Half a century living face to face has taken Hebron no closer to peace
The night air was cold but the Israeli settlers were in high spirits as they gathered in front of the Tomb of the Patriarchs, where Abraham, the father of Judaism, is said to be buried. They were there to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Israel’s improbable victory in the Six Day War of 1967, when the fledgling Jewish state defeated five Arab armies and conquered the West Bank, including the ancient city of Hebron.
Music blared as stage lights illuminated the government ministers who had flocked to Hebron to mark the triumph. Children ran and played while heavily armed combat troops stood guard.
“Fifty years ago, Hebron was liberated and returned to our hands,” shouted Naftali Bennett, Israel’s education minister and one of the leading opponents of a two-state solution. “Hebron is the DNA of the Jewish people. Here is our genetic code.”
A few hundred yards away, the Palestinian areas of Shuhada Street were quiet. Residents there were forbidden from going on to the street and, besides, they had nothing to celebrate.
Half a century after the 1967 war reshaped the Middle East, around 130 Jewish settlements have sprung up across the occupied West Bank. But none can match the intensity of Hebron, the only Israeli settlement in the middle of a Palestinian city.
Here, around 850 deeply religious Jewish settlers are surrounded by some 200,000 Palestinians. Unlike anywhere else in the West Bank, Israelis and Palestinians in Hebron live literally next door to one another. The two sides are not faceless enemies but unhappy neighbours, living out the conflict in strikingly personal terms. They often know each other’s names and see one another every day, but 50 years of familiarity has brought them no closer to peace.
From the balcony of her house on Shuhada Street, Zleikha al-muhtasab, 55, watches the settlers and soldiers. The street was once at the city’s bustling heart but is now part of the ghostly “sterile zone” – open to Israelis but shut to Palestinians, even those who live on it. The Israeli military says it ordered the closure of Shuhada Street to protect settlers. Now, if Ms al-muhtasab decides to step out she must leave her home through a neighbour’s courtyard at the rear, for five years ago soldiers sealed her front door shut with a blow torch.
“Other people are controlling even my front door,” she says. Her balcony is encased in a cage to protect against the stones that Jewish settlers sometimes throw. “Bad gifts from the neighbours,” Ms al-muhtasab says wryly as she gestures at the rocks.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s relationship with the settlements is complicated. When speaking to his Right-wing base Israel’s prime minister presents himself as a champion of the settlers. But despite pressure from the Right of his cabinet, he has not allowed the settlers to start the massive expansion they want. “Netanyahu’s forte is walking between rain drops, trying to make everybody happy,” said Uri Karzan, the settlement’s director general.
Mr Karzan said Mr Netanyu’s coalition was probably the most pro-settler in history, but he had hoped it would do more. “Maybe now is the time for a prime minister who takes an ideological stance: less pragmatism and more ideology,” he said.
Further down the street lives Elad Pass, a 35-year-old Israeli paramedic whose eyes are still puffy from his night shift driving an ambulance.
Though many of the 400,000 West Bank settlers live in what look like small American suburbs, where modern houses with pink terracotta roofs line well-manicured streets, Mr Pass’s home is Spartan by comparison. A group of soldiers is stationed permanently outside the house where he is raising four children.
Why would he choose this difficult life, surrounded by people who hate him, when his family could live in comfort in the nearby settlement of Kiryat Arba or in distant Tel Aviv? “We believe everything is from God and we live for what we believe in,” he said.
“We believe this land is ours and like the pioneers that came before we are prepared to fight these hard conditions.”
In 2001, he was shot in the leg by a Palestinian sniper looking out over the settlement from a nearby rooftop. Two weeks later his 10-month-old niece, Shalhevet, was killed. Today, like many male settlers in Hebron, he carries a gun tucked in his waistband.
In 1997, Hebron was divided into two zones – Palestinian-controlled H1 and Israeli-controlled H2. The H1 zone is the vast majority of the city and around 120,000 Palestinians live there under the Palestinian Authority (PA). But the 30,000 Palestinians who live inside H2 are under a different justice system from Israelis. Palestinians who attack Israelis face military courts and swift punishments. Israeli settlers who attack Palestinians are under a civilian system and are rarely convicted.
A 2014 study by Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group, found 85 per cent of investigations into crimes by Israelis against Palestinians in the West Bank are closed without prosecution. Of the small minority that are prosecuted, only a third end in a conviction.
Today in Hebron both sides like to tell stories about how Jews and Arabs lived together in relative harmony until 1929, when Arab riots broke out and rioters killed 70 Jews and drove the rest from the city.
The Jews returned at the end of a gun in 1967, and for 50 years Israeli settlers and Palestinians have lived unhappily side by side. Each insists peace can come again – if only Israel ends its occupation, or the Palestinians give up on terror. But, for now, peace feels a long way off.