 |
| To me, this picture pretty much sums up the situation in Hebron |
All the service taxis were full. We were standing on the main road at Al Khader, trying to wave one down for a ride to Hebron, 25km away. But service taxis wait in Bethlehem until they are full and then set off so, of course, they were full! Eventually a guy in a car stopped and gave us a lift. But he had a motive. I was standing there with a fanciable blond.
He saw a marriage opportunity in my friend Morgan and, while travelling along Route 60 toward Hebron he tried her out, asking her hand in marriage, in Arabic – she speaks better Arabic than me – but he was polite with it. She’s used to it, but I guess she must be fed up with it. To many Palestinian males, marrying a woman from Amrika, Britaniyya or Allemanni means a passport to heaven, where they can get rich and feel free. I try to disabuse them of this belief, but they don’t want to know – anywhere must be better than here!
Morgan is a young American who lives in a village called Al Aqaba, near Tubas in the northern West Bank. She has been teaching English there and has evolved a plan, with the village mayor, to develop the village guesthouse to welcome guests and parties from abroad so that they can have a genuine Palestinian village experience. It’s a noble plan. She had outlined it at a meeting at Beit Jala of the Center for Emerging Futures, where we had met more than a month ago, and a load of us are going to go up to Al Aqaba soon to act as an inaugural group – and we’re promised a shadow-puppet show!
We were off to Hebron. Morgan had never been there and I felt it was time to visit my old friend Ibrahim the Patriarch (Abraham), father to the Arab and Jewish peoples, who lies in his tomb in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron – Islam’s fourth holiest place. Eventually we arrived in Hebron, Morgan remaining thankfully unmarried, and we walked the streets down toward the souk, the old centre of town.
Hebron is the West Bank’s largest city. A full-scale city it indeed is, friendly and bustling. Historically it has been a great trading city, where in ancient and medieval times traders from Egypt and Arabia met with traders from Mesopotamia and the Levant – but nowadays it is relatively isolated because of the appearance of Israel 60 years ago, and the subsequent forced insulation from the surrounding countries, as well as the insulation of the West Bank within Israel. But Hebron still bustles – it’s the West Bank’s main industrial and business city, where they do engineering, glass-blowing, food-processing, crafts, textiles and ceramics.
We stopped for a falafel sandwich at a cafe, a very friendly one but certainly not complying with British-style health and safety regulations – though the payoff was that our meal cost less than most British cafes would charge for a mere cup of tea. Then we headed off down into the souk. This is an edgy, tragic place, the historic heart of the city, now besieged by soldier-protected settlers of a particularly aggressive kind, notorious amongst Palestinians.
Jews lived in harmony with Arabs in Hebron for centuries. They eventually were moved out by the British following a massacre in 1929 which arose partially from Britain’s own colonial policies. In Jerusalem there had been a bloody dispute over access by Jews to the Western (Wailing) Wall in which people on both sides were killed. This unrest overspilled to Hebron, where 67 Jews were killed – though another thousand Jews were sheltered by Arabs too. They had been friends and neighbours for generations. The British moved the Jews to Jerusalem for their safety, ending an ancient Jewish presence there and also increasing the social separation between Jews and Arabs – a trend which was to lead to the eventual creation of two sundered peoples with a high wall between them, decades later.
Ultimately moving the Jews out was unwise because it led to a situation long afterwards, shortly after the 1967 Six Day War and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, where Israeli settlers moved back, led by a mad rabbi and backed by the guns of the IDF. They occupied the main hotel in town and started spreading out from there. But these people were different. The original Jews in Hebron had been Palestine’s indigenous Misrahi Jews who for centuries had played their part in its multicultural landscape and were integral to it. The settlers who moved in were immigrant Ashkenazi Jews from France and America, led by a ferocious radical rabbi, Moshe Levinger. They had no intention of coexisting in a mixed community: they wanted to reclaim Hebron and drive Palestinians out. Had the British left the original Jews in Hebron, this might not have happened – or at least, not in the same way.
There are only about 600 Israeli settlers in Hebron yet they control 20% of the city, with the help of the IDF (the army). Just outside Hebron lies the settlement of Kiryat Arba with around 6,500 inhabitants, swelling the numbers. Meanwhile, Hebron’s Muslim sector, taking up 80% of the city, has nearly 200,000 people. The areas were formally separated as part of the Oslo Accords of the 1990s. They are divided by urban roadblocks, most of them barred gates, barbed wire and piled-up rubbish. But some Palestinians still live in the Jewish area, doggedly refusing to be ousted and going through significant humiliation and insecurity for doing so.
 |
| An Israeli urban settlement with army watchtower |
It’s a heart-rending situation. It’s not exactly the presence of Jews that is problematic: it’s their attitude and approach, one of arrogant certainty, provocation and hard-heartedness. Their technique is to provoke incidents, drawing in the IDF to protect them and do their dirty work, then to occupy properties as if justified by the incident to do so.
I find it hard to understand how people can live like this and raise children in such an atmosphere. But they do, and one thing that happens in Palestine is that people are regularly faced with a choice: you can eat your heart out over what’s happening, or you can get on with life and make the best of what you’ve got – and survival is best furthered by getting on with life.
Quite a lot of the souk has been closed up by the settlers, who have a nasty habit of welding shut the metal shutters in front of the old Arabic shops. The whole area has a distinctive Ottoman architecture. The souk follows a covered lane passing down a valley leading to the Ibrahimi Mosque.
As you walk down you pass people who are exceptionally friendly and welcoming to visitors, though what’s distasteful is that, as a Westerner, if you get money out of your pocket to buy something, others swoop in on you demanding you buy from them too and, since you visibly have money, you’re duty-bound to support them by buying something. This is sad, and sometimes it’s necessary to be firm in drawing a line and shaking them off.
What affects me most about this is that this happens on the way to a holy place. I find that, once I have been to the Ibrahimi Mosque, I’m in quite a sensitised state, and encountering these guys on the way back is a bit like psychic attack. But there are other Hebronites who recognise this and assist – they know that if foreigners get hassled, they won’t come back.
Returning later from the mosque, one guy affixed himself to me and wouldn’t let go – they’re not violent but clingy, trying to convey the idea that if you don’t support them they will die, and tugging hard on your heart-strings. In fact this approach is more a mental state than a fact, since some of them aren’t desperate. They can suffer a limpet-like victim approach which is a sad effect of the deprivation and loss people have been through, and the feeling of helplessness some Palestinians feel.
At one point a young chap came along, leading us along a side-street to show us the empty shops and then a roadblock – an unsightly tangle of barbed wire and rubbish preventing access to the Jewish zone. Then he showed us an urban Israeli settlement through a gap in the old Hebron buildings, resplendent with Israeli flags. Then he led us up some old stairs into a house, up some more stairs and out onto a roof with a view.
Down on the next building was an Israeli soldier – he looked as if he might be a Druze, used by the IDF in sensitive areas where the Arabic language and the conflict-management skills of the Druze are useful. Further down in the street a situation was developing – a soldier was searching a few Palestinian youths while other soldiers looked on, guns trained. Here it was before us, a normal day unfolding under military occupation. It wasn’t even tense – it was just boringly routine. A bit like British police on a Friday night, searching hoodies and young Muslim men.
Eventually we reached the checkpoints preceding the mosque, but it all worked quite well. At the first you go through a turnstile where a soldier with a machine gun eyeballs you, saying and doing nothing – I’m not sure why he’s there. It must be a killer to wear those helmets all day and every day. Then you come to a checkpoint where usually they examine your bags and the contents of your pockets. I readied myself to open my camera bag but, no, the female soldier just smiled and asked whether I had anything sharp. The soldiers were quite friendly this time – I had a nice chat with the woman, who was more interested in us as people than as potential security threats. Then we progressed up the steps to the final checkpoint at the door of the mosque, where the soldiers, one Russian, one Ethiopian, were just plain bored and waved us through.
Then came a surprise. The Muslim warden at the door, usually cagey and nervous about non-Muslims entering the mosque whenever I’ve come here before, was very welcoming. I think he recognised me. He produced a light hooded cloak for Morgan to wear, to cover her head and the profane jeans and sweater she was wearing, then he took us through to the place where we remove our shoes. He was smiling and seemed happy to have foreigners visiting.
We entered the vastly carpeted main hall and wandered around. The arched ceiling is lovely, and the tombs of Isaac, Rebekah and others of Abraham’s family are there, containing remains thousands of years old. It’s a bit like a carpeted cathedral.
Then we went into Abraham’s tomb. I find this place stirring – the energy here is so dense with holiness and power that it makes me feel weak in the knees every time I come here. Two other guides were watching, fascinated at how this (they thought) tourist had obviously gone into a deep meditation, standing quietly before the tomb, transfixed.
I stood there awhile, losing track of time. I love the Ibrahimi Mosque. It’s deep, profound. The sense of presence is captivating. If you want to experience true holiness, come here.
Before long we were out. Time was actually pressing. We needed to get back to Bethlehem because Aisha was coming to stay the night and I needed to let her in. I collected a camel-hair rug which, on the way down, I had bought from a trader who has become a friend. He’s a Palestinian with the nickname ‘Manchester’ because that’s where he lived before returning to Hebron. He has lovely, colourful traditional hand-woven rugs and hangings made in the villages south of Hebron – I’d love to buy a truckload of them to distribute around my friends. But I bought just one for 350 shekels (£70), which I shall treasure. We continued up through the souk, emerging into the crowded main streets of lower Hebron and soon to sit in a bus for Bethlehem.
I feel I have a past-life connection with Ibrahim the Patriarch. Having taken Morgan to see him felt right – almost as if ordained. She has been really taken by Palestine, and this event will be a highlight, methinks. An old friend from Glastonbury is coming to the Middle East in January, visiting Jordan, Palestine and Egypt, and I think I’ll bring her here too. I have sent out so many signals to old friends, offering a place to stay for free, and a memorable adventure, and she’s the only one who has acted on it thus far. A ‘new age Christian’, she’s a dedicated community activist in Glastonbury, and I know in my bones that this will be a pilgrimage of the heart for her, a journey of reconnection with something deep down. Perhaps she’s starting a new chapter in life. I feel privileged to pay my part.
When we got back to the school, two of Aisha’s English students were there in their car with her. Though many Westerners think this is a male chauvinist place where women are controlled by men – not entirely true because many of the submissiveness patterns in Arab women are actually passed down from mother to daughter and chosen and reinforced by women – there’s a touching side to it. Women are very much protected by men. Apart from the fact that it gives them an extra half hour of informal English-language chattering with Aisha, these guys go out of their way to save Aisha taxi-fares and getting around alone. Palestine is not at all dangerous for a woman on her own but it is haram, sacred, to protect and support women, and there’s a touching and honourable side to it.
That evening I was honoured and blessed to cook for and look after two ladies. Morgan visited Palestine a year ago with her brother, returned to the States and came back here as soon as she could, and she is thinking seriously of finding a way to stay here longterm. She has fallen in love with her village of Al Aqaba. It was valuable for her to meet Aisha to find out more about the ins and outs of marrying into Palestine. Aisha (pronounced Ay-ee-sha), English, seems happy to have done so. Whether it’s right for Morgan I cannot tell, but she’s not entirely American, having grown up in Japan, Hong Kong and India. It’s a big decision to make.
Whenever I go to Hebron, my soul gets rumbled, shaken and quaked. Something is going on inside me. I don’t know what it is, but it feels alright. Perhaps my angels are rearranging my inner circuitry. Or perhaps I’m making a deep decision I’m yet to become aware of. Or perhaps I have a case of immaculate concussion. Whatever it is, 2012 is starting soon, and I don’t think this is going to go away.
