From Hebron to Jerusalem July 5

Six ISMers, Ananda La Vita (US), Teresa (UK), Eden Coughlin (US), Mary (Spain), Heidi Niggemann (Germany), and I, started out early enough, but got bogged down in the geographical segmentation that Israel has imposed on Palestine. A taxi picked us up at the hotel at 8:15 a.m., and took us on one of those roads fit only for a donkey round about to a barrier set up to keep Palestinians off of the main road to Jerusalem. This ride took about 15 minutes and landed us here:

When we arrived at this barrier, the girls recognized the taxi driver who had escorted them around the Old City of Hebron the day before. He is facing the camera with his hand over head to shield the bright sunlight. He speaks very good English, and volunteered to order a van to come out from Jerusalem to pick us up. The driver from Jerusalem got held up interminably at some checkpoint along the way, so we waited and waited. It is 47 km from downtown Hebron to the Old City. It took us two and a half hours.

It is difficult enough to walk over one of these barriers, let alone get any kind of cart across. Some youths had gone into business with small wheelbarrows and were ferrying packages and goods across for a small fee. More interesting were the two vans, parked on either side of the barrier, and transferring the load from one to the other across the mound.

The van on the right is from Hebron, a few kilometers away; the van on the left is from a village in the area. They are transferring frozen beef from Brazil to be taken by the van on the left across the forbidden highway—when the soldiers go away for a while—to some store in the village across the way. The beef had to come from Brazil into Israel, through Israeli customs with duty applied, then sold by an Israeli businessman to some Palestinian, and the distributed this way.

A close up shows the product.

While this was going on, a steady stream of ordinary people was crossing the barrier carrying all sorts of things. The kids helped by ferrying some goods in the little wheelbarrows.

A small herd of sheep also crossed over for greener (?) pastures.

I got to chatting with the taxi driver who was getting a van sent out from Jerusalem for us, since Palestinian taxis are not allowed on the highway. He was born and raised in Hebron, but spent five years working at the Sheraton in Tel Aviv, before all Palestinians were expelled; thus the fluent English. He remarked that he had had been praying in the ancient Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron in 1994 when the Zionist zealot settler, Baruch Goldstein, originally from Brooklyn, NY, entered the mosque and started shooting praying Muslims. Israeli soldiers guarded the mosque so he had no trouble getting in. He killed 29 Palestinians, and 30 more were killed by Israeli soldiers in the melee that resulted. Hundreds were wounded, among them out taxi driver. He showed me the scar on his scalp from an M16 bullet, what lodged in his head. He spent a year in Jordan at the King Hussein medical center, where most of the severely wounded were sent. Israel did nothing to help the wounded. He was in a coma for months, but gradually regained his faculties, and his command of English, although he apologized for not being as fluent as he used to be.

After the massacre, the Israelis put a curfew on the Palestinians of Hebron to protect the settlers. There are 400 settlers located downtown Hebron high up above the Old City where they can look down on the "Arabs" below. There are 1500 Israeli soldiers protecting these settlers. The CPT people have documented some of the graffiti spray painted on the walls of the Old City.