Hebron

I’ve wrestled with whether or not to post memories of my trip to Hevron with Truah and Breaking the Silence. The timing was and is bad—reports of the mass shooting in Pittsburgh came mere hours after the trip, and I waited more than a week out of respect, only to encounter more bad timing in the form of attacks to and from Gaza in response to an Israeli military action. At this moment, I’m thinking that, as with gun violence, there will never be a perfect time to talk about it, and I need to discuss what I saw before time blunts the memories.

Hebron is home to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, which includes both a synagogue and a mosque where visitors can pay their respects to the graves of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, and Leah (as well as, according to legend, Adam and Eve). Needless to say, it’s a contested space whose tensions radiate out from the tomb to the town. It’s the space where the issues of the Occupation are at their most blatant and awful.

At the edge of a pretty public park in Hevron is the grave of Baruch Goldstein, who killed 29 Palestinians and wounded 125 more at the Tomb of the Patriarchs. The grave is adorned with artfully arranged stones, mementos of respect left by visitors who see him as a martyr, which are regularly renewed and rearranged. The inscription on the stone reads, in part, “He gave his life for the people of Israel, its Torah and land.”

Israeli security orders mean that some streets in Gaza are closed to cars, others even to foot traffic, and some are completely purged of residents, all in the name of protecting Israeli settlers. As each neighborhood is purged, settlers move in and take the empty houses, necessitating the purging of ever-widening rings of the city for security. Once a week, settlers apparently dress in white to honor the coming Sabbath and get military escorts to protect them while they march through the Muslim neighborhoods harassing the residents. For me, this was an unexpected and sickening inversion of Jewish values.

Everywhere I looked, there were stark contrasts that hammered home who has security, who has access to water and transportation. The Israeli homes had lush greenery in the backyards. Palestinians must use mesh to protect their balconies from Israeli settlers throwing rocks. Balconies in the Middle East are like the porches of the American South, a necessary part of every home and a way to connect with the neighbors, so the isolation this causes is intense. Additionally, because Palestinian foot traffic is forbidden on several streets, the residents have had to break through their back walls to create new ways in and out of their buildings. On the first floor, Israelis have posted giant, official-looking plaques in English and Hebrew with their version of why this area belongs to them, since the Palestinians who own the buildings can’t access their own front doors to remove such signs. 

Most painful of all, when we arrived, we saw a settler family moving into a purged Palestinian home. By the time we made our way around the neighborhood, they’d unpacked their car and made themselves at home.

Understand, I believe 100% in the need for a Jewish state, and in the importance of our historical connection to this land. But the ways in which the Occupation has stripped Palestinians of their rights, their homes, and their humanity hurt me on a deep level. I truly believe that the test of Israel is to prove that when we have power and agency, we do better than those who oppressed us. And right now, we are failing that test.