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.

We are on a street used by the Palestinians to go to the school, which is just above the settlement, on a hill. The street is also used by Palestinians who live near the school to go to work, to other schools, or to the shops, as all the shops are closed here, in the “Palestinian” side of Hebron. And it is also used by the settlers to drive (or, on Saturdays, to walk) from one settlement to the other, and to beat, stone … and generally harass the Palestinians and make their lives unbearable since, in their opinion, they are no better than animals, scoundrels invading illegitimately the territory that God left them.

The street is completely deserted because the Israeli government will not allow the shops to open. The international treaties signed by, among others, USA, Israel and the Palestinian authority, establish that all these shops should be allowed to be open. They actually established that they should all have been opened within six months since the date of the treaty.

D. tells me that, since then, every six months, a soldier goes to the end of the street, near the checkpoint I went through, and puts a piece of paper under a stone. In that paper it always says, in Hebrew only, that the shops will remain closed for another six months. So, after years after the “treaty”, the shops remind closed, and the treaty violated.

A young couple, made up of an Israeli soldier and a settler girl, comes along the street. They are holding hands but as soon as they see us they separate. D. tells me that the Israeli government always denies all links between settlers and soldiers, and what we have just seen in one more example of this lie. Fig 29.

He then tells me that they routinely see settlers speak with the soldiers as if they were acquaintances, and that some times they have seen soldiers let settlers “play” with their guns pointing at Palestinians and making jokes.