A Walk through Hebron
Up on a roof on Shalala Street, the main street of Hebron, a swarm of Palestinian children play their favorite game. They are eight, ten, twelve years old, and they throw stones or shoot them with slings over a crumbling ledge, from which they gather their ammunition. Half a dozen policemen in black uniforms try halfheartedly and unsuccessfully to restrain them: the children—impossible not to think of Gavroche and Les Misérables—wriggle out of their grasp, and sometimes throw pebbles or stones as they are dragged into the street. Below, a crowd of adult men (seeded with a few clumps of women) watch what is happening with anger and frustration from behind the police barricade—of officers and armored cars—that keeps them from getting close to the Israeli soldiers, whose helmets, rifles, and green uniforms may be spotted thirty or forty meters ahead.
The no-man’s-land that separates them is sown with objects, some so huge—rocks, slabs of pavement, iron rods, chunks of metal—that it seems they must have been launched by catapults, not human arms. As we cross it, pressed against the wall since the hail of stones continues though it is slackening now, I see the Palestinian policemen struggling to pull away more children, who are trying to sneak up on the enemy from unlikely hiding places—the hollows of windows, the eaves and gutters of roofs, the mouths of drainpipes. I see some of them from very close up, and I am shaken by the precocious, unbridled, incommensurable hatred I see stamped on their features.
Hebron is one of the eight cities on the west bank of the Jordan River that was returned to the Palestinian Authority by Israel as a result of the Oslo Accords. One hundred twenty thousand Palestinians and 450 Israelis live here, these last concentrated in the settlements of Beit Hadassah and Avraham Avinu, not far from where I am. At ten this morning, two students from one of the settlements’ religious schools shot and killed a young Palestinian who, they said, had tried to attack them. In the demonstrations that have convulsed the area since then, two more Palestinians have been killed, and one hundred people wounded, by the rubber bullets that the Israeli army uses to deal with street unrest. We heard the shooting when we arrived in the city, half an hour ago. The no-man’s-land I am crossing is littered with these bullets, some round and some cylindrical; I put one in my pocket to keep as a souvenir.
The Israeli soldiers on guard at the other end of the no-man’s-land are also very young, and although in theory they can’t be under eighteen, the age at which they begin their three-year military service, some seem to be sixteen or even fifteen. They shield themselves from the stones around corners and behind jutting walls; they wear helmets, visors, bulletproof vests, clusters of grenades, and rifles; and one of them, overcome by the heat or nervous strain, has just collapsed and is on the ground choking and vomiting. His companions urge us to leave the area, since stones are still raining down from time to time.
We continue on, and less than half a block away is the settlement of Beit Hadassah, surrounded by barbed wire, floodlights, and sandbags and guarded by soldiers and Israeli police. It is a single multistoried building with two side wings, which we are allowed to enter after we show our identification papers. I spot two settlers carrying buckets of cement with Uzi machine guns over their shoulders, but what perplexes me is a small group of children who, in the midst of the turmoil, play on a slide, swing, and build sand castles. There is a brutal counterpoint between this idyllic childhood scene and what is happening around us just a few feet away on the streets of Hebron; what has happened and will continue to happen around this defiant enclave and those like it that dot the West Bank, so long as Palestinian-Israeli violence persists and until the two nations settle on some form of coexistence.
When I was in Israel two years ago, the miracle seemed possible and already on its way to being accomplished. The climate of optimism was rousing and contagious. I heard Shimon Peres say, “There will be peace. The accords are irreversible,” and I believed him wholeheartedly. Then came the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, Peres’s defeat in the elections, and the rise to power of the Likud and Bibi Netanyahu, and the forward motion was halted abruptly. Now pessimism reigns everywhere, and not a single one of my Israeli friends holds out much hope that the tendency will be reversed in the near future. Some of them, like the writer Amos Elon, even believe that the Oslo Accords are already dead and buried and that only the merest simulation of them has been retained, for appearance’ sake. In other words, they believe that once again the little flame of apocalypse has begun to flutter on the horizon of the Middle East.
This prospect doesn’t at all seem to trouble the only Beit Hadassah settler with whom I manage to exchange a few words. He is thin, blond, and blue-eyed, with two delicate earlocks that the wind brushes against his cheeks, and, like most Jewish settlers, he is soberly dressed. He has the look of those who are secure in their beliefs and knowledge, who never doubt. When I say to him, motioning toward the children playing, that it is terrible for them to live like this, in confinement and under duress, among weapons, stone throwing, explosions, and uncertainty, that it will leave permanent scars, he looks at me with pity, not scorn. “They are very happy,” he assures me. “I wish I had been lucky enough to live here as a child, the way they live. Excuse me now, I must make lunch for my daughter.”
That 450 people with a different language, customs, and religion should live in a city of 120,000 Arabs doesn’t seem terrible. Under normal circumstances, it could even be healthy. But as things stand, it is a provocation and a major obstacle to peaceful coexistence. The settlers know this very well, and it is what makes them dig themselves in here, forming these enclaves in Palestinian territory. Once they are established, the Israeli state is obliged to protect them, which means maintaining military patrols around the settlement. And to do that, it must build a barracks and a headquarters. This infrastructure has an impoverishing and paralyzing effect on the surrounding area, which is then prone to the kind of incidents and violence that we witnessed this morning. The Arab market that separates the colonies of Beit Hadassah and Avraham Avinu, which we later cross, is deserted except for a few cats sunning themselves among the garbage piles, and the doors and windows of some of the businesses are boarded up, as if they have been permanently closed.
At the entrance to the Avraham Avinu settlement is an enormous poster that says, in Hebrew and English: “This market was built on a synagogue taken by the Arabs in the year 1929.” The text alludes to a small Jewish community established since time immemorial in Hebron, which was massacred by the Arabs during the 1929 rebellion. Very close by rises one of the most revered holy places of Jews and Muslims alike: the former call it the Tomb of the Patriarchs, and the latter the Abraham Mosque.
In fact, the synagogue and the mosque are a single building, divided by a wall reinforced with sheets of steel and equipped with widely separated entrances for the faithful of each religion. Now, in order to enter the mosque, one must pass through a metal detector and submit to careful questioning by the Israeli patrol stationed at the door. These precautions have been tightened since, two years ago, a settler from a Jewish settlement on the outskirts of Hebron, the doctor Baruch Goldstein, entered this vast and carpeted space at prayer time and, become a killing machine, raked the crowd with machine-gun fire, leaving 29 dead and 125 wounded, and thus letting the world know that fanatic and homicidal madness is not the exclusive patrimony of Hamas or Islamic Jihad but a bloody excrescence that also afflicts Jewish extremist groups.
Walking around downtown Hebron on a morning like this, escorted by Juan Carlos Gumucio (of El País) and his wife, Marie Colvin (a Sunday Times correspondent whose nose was broken by a stone not long ago), is a practical illustration of Isaiah Berlin’s theory of contradictory truths. It is a mistake, Berlin explains, to believe that one truth always eliminates its opposite, that it is not possible for two clashing truths to coexist. In the realm of politics and history, such a situation may arise, as it has in the conflict that so often bloodies Palestinians and Israelis. To any tolerant observer who judges the matter rationally, the accusations that each levels against the other are equally persuasive.
No one can deny the Israelis their right to a land that is tied to their history, culture, and faith, or their right to a country that they’ve created by investing an incredible amount of heroism, sacrifice, and imagination—a country, it is also worth remembering, that is the only working democracy in the Middle East, a region of limitless despotism. And who could deny the Palestinian people, after the exile, war, dispersion, persecution, and discrimination they have suffered—which makes them so closely resemble the Jewish people—the right to finally have what they never had in the past, an independent and sovereign state?
That two truths are “contradictory” doesn’t mean they can’t exist side by side. The concepts of justice and freedom secretly repel each other, but democratic society and the culture of freedom have managed to keep these embattled siblings from destroying each other; on the contrary, coexisting in tense harmony under the rule of law, they make possible the advance of civilization. Israelis and Palestinians must learn to live alongside each other for the simple reason that, despite what the fanatics believe, there is no other alternative—except apocalypse, which is not a solution, since no social problem is resolved by collective suicide. The Oslo peace accords, signed by Rabin, Peres, and Arafat, and the steps taken in the following months to put them into effect, finally ended the stalemate and proved that what had seemed impossible was possible.
Until Oslo, the major obstacle to negotiation came from the Palestinian side, from its extremely violent methods and its senseless refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist; it seemed politically under the sway of intransigent extremism. The accords demonstrated that there was a flexible and pragmatic contingent willing to make the indispensable concessions to achieve peace and that it wielded sufficient power to resist the partisans of all or nothing. In Israel such a force has always existed, but, unfortunately, until Oslo it hadn’t found a partner in its Palestinian adversary. Today, the main obstacle to enacting the accords is Netanyahu’s government and his arrogant initiatives and brusque gestures, which have once again fraught with distrust and hostility a relationship that was beginning to grow easier. The West, especially the United States, with which Israel maintains very close relations, has the obligation to pressure the Israeli government to respect the spirit and letter of the Oslo Accords, which, for the first time since its birth, have opened up for Israel the possibility of peace and collaboration with the whole Arab world.