pity and succour, but rather to increase our strength and our work in the land.’
Fast forward to 1967, when Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook (remember him?) delivered a rant still emotionally quoted in certain circles. ‘Where is our Hebron? Are we forgetting it? Every clod of earth, every square cubit, every region and piece of land that belongs to the Lord’s Land – is it within our powers to relinquish even a single millimetre of them?’
Yigal Allon was listening, a man who began his career before the establishment of the State of Israel commanding the Palmach, the Haganah’s quasi-terrorist elite force. Then he became a notorious IDF commander, a Minister of Labour during the Six-Day War and eventually Israel’s deputy Prime Minister. He saw the promotion of settlements as a logical sequel to a conquest of territory. In January 1968 he proposed ‘the building of a Jewish neighbourhood in Hebron’ and when the government said ‘No’ he resolved to help Rabbi Kook’s followers to break the law.
In March 1968 another Rabbi appeared centre stage: Moshe Levinger, who had been closely associated with the Kfar Etzion proto-settlement. He asked Hebron’s military governor for permission to hold the Passover seder in an Old City hotel; after 48 hours he and his 60 guests would leave – that was a promise. Israeli citizens were not allowed to stay overnight on the West Bank but for Levinger the governor, Uzi Nrkiss, made an exception. Ever since, crazed Gush Emunim types have been implanted in Hebron’s heart like a poisoned arrow. This is the only OPT city afflicted by settlers within its boundary.
In April 1968, the IDF hastened to arm the settlers. Meanwhile Hebron’s mayor, Sheikh Muhammad Ali Jabari, was demanding their removal and a few Hebrew University professors were pathetically waving protest placards outside Levinger’s base, deploring his sly infiltration as a perilous trend-setter. In the Knesset Moshe Dayan was questioned by Uri Avnery – ‘Is it true the group lied to the army about only staying 48 hours?’ Dayan promptly replied, ‘I don’t examine innermost thoughts!’ Soon after, he revealed that the group had applied for recognition as permanent residents of Hebron ‘and the administration has approved their request in accordance with the government’s decision’ (Knesset Protocols, vol. 29, 12 June 1968). At this stage Hebron’s settlement was being amply funded by an American Jew, Shmuel Wang, and by the ‘Movement for the Greater Israel’.
Some twenty years later, when Hebron’s settlers had become globally infamous, bringing shame on the Zionist project, Uzi Narkiss, the military governor who said ‘Yes’ to Levinger, wrote A Soldier for Jerusalem. In it he referred to the settlers’ ‘cunning manipulation of the political situation’ and noted that ‘the little trick they played was destined to go very far’.