I’m usually in the lower street, but some times I am up the hill, where the children enjoy themselves playing ball games or asking us to take pictures of them. If you take one’s picture, that’s it, you’re done, they won’t stop bugging you until you have taken two pictures of each of them, and then again in groups.
Hebron V. Apartheid
It is mostly quiet in the street where I “patrol”. The street is usually deserted, apart from the soldiers at the checkpoints and the odd Palestinian. The shops are all closed down. Their doors are all green but rotten because they are not used or painted or looked after. Most of them have David’s stars painted on them, just like the Nazis used to paint swastikas on Jews’ shops. Now it is Palestinian shops that have a Jewish sign on their doors.
Hebron IV. Lies
My favourite spot to patrol from is the place where I first saw D. when I first arrived here. The spot is good because from here we see, at the same time, the coffin-checkpoint to our right, and the illegal Israeli settlement (or at least the settlers that would come out of it to violently harass Palestinians) to our left.
Hebron III. Drug dealing
When the children get out of school I leave this spot and go up the hill, next to the other settlement. Roughly half way between the two settlements that surround this Palestinian neighbourhood, there are two “outposts” for soldiers, one at each side of the street. In one of those outposts two soldiers detain a boy, for no apparent reason, and they ask him for his identity card and I see them like playing with it.
Hebron II. Saturday
Hebron, specially the neighbourhood we are in, between two illegal Israeli settlements, is brutally depressing. It one of those experiences where you think you are loosing your sanity. We are in a Palestinian neighbourhood, between two settlements full of quite fanatic and fearful Israeli settlers. They are so fearful they go out to the street with sub-machine guns, and they routinely stone Palestinians.
Hebron I. Anticipating the Sabbath
As part of the Sabbath prohibitions of all kind of work, strict Jews can not drive. For a whole day every week, the Palestinians run the risk of being the victims of armed Israelis that they could meet walking on this street.
Bi’Lin – Qalandia – Hebron
I come out of the flat where I have been staying very early in the morning, carefully not to wake up anyone. I don’t want to risk arriving in Hebron after dark because I don’t even know how to get to my destination, and this time, too, I am travelling on my own. The first stop will be of course Ramallah – first taxi change to get from there to Qalandia. I was assured yesterday that I will pass through that checkpoint with no problem. From there I will get another taxi to Jerusalem and then another one from Jerusalem to Hebron.
Sickening
from the diary I am given to read in Hebron, that I found so sickening.
Today in Tel Rumeda, a focal point for Settler aggression to Palestinian citizens, Isreali Defence Forces were giving tours of the Security facilities to armed Settlers.
Bi’Lin VII. Olives
W. and I go out for a walk in the surroundings, observing the wall again and, as usual, we can’t finish our walk without being invited for lunch. This time it is M. and his son inviting us to their roof terrace. Communication is difficult this time so we only learn that all the land we can see on the other side of the road belonged to M.’s father once. He tells us this while we eat from a tiny dish of olives.
Bi’Lin VI. The day after
Imagine you live in constant tension. Imagine that there is nowhere safe where you live and you can never peacefully go to sleep. Imagine that tonight, as you are falling asleep, you hear some one knock on your door asking for entry. Imagine that the person you live with, your wife, your flatmate, your mother… gets up and opens the door for them. Imagine the person who enters is another person who lives with you; your son, your flatmate’s girlfriend, your father… and imagine that now, knowing that every one who lives in your house have finally come at the end of today, only now you can know that all your family have lived just one more day.
