[R-G] The Shuttered Houses on Holy Days

[DavidMcR at aol.com]

 an Israeli reporter on what is happening to the Palestinians...
 
 The Shuttered Houses On Holy Days
 Ha'aretz, 20 November 2002
 Amira Hass
 
 The one and only meaning to the creation of "territorial contiguity" from
 Kiryat Arba to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, is expulsion. The expulsion of
 thousands more Palestinian residents of Hebron, people who were unlucky
 enough to find that their homes, shops and gardens are in the area meant
 for "contiguity." The IDF will protect the Jewish construction and dozens
 if not hundreds of Israelis - contractors, engineers, architects,
 carpenters - will join the work, and police will protect them. Thousands
 of Israelis will thus become active partners in the expulsion. They'll go
 home every night to their worried families in Jerusalem and Kfar Sava. If
 one of them is killed in a Palestinian ambush, the response will be even
 more "territorial contiguity."
 
 There won't be any need to load people onto trucks. They simply won't be
 able to stay in their homes, let their children risk going to school
 every day on the same route where their Jewish "neighbors" are building,
 striding the streets with their rifles like masters of the land if not the
 universe, speeding along streets that for security reasons are closed to
 Palestinian traffic. They'll lose ever more days at work when they try
 leaving their homes or try coming home and are faced by a noisy laughing
 gang of Jewish teens of both sexes, stoning them with rocks, kicking at them
 and spitting at them, while a policeman or a few soldiers stand idly by. The
 Palestinians living in the "territorial contiguity" will go through what
 happened to the Palestinians of the old city of Hebron, but at an
 accelerated rate.
 
 It's an open secret that many of the residents of the old city have left
 their homes in recent years. They simply couldn't take life with the
 unceasing harassment from a handful of Jewish citizens of Israel who were
 allowed to behave that way due to the laxity or sympathy of soldiers and
 officers, the apathy or sympathy of police and the indifference of the
 Israeli public. Dozens of shop owners in the old city have stopped
 opening, whether because of the unending days and nights of curfew imposed
 on Hebron and its ancient heart, or because the "neighbors" scare off the
 shoppers, or because the streets where the shops are located are closed to
 protect the security of the Jewish neighbors.
 
 When the curfew is lifted, and the market is reopened for a few hours,
 there is the illusion of life. But last Saturday, on the day after the gun
 battle between armed Palestinians and soldiers, police, and armed Israeli
 guards from Kiryat Arba, under the full curfew imposed on Palestinian
 Hebron, it was possible to discern how empty the old city has become. An
 elderly woman and her son peeked frightened through a barred and netted
 window. Behind a tightly shut iron door, one could hear the murmurings of
 the inhabitants. Someone, in the chilling silence, quickly opened and
 closed an iron door. But from one of the rooftops in the old city the
 abandonment could easily be seen: wide open wooden window shutters lazily
 flapping in the breeze and behind them black holes - empty rooms. Dried up
 plants, clotheslines bare of laundry - these were the signs of an empty
 place.
 
 Some of the Palestinian houses are already empty in Wadi Nasara, where the
 gun battle took place opposite the southern nook of Kiryat Arba. The
 "Worshipers Way" for the Palestinians has become the path of the stone
 throwers and the shooters in the air, and the lack of response from the
 authorities for years. Fridays and Saturdays and other Jewish holidays when
 the worshipers walk the way, are the cursed days for the residents of Wadi
 Nasara and the old city. That's when they lock themselves in their homes and
 shutter their windows, blocking their ears when the window shatters or their
 plant pots are overturned and they know there's no point calling the police.
 
 The settlements were built before the terrorism and after it. They were
 built whether the Palestinians expressed their opposition or not. A
 lengthy curfew was imposed on Palestinian Hebron after Baruch Goldstein
 murdered worshipers at the Ibrahimi Mosque/Tomb of the Patriarchs; a
 curfew was imposed on them when a Palestinian murdered a Jewish baby and a
 curfew is imposed when armed Palestinians fight armed Israelis. Jewish
 zealots in Hebron and throughout the West Bank harass Palestinians before
 attacks and after attacks. Now they don't even hide the fact their
 "settlement enterprise" is part of their Transfer plans, which everywhere
 else in the West is known as "ethnic cleansing."
 
 Are those Jewish zealots and their lobbyists really the heirs of the Jewish
 Diaspora? From inside Hebron they actually appear to be of a different
 heritage, scions of nationalist, anti-Semitic movements who sent pogromchiks
 at the head of mobs who spread fear and were full of greed for the Jewish
 homes, to gradually implement the plan of "cleansing the homeland of its
 kikes." Hebron, on Shabbat, was reminiscent of ancestral tales from Sochba,
 a town in northeast Romania, where on Holy Sundays, the Jews would shutter
 themselves up in their homes.