February 14, 2007 9:04

Hebron Blues

In Hebron recently, I met one of the 500 Jewish settlers who live surrounded by 120,000 Arab neighbors. It's tense. In Hebron, the Arabs and the Jews fear and hate each other, and so do their children. One settler said that a few days before, an Arab --a robber or a terrorist, he wasn't sure which, but presumed that the intruder was a terrorist--- had broken into an apartment a few steps away from where his daughter and her kids lived.

What sort of impact did this permanent state of seige have on the children of Jewish settlers, I asked. None, replies one of the settler leaders. "Our kids have platinum nerves," he says confidently. "Our children will grow into the next generation of Israeli leaders."

That's a scary prospect for many Israelis. A few weeks ago, Israeli TV showed one of these "platinum-nerved" future leaders, a young settler woman, named Yifat Alkobi, in her early twenties. She and her child had corraled a Palestinian schoolgirl at the entrance to her house and were cursing her, in Arabic, as a "slut" and a "whore." These are not the future leaders that most Israelis want; Alkobi’s televised rage provoked universal revulsion.

Not long ago, I ventured into Hebron to speak with the family of the Palestinian girl reviled by the settler woman. I wanted to see what they thought of their Jewish neighbors. On this street, winding up a hill, it was easy to spot the Arab houses. Their windows and doors were covered in metal grills to protect them from stones, rotten fruit and the occasional gunshot coming from settlers living across the road. Over the years, a few Jewish settlers had also been shot by Palestinian militants, and Israeli soldiers had cordoned off this section, emptying life from the heart of old Hebron.

The Arab houses were easy to spot for another reason. The settler kids had spray- painted a Star of David on walls of all the Arab houses. A religious symbol used for intimidation. I found this distrubing, like seeing the Klu Klux Klan's cross blazing on a black man's lawn.

The patriarch Abu amir Abu Aisha greeted me. He showed me a few bulletholes in his ceiling, from Jewish settlers across the lane, he claimed. He was in his late seventies, old enough to remember when his father saved their Jewish neighbors from being massacred by Arabs during the 1929 Hebron riots, which, some historians say, were instigated by the British.

"At first, we welcomed back the Jews," he says. "We gave them fruit from our trees and vegetables. But now they are harassing us to leave our homes.”

Faced with settlers’ abuse and the Israeli army’s one-sided efforts to keep the peace between Jewish settlers and the Arabs, six neighboring families of Abu Aisha have vacated their homes. He shrugs when I mention the incident of the settler woman cursing his young daughter. "That's nothing," he says. From inside his robes he takes out a wad of complaints about the intimidation he has received from his Jewish neighbors, none of which the Israeli police have acted upon, he says. Then he adds, somewhat perplexed, "These are not like the Jewish people that I remember from my youth. I don't know what's happened."
--by Tim McGirk/Hebron