Hebron turned into ‘ghost town’
Human rights groups say Israeli curbs on Palestinians in the West Bank town of Hebron have forced thousands of them to leave homes and close businesses.
B’Tselem and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel said Israel had in effect expropriated central Hebron to protect some 650 Jewish settlers there.
Israel had breached the Geneva Convention prohibiting forced transfer, which was a war crime, the groups said.
The Israeli military says curbs are to maintain order and protect life.
“The policy of separation founded on ethnic criteria has caused a massive exodus of Palestinians from Hebron’s city centre,” the joint human rights report said.
“Israeli activities have been carried out on the basis of a preferential policy toward settlers that has turned the centre of Hebron into a ghost town.”
Military closures
The groups said about 1,000 Palestinian homes, more than 40% of homes in the centre of Hebron, had been vacated because of Israeli closures in the centre of the city.
Two-thirds of these were vacated during the course of the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, which began in 2000.
Troops look after settlers’ interests not Palestinians’, the report saysMore than 75% of shops were shut down, the joint B’Tselem/ACRI survey said, 62% of them since 2000 and a quarter of them as a result of military orders.
“They created conditions that made the Palestinians move,” B’Tselem spokeswoman Sarit Michaeli said. “The army can’t now say that they didn’t know this was going to happen.”
An Israeli military statement said the report had failed to reflect the complexities of Hebron, and that the restrictions were imposed to protect both Israeli and Palestinian residents.
“In this complicated reality the military commander is required, and is in fact obliged, to take such actions on purely security grounds,” a military statement said.
‘Lies, distortions’
The report said the army generally did not intervene when Palestinian residents were subjected to attacks by militant settlers, which also caused people to leave.
“Dozens of settlers attacked my house at once, and they burned things inside the house,” former resident Mufid Sharabati is quoted saying.
“We called the Israeli police and the army, but nobody helped us.”
Settler spokesman David Wilder denounced the report as lies and distortions, and said Palestinians left because of curfews imposed because of attacks on settlers.
“We have never tried to throw anybody out, and we have not tried to keep anyone here,” he said.
Hebron is the only place in the Israeli-occupied West Bank where a small community of Jewish settlers lives in the heart of a Palestinian city.
Under an agreement with the Palestinian Authority, Israel evacuated 80% of Hebron in 1997, remaining in an area around the Old City where 650 Jewish settlers live among about 30,000 Palestinians.
All Israeli settlements built on land captured in the 1967 war are illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.
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Also read an interesting article on the divide in the Palestinian and Israeli narratives of the conflict history: Nakba and Occupation of Palestine and the establishment of Israel.
my friend Marwa lives in Tal el Rumaideh, one of the major points of clashes in Hebron, after all the fights, annoying, and settlers’ disgusting behavior, she told me once the protection of the Tal is the duty of her family.
inhabitants of the old city of Hebron are really suffering.
A must-read:
“Saree Makdisi: Secrets of intellectual warfare” -Al-Ahram Weekly
‘Few if any of the tens of thousands of Egyptians flocking to theatres in the last month to see the epic movie 300 are aware of what the scriptwriter, Frank Miller, told American national radio about Arab-Muslim culture in January. Had they known, his movie would have likely had a different reception.
In what was supposed to be a critique of President George W Bush’s State of the Union Speech which included references to the “global war on terror”, Miller warned Americans of what they’re “up against” — “the sixth-century barbarism that these people actually represent”. In fact, he said, “the contention that all cultures are equal and that every belief system is as good as the next, is utterly reprehensible. We have to understand that some cultures are superior and some cultures are inferior. Our culture in the West is superior than their culture”.
…
I think it’s a mistake to imagine that US foreign policy these days is driven strictly by national interests or realpolitik,” he warned. “It is increasingly driven by certain cultural predispositions, certain ways of imagining the world that US policy-makers have thought themselves in possession of. And it’s these cultural predeterminations that I think are driving a lot of what’s going on in American foreign policy rather than America’s actual material interest, particularly in the Middle East.” So, for example, when Miller “critiques” Bush’s State of the Union speech, Makdisi notes, he actually replicates what the president says.
…
Makdisi’s bold views and prolific writings have earned him respect but also, unsurprisingly, enemies. In January 2006 he published an article in the LA Times entitled “Witch hunt at UCLA”, which explains how he and other “targeted professors” were the subject of an offer made by a UCLA graduate website encouraging students to “expose” professors who talk about Bush or the war on Iraq in return for money. Makdisi’s articles which appear in various American newspapers often generate positive feedback from “normal Americans” who, he says, have thanked him for speaking up and presenting a critical point of view. But he also gets hate mail by America’s Israel defenders accusing him of “vicious lying” and “hate”. Still, he says, “I’m holding up to what I know objectively to be a humanist argument. These guys see this and recognise — subconsciously because they can’t really process it — their own inhumanity in what they represent. So in their twisted minds, they turn it around and project it onto me. They accuse me of talking about hate, when I’m talking about peace and justice. They’re the ones talking about hate. It’s like you press a button and hate comes out of it like a volcano.”
In his calmness and low-pitched voice, Makdisi easily sounds sarcastic. He also bears a resemblance to Edward Said, who happens to be his uncle. When I asked him how the witch hunt in UCLA or Zionist criticism of his views has affected him, he said it didn’t. “I’m an intellectual, somebody who uses his brain to think and write. So it’s utterly offensive that somebody articulating a point of view is received not with counter arguments but rather with hate, blind derision, anger and viciousness.” Personally, he adds, he doesn’t “give a damn”. Nor should he, he explains: “the kind of things they say are utterly stupid and the reason why Israel’s America defenders resort to these tactics is because they have nothing else to say. They have no arguments, reason, justification, they have no legal basis.”‘
Israel had breached the Geneva Convention prohibiting forced transfer, which was a war crime, the groups said.
Those Israeli fuckers!
That’s one major reason I read this blog, because it’s so concerned about the Geneva Conventions. It doesn’t matter who is in violation[*], this blog holds everybody to the same standard.
Well, since the Israelis started it, the Palestinians have a choice to make: do they continue their longstanding tradition of abiding by the Geneva Convention on bombing civilians, or do they take off the gloves?
*as long as they’re American or Jews.
Incidentally, why isn’t Kabobfest covering the high-level talks about a unity government for Palestine?
The peaceful way in which Palestinians can settle their differences gives us a lot of hope for a peaceful resolution with Israel, if only those damn Jews would stop being such warmongers.
haha!