Leah Green writes:
Dear Friends,
Hisham Sharabati, our Palestinian coordinator in Hebron, has taken many of
our groups over the years to visit his cousins in the heart of the old
market in Hebron - starting in the early 1990's as I recall. Their house,
partially destroyed by their settler neighbors in Avraham Avinu, was sealed
by the Army several years ago to "protect" them from the settlers. Family
members lived elsewhere while they fought a court case to regain entry to
their home, which has been in the family for many hundreds of years. The
Supreme Court recently ruled in their favor and this article describes their
bizarre current situation.
I have vivid memories of the strong patriarch of
the family who died in 1998. By the time he died, the family had fully
encased their courtyard in chain-link fencing (on the ground and in the sky)
in an attempt to protect themselves from the stones, paint, dirty diapers,
and other trash continuously thrown into their yard and home by the
settlers. As the former Israeli soldier in the article says, "I have seen
them do things not part of the Jewish religion - destroying cemeteries,
hitting old men and women, children hitting them with stones." I have
witnessed these actions myself on several occasions in Hebron - surely one
of the strangest places on earth.
If any of you remember sitting inside the "caged Sharabati house", drinking
tea with Hisham's beautiful, scarved cousin who taught physics at the local
high school, this is the place! Thank you Elana, for forwarding the
article...
love to all,
leah
The West Bank: Siege mentality
Ruins of Sherebati house in Hebron
By Donald Macintyre
The Independent
21 April 2005
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=631580
The Israeli soldier watching Muhammed Sharabati surveying the ruins of his
family home pointed to the side of his own head and described a circle with
his index finger. His gesture, the universal sign language for craziness,
was his soundless response to the enraged shrieks of the woman leaning over
her balcony. `Terrrorist,` she shouted down to us. `Thank you for coming
here to the house of the terrorists.`
Anyone who assumes a solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict is close
should visit the heart of Hebron, an ancient and bitterly divided biblical
city in the occupied West Bank. Implementing an order by the Supreme Court
of Israel to allow rebuilding and reopening the centuries-old Sharabati
house is no easy matter when the people who helped destroy it live only a
few feet away. The young soldier and the five other men in his unit were
there to perform the unusual task of protecting the family - and more
particularly Palestinian construction workers - from the Jewish settlers
overlooking it.
As the woman loudly accused the army of `allowing Arab killers to enter our
house`, prompting her fellow settlers to appear at their windows and other
armed troops and Israeli border policemen to deploy across the nearby
rooftops, the soldier asked us to go and return later.
The week before, as troops erected an ugly, 13ft-high wall of grey concrete
slabs to defend the devastated building from the people of the neighbouring
Avraham Avinu settlement, the settlers pelted a protective cordon of police
with stones, eggs and paint. Thirteen settlers were arrested and an
officer`s hand was broken. Anticipating the violence, the army originally
delayed enforcing the December court decision. But faced with a fresh legal
petition from the family`s lawyer, it told them in February they could
return.
After 20 years of reverses, Mufid Sharabati, Muhammed`s younger brother,
said: `For me, and for the city of Hebron, this is a victory. It means right
will win in the end. I am very happy with the result.` More soberly, he
added: `The implementation of this decision is very difficult. There is
fear. They [the settlers] attacked us in the past many times. But we will
return to our house. We are determined to do that. Allah decides our fate
and our life. We have to be steadfast.`
The struggle over the Sharabatis` right to re-enter the house they have
lived in for generations symbolises much that is most intractable in the
conflict. Gaza, as the world knows, is to be stripped of its 21 settlements
this summer. In return, President George Bush has agreed to Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon`s demand that the biggest West Bank settler population centres
would remain in Israeli hands in any peace deal.
The 900 Jewish settlers in four enclaves inside Hebron do not fall into
either category; not only do they live deep in the West Bank but they are
the only such group to inhabit the heart of a city in which Palestinians
form an overwhelming majority.
The Tomb of the Patriarchs, 300 metres from this urban front line, is sacred
to Jews and Muslims as the burial site of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But,
while any internationally agreed peace plan should guarantee access to both
religions to worship at the holy site, no such plan has so far provided for
the settlers to stay in Hebron.
Yet no settlers have demonstrated so consistently how determined they are,
despite the deaths they, like the Palestinians, have suffered in the past
four and a half years, to tighten and extend their grip on the territory
they occupy. In sardonic deference to its militancy, the Israeli commentator
Zvi Bar`el this week described Avraham Avinu as the `Jewish Sadr City`.
In 1982, when the then ample house of 17 rooms and four small courtyards was
inhabited by 80 members of the extended Sharabati family, Jewish settlers,
protected by Israeli military, began building Avraham Avinu right beside
their home, in the heart of the old city.
The settlers came to Mohammed`s father, then head of the clan and offered
him a blank cheque to buy the house. `They said, `You write the figure you
want`, but he refused,` said Mohammed Sharabati in the local council offices
where he works as a clerk. In September 1982, the Israeli administration in
the occupied territories demolished six rooms, and four more the year after,
to clear the way for settlement construction.
The settlers` repeated claims that the Sharabatis are `terrorists` are not
borne out by concrete evidence, beyond what their spokesman, David Wilder,
says are `eyewitness` accounts that long-dead members of the family helped
in the notorious massacre of 69 Hebron Jews in 1929.
(This is a city haunted by massacres; in 1994, a fanatical Jewish doctor,
Baruch Goldstein, machine-gunned to death 29 Muslim worshippers at the
tomb.) Mohammed Sharabati is in Fatah and members of the family were
arrested for offences such as throwing stones during the first intifada in
the late 1980s, but none for militant violence (of which there has been much
in Hebron) over the past four and half years.
But Mohammed can remember being detained for a day for obstructing the
demolition of his house. `While I was being taken in the Jeep, the settlers
were running after me and shouting, `Do you want to sell the house? If you
do you will be released`.`
But, consistently, the family refused purchase of the house or, in court
cases it brought in the early 1990s, turned down compensation for what had
been destroyed, thinking it would legitimise the seizure.
`This is the conflict over the land,` Mohammed said. `This is our existence,
our history, our civilisation.` The family felt, he added, that the Israeli
administration was `stealing our history`. Soon the settlers resorted to
other means. The family says holes were shot in their water tanks, and
stones and rubbish thrown into their courtyard.
Steadily, members of the family started to leave and in 1998 the Sharabati
brothers` elderly father died, exhausted, they say, by the friction with
their neighbours. By the time the second intifada broke out in September
2000, only seven members of the family were in the house.
Then on two days in July, reacting to a Palestinian attack that had killed
four soldiers on a road outside Hebron, 200 settlers stormed the house and
ransacked it while almost all the family were at a wedding. Tarik, another
Sharabati brother who had not gone to the wedding and locked himself in a
room, was rescued by the Israeli army who then welded the outside doors
shut. The house was closed to the family for the next two and a half years.
After the military decided to allow the Sharabatis back, and took them to
inspect the building in February, the settlers demolished part of the house
with sledgehammers. Israeli police who arrived were pelted with stones and
eggs. By then, many items of glass and pottery, including antiques, had been
smashed, and much of the family library was missing, along with furniture.
Kitchen cupboards were ripped from the walls. Mufid Sharabati says,
hopefully, that the family may bring other Palestinians back to the ghost
town that much of the old city now is. There is little sign of it. Only a
few shops still open after the years of violence and curfews, and the rest
are shuttered, many scrawled with graffiti, including `Death to Arabs`.
Former Palestinian stores in the old vegetable market are occupied by
settlers, who say the site is now owned by the state of Israel and this is
where Jews lived up to 1929. The army have thrown mesh, now filled with
settlement rubbish, above the street in the casbah which runs alongside
Avraham Avinu to prevent the settlers throwing objects on the Palestinians
below, just as some Jewish homes have gratings to protect them from
Palestinian stone-throwers.
As soft classical music plays in his cluttered Avraham Avinu office, David
Wilder, among the few local settlers who will speak to foreign journalists,
insists that despite the present lull in the conflict, nothing fundamental
has changed since the army decided to keep the Sharabatis out for `security
reasons`. He added: `Everybody who knows anything about security knows the
situation is going to deteriorate`.
Even if the Sharabatis are not going to inflict harm on their Jewish
neighbours, he says the settlers fear others will use the house as a passage
from the Palestinian side. `At a time we are evicting 9,000 people from
their homes [in Gaza] `for the sake of peace` why should one family be
allowed to stay in the middle of this neighbourhood and threaten our lives?
We will continue to oppose this and we hope very much we are going to find a
way of preventing them from coming back.` Can he be specific about how?
`No.`
By throwing rocks or attacking the building? Mr Wilder, a holstered 9mm
pistol at his waist, says the `community leadership` of which he is a part
opposes violence. `We don`t encourage it and we certainly don`t initiate
it.` But he is less than unequivocal in his condemnation, adding that
Avraham Avinu is `not a kibbutz` which takes decisions that bind all its
members. `There are things we don`t have [something] to say about and things
we do. People have different ways of expressing themselves.`
The settlers here, he says, are not `pro-violence` but having experienced
`tremendous terror` - he cites the fatal shooting of a baby at the height of
the intifada is 2001 as an example - they may resort to means `that are not
necessarily the ones we would prefer`.
Mr Wilder justifies the settlers` presence in Hebron since it was occupied
after the 1967 war as a return to the period between the 16th century until
the riots of 1929, when there were 800 Jews in an otherwise Arab population
of 20,000. `Where we are living now is on top of ruins of [Jewish] people
who lived here for more 400 years.` Mr Wilder would not for a second apply a
similar argument to any of the 900,000 Arabs who fled or were expelled from
their homes in the 1948 war of independence.
He says the settlers are not trying to drive the Arab population from Hebron
but adds: `If you`re asking me, `Do I cry when an Arab leaves?` the answer
is no, any more than I expect they would cry about me leaving.`
Mr Wilder expresses enthusiastic support for the army as the settlers`
protector, but is angered when it is used `as policemen` against the
settlers. Jonathan Boumfeld, a member of a courageous group of Israeli
former soldiers who served in Hebron and helped to mount a ground-breaking
exhibition about the city last year, `Breaking the Silence`, testifies to
this dichotomy, albeit from a different standpoint.
He says that on occasions when he was commanding a unit, the settlers
`kicked shit out of my soldiers`. And he added: `One minute we are
protecting them, then we end up fighting them.` That was when they would be
forced to intervene when Palestinians were attacked or their shops and other
premises were broken into by settlers.
Mr Boumfeld says he was on patrol in March 2003 when they found the door of
the Sharabati house open and evidence of recent entry. The patrol called
army engineers to reweld the door. `The whole neighbourhood turned out and
tried to enter the house. Then we formed a human chain and to stop them and
they were shouting, `Nazis, fascists, why are you helping the Arabs?```
He says settlers repeatedly threw rubbish, including soiled nappies, into
the Sharabatis` courtyard, and makes no secret of his antipathy to the
Hebron settlers (he mentions the chilling graffiti depicted in last year`s
exhibition: `Arabs to the Gas Chambers`), or his belief that Israel should
not be in the occupied territories.
But he adds: `I think some of these people will fight to the last drop of
blood to stay in Hebron. You have here some of the most militant settlers of
all. These are not the people of Gush Katif. I have seen them do things not
part of the Jewish religion, destroying cemeteries, hitting old men and
women, children hitting them with stones.`
Since rebuilding started, Mufid Sharabati says the workers were attacked by
25 settlers for 20 minutes with stones, bottles, and eggs. Soldiers, he
says, were hit, before they forced the settlers down from vantage points.
Israeli soldiers and police are still entrusted with ensuring that the
settlers do not get their way and that the Sharabatis return to their home.
This is a struggle that may have only just begun.
Sharabati house - Bulldozer still there