When the sun rises on the Holy Land on the morrow, I go to Hebron.
Gate Eleven
What’s a German minister doing among stray dogs? Why are Israeli soldiers scared when Arab kids throw stones at young Jewish ladies? Why is Catalonia spending millions on an old lady?
YES, HEBRON. OF COURSE, AS IS CUSTOMARY IN THIS PART OF THE UNIVERSE, Hebron is what we call it in English. It’s Hevron in Hebrew and al-Halil in Arabic.
Hebron, the city that a billion journalists and authors have written and spoken about; the famous Hebron where a couple of Jewish settlers live amidst half a million Arabs and rule terror over the whole city. It is there in Hebron where a structure, second holiest to Jews and fourth holiest to Muslims, stands. And, yes, just like its famous sister in Jerusalem, the structure was first sanctified by Jews, then Christians came and made a mess, and Muslims built a sacred place on top of it. As might be expected, not everybody agrees with this short summary; what is day for one is night for the other.
I land in Hebron in the heat of day and the moment I arrive I feel the power of hallucination. Maybe it’s the unforgiving sun cooking my brains, maybe it’s the multitude of soldiers constantly on the move here, maybe it’s the quietness of the streets, maybe it’s the deafening sounds of various prayers and, yes, maybe it’s just me in an urgent need of the liquid known as Coke.
Hebron is a biblical city. Here the creators of Judaism and their spouses are buried: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Leah, and Rebecca. The Jews call the burial site Me’arat Ha-Makhpelah (Cave of the Patriarchs), the Muslims call it al-Haram al-Ibrahimi (Sanctuary of Abraham). The Jews claim the dead are theirs, the Muslims say the dead are theirs. European and American leftists, who don’t believe that Abraham and the others even existed, take the Muslims’ side. The rightists of those countries, who believe all Jews who don’t follow Jesus are doomed to die when Christ arrives, staunchly protect the Jewish side.
Hebron also is a place of two massacres. In 1929 the Arabs went on a rage against the Jews and slaughtered sixty-seven of them. Just because. In 1994 a Jewish physician by the name of Baruch Goldstein entered the holy site and massacred twenty-nine Muslims. Just because.
A happy place, no doubt. Not exactly Norway, but Norway is strongly interested in this place.
It’s a Norwegian, Christine Fossen, who heads an interesting international observers mission here called TIPH (Temporary International Presence in Hebron), whose cars can be spotted patrolling the Jewish part of Hebron in obvious search of misbehaving Jews.
Jews may live only in one section of Hebron, as has been decided by the politicians a long time ago. How big is this section? Very small, 3 percent of the city. I know this, because there are signs on the streets providing info to the visitors. The three percent is an important figure, for a very simple reason: By order of the Israeli army, Jews are not allowed to walk out of their allocated space. For the Why and How in this city one would need a doctorate in politics and psychology, a process that will take you years of hard studies.
For those of you who are not willing to spend ten years in academia just to understand the complex formulas governing this place, here is what you can learn just by walking around: At some point a few years ago, when everybody could move anywhere they wished and no fences were around, Arab residents got into the habit of shooting the Jews, aka settlers, living here. The Israeli army, probably as a result of its inability to calm the situation, shut down Arab-owned stores in the area, causing most of their owners to relocate their stores into the other 97 percent of the city, and erected fences around the Jews.
The division into Arab and Jewish areas requires multiple doctorates in mysticism, philosophy, engineering, and maybe Hinduism too, just in order to comprehend. It is a maze. Cement fences, wire fences, and whatever kind of barriers divide the two sides. Sometimes, if I see correctly, a house is divided into two, part here, part there.
Around and by these complex borders, one governed by Israel and the other by the Palestinians, a huge mass of trash and destruction can be seen. Some of the trash was left by Arabs, some by Jews. The Israeli army evicted both Arab and Jew from different locations and those who departed didn’t care, and still don’t, for the look of the place.
I am in Hebron to spend the Shabbat (Sabbath) with the Jews.
The first soul I meet is a man by the name of Eldad, and he speaks unto me: “We are a microcosm of the Israeli society. Five hundred Jews amongst 170,000 Arabs. Just like Israel itself: a few million Jews surrounded by billions of Muslims.”
I go on a tour of the local museum, an old house with old pictures, where Jewish life in Hebron before Zionism is depicted. By sheer coincidence, a Jerusalem resident named Hana, an eighty-nine-year old lady who lived in Hebron long before Israel was born, is also touring the small museum. She looks at the photos displayed in the museum from that period and points to a little girl in one of them. That’s her, in the year 1927.
She remembers the story of 1929, when she was five years of age.
The Arabs were yelling her father’s name: “‘Haskel, Haskel’! But Haskel wasn’t home at the time, he was in Jerusalem, and they tried to break the door to the house, which was locked, and then the British soldiers came and took the family out of the house. They sent us to Jerusalem.”
She might not have known it at the time, but she was one lucky girl. If her family had been in Europe in those years, soon enough she would have been like the ashes of my cigarette in no time.
***
I walk over to a checkpoint, one of many in this area.
The border police manning the checkpoint, a security apparatus that is made of both police and army personnel, ask me if I’m an Israeli, in which case they would not let me pass. I say that I’m not. They ask if I’m Jewish. I ask them if they are planning to demand that I drop my pants for them, just to show them. They repeat their question: Are you Jewish? No, I say; I’m a faithful Christian follower of the Messiah. Do you understand Hebrew? they ask. I tell them: And Arabic too.
They demand to see my passport. I tell them I don’t have it on me. They decide I’m a Jew. I get very, very nasty with them. I am German, I scream at them. Can’t you see, for God’s sake?! Oh, they now decide, I am from B’Tselem, a pro-Palestinian Israeli NGO. That’s so stupid, I tell them: How could a German like me be a Jewish-Israeli leftist?
Pretty convincing German logic, and so a border police man contacts command to help him in this dilemma: here is a guy, he tells them, who doesn’t look Jewish, carries a press card but no passport, and he seems to understand Hebrew. Is the creature a Jew or not? I listen to this bizarre conversation and tell the young man that he is too shater for me. He shoots back: You do understand Hebrew, you just called me shoter (cop)! An Arab passing by tells the young man: No, he didn’t say shoter, he said shater (smart in Arabic).
How comforting: an Arab is defending me, a Jew is accusing me. Which side should I choose? I don’t know. What I do know is this: an absurd discussion goes on between the security people on the radio, all in an attempt to figure out what kind of a creature I am: Jew or German?
Maybe Fania Oz should come here to help them.
This goes on for some time. Palestinian residents of this Jewish ghetto, who come and go as they please, look on in amazement and can’t stop laughing. But finally a decision is made: I am no Jew and I can go to Palestine. “But if the Arabs kill you,” a Russian-born soldier tells me as I cross, “don’t come back to complain that we let you cross.” He is one of the million-plus Russians who immigrated to Israel after the Iron Curtain fell and he knows a thing or two about borders.
Idriss, an Arab who minutes before laughed and smiled with the Israeli soldiers as if he were their best friend, crosses with me and immediately starts singing totally different tunes once we are on the Palestinian side. He opens his mouth, takes out his bottom dentures and says: “This is what the Jews did to me. They beat me up inside my home, they wanted me to leave my ho
me. I didn’t want to leave, I’ll never leave my home.”
I light up and Idriss tells me not to walk in the street with a cigarette on Ramadan. “Hebron is not Ramallah. If you smoke here the police will arrest you and put you in jail.”
Hebron, on the Arab side, is full of life. Stores all over, captivating landscapes and buildings, and people of all ages are roaming the streets.
I try to compare it to the Jewish side, the one I have just come from. No comparison. The Jewish side is not just small and tiny, but it is also lacking life. So much trash, so much destruction, and then those deserted buildings.
***
Am I on the same planet? I cross back to the Jewish side, just to make sure I was not dreaming that part up. No. I was not.
The Jews here not only live in the midst of destruction, but the worst part is this: they live in a ghetto. They can’t move out of this eyesore of a place. They are buried in it. No way out unless they take their cars, or a bus, and drive out of this area altogether. But what surrounds them, the nearby that encircles them, is forbidden to them. I stop people walking by, those few who will stop, asking them to explain to me this ghost town they call home. “This used to be a very nice place,” they tell me. “We could go in and out, walk anywhere we wanted. We used to shop in the Arab stores, and they used to come here. It was one city, and we loved it. But then it all ended, one day and it was all over.”
What happened?
“Peace broke out.”
What?
“Oslo Accords, the peace process, destroyed our life together, destroyed the city.”
Never before have I heard this expression, “peace broke out.” War breaks out, but peace??
In Hebron it has.
***
I am invited to a Jewish family, religious like all of them here, for a Shabbat meal, the first of three meals in the next twenty-four hours that religious families celebrate together every Sabbath.
And we talk. Parents, children, and friends of children. I want them to explain to me what it means to be Jewish. I ask it because I changed from a Jew to a non-Jew, or vice-versa, in a matter of minutes just moments ago.
They respond by saying that a Jew is a unique being, a preferred being, a chosen being, a being born with a “Jewish soul.”
Isn’t this, more or less, in line with Adolf Hitler’s idea of a German? You don’t tell a Jew, whatever “Jew” means, that he or she is a Hitlerite and expect them to agree with you. The people sitting at this Shabbat table think that I have lost my mind or, better yet, that I’m a psychotic leftist.
Truth is, and I must admit, there’s one huge difference between them and Adolf. If I told Adolf Hitler that he’s just like the settlers of Hebron, a right-wing Jew, I don’t think he would have continued to feed me. Adolf would have fed me to the animals, but here I get fed some animals: excellent chicken, for example. I eat the chicken as I keep pushing my hosts to the edge and they tell me to eat more.
That’s a difference. Yes.
But I stick to my guns and keep on asking for answers. The Jew, they finally react to my earlier question, doesn’t have different blood, as Hitler said about his Aryan friends, but a different soul.
What the heck are you talking about?
“Every human being has a soul. Don’t you know that?”
Jewish and non-Jewish?
“Yes, of course.”
And the non-Jewish soul is like that of animals, let’s say dogs, but the Jewish soul is Godly. Right?
“We didn’t say that. We said that the Jews, by God’s design, have a different soul.”
Sorry. What does this mean?
“If you don’t know what a soul is, there’s nothing to talk about.”
Well, maybe you could explain to me.
“A soul, you don’t know what it is?”
Honestly, I don’t.
This creates a new discussion, esoteric in language, absurd in thought, and totally incomprehensible to me. I hear words flying around the table and I have no clue of their meaning. In short: I’m lost.
I tell them: Could you please stop hovering above reality and start communicating with me via the use of human communication?
“Try the chocolate cake,” they suggest.
I do. It’s delicious.
“This is the best Shabbat meal we ever had,” my hosts’ son announces to the assembly, and profusely thanks me for challenging them. “We will not forget this evening and it will make us think,” he declares, gratefully shaking hands with me.
***
This is a face of Hebron I learn of by being with these people. Eating with them instead of talking about them with a tour guide. When you walk the streets here you can see the guides and you can hear them. For the most part, they are leftist activists whose purpose it is to show the world that the Jews living here are ruthless occupiers. They must have, using the lingo of the people here, a leftist soul.
By living with the Jews here, albeit for just one day, I realize that theirs is a life of the doomed, much more so than I had ever thought before. No new houses within the 3 percent zone are permitted for them, and existing ones are not allowed to be expanded. Arabs, and there are Arabs within this 3 percent, can build or expand as much as they desire.
I walk over to these Arab houses and see something strange: The Arab houses that are being renovated and built, evidently to the tune of multi-million euros, are not built by the Arabs themselves. Nope. Arabs, meaning Palestinians, don’t put a penny down. It is all given to them. I know this because I can read. There are plaques on the walls of mansions, yes, mansions, denoting who made them come into being, who created them.
Who are the good uncles and aunts who build the mansions here?
Europeans. A gorgeous house I’m passing by right now, for example, was built by the Catalonians. I knock on its door, wondering who lives inside it.
“I live here,” says an old Arab lady, inviting me inside her beautiful abode. “My daughter, she is in Germany.”
Where in Germany?
“I don’t know. She is in Germany, that’s all I know.” It makes her feel good, she tells me, because her daughter is with friends. Yep.
I hear a loud noise down the road, near an old cemetery, and I walk there to see.
SCENE: Jewish girls walk in the street. Two Arab kids throw stones at them.
Soldiers and police arrive.
A bunch of Arab kids, in the cemetery, are arrested.
Soldier in a watchtower across the street is asked to identify the stone throwers amongst them.
Soldier identifies two, one in a green T-shirt, one in a red.
An Arab man shows up, claiming he is the father of the kids and denies his children did anything wrong.
A woman shows up claiming she’s the mother of the kids. She, too, denies her children did anything wrong.
Soldier from the watchtower is called to come over and identify in person.
Soldier enters.
By now, about fifteen soldiers and border police officers are on location.
Soldier identifies the kids in person.
Father slaps the children on their faces, pretty hard.
A soldier asks him to stop. Another soldier tells the first soldier that it’s better the father slap his children than any of the soldiers.
From somewhere inside the cemetery a man and a woman show up with a video camera.
Soldier informs other soldiers of the camera’s presence.
Soldiers move, with kids, to edge of cemetery.
Soldiers and parents talk and argue in two different languages, Arabic and Hebrew, and it transpires that no one understands what the other is saying.
Video camera holder comes closer. Soldiers, with the kids, move out of cemetery to the Jewish area, where the video takers cannot enter.
More police are called in.
Another man, an Arab from outside the Jewish ghetto, shows up in the cemetery. He stands at the edge of a stone fence, then
jumps out – permitted or not. He claims he is the father.
A police top brass shows up, gestures to me that I should leave and says, “Shalom, chaver” (the words President Bill Clinton uttered in his eulogy of Prime Minister Rabin, which soon became a recognizable phrase of the Left). He views me as a leftist troublemaker and wants me to go.
I stay.
Soldiers and police are ordered to release the kids and move away.
The cemetery and its vicinity are cleared of Arabs and Jews.
Only the dead and the dogs, many stray dogs, stick around.
***
When I think of the man and the woman who appeared from a cemetery with a video camera and walked between graves while taking pictures I start believing that Jesus indeed rose from the dead and that Muhammad indeed flew to heaven. Everything is possible in this land.
Sorry, but so far the Jews have proven nothing about their faith.
Army jeeps and a great deal of soldiers armed to the teeth constantly move and drive about in an impressive show of force in this part of Hebron. But it is just a show, I now see; an impressive show of nothingness. It takes but one video camera to defeat them all.
The two people with the video camera, at least judging by the hijab the lady was wearing, are Arabs. I don’t remember Palestinians carrying video cameras in my time. When did they start doing this? Somebody out there, I start suspecting, could be behind them. Who are those people?
I will have to find out.
Now that the humans have gone, more dogs show up. They go wild, and oh boy they bark! I have not seen so many dogs in one place ever before and don’t know what they’re waiting for. Maybe some wounded girls or fresh graves.
I think of the stray cats in my backyard garden. They are much nicer. I should be nice to them.
As I write this, I see one of the real powers of the place here: A TIPH car, which is patrolling the area. They seem to be the real kings here. They drive here as if they owned the place.
Catch The Jew! Page 11