Hebron

If you talk to a Jewish settler about whether Jews or Palestinians have the right to claim Hebron, he will inevitably point you towards the Bible. One settler even had a bible on him. He gestured vehemently at the appropriate verses, urging me to read them. “You see? Do you see?”

The script was in Hebrew.

I’ll save you the trouble of shaking the dust off your family bible. Hebron was King David’s capital before he conquered Jerusalem. Long before that, Hebron was- and still is- the site of the Cave of Machpela, an old series of family graves that house some of the most famous bones in history. You’ll recognize them.

Abraham. Sarah. Isaac. Leah. Jacob. Rebecca. Popularly known as the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, the Bible will tell you that they are the founding fathers of the Jews- to whom God promised the Holy Land.

But the Jews left. To be fair, they were thrown out- by the Babylonians, then again by the Romans. A few centuries later, in rode the Muslims.

Here’s where it gets sticky. Abraham and his progeny aren’t holy just to Jews. According to the Koran, Abraham (or Ibrahim), is also the forefather of the Arabs through his son Ishmael, brother of Isaac. Yes, this is also in the Bible. By association, the “Jewish” Patriarchs are also “Muslim”, held as mighty prophets in their own right.

The Muslims renamed the city Al-Khalil (or “The Friend”, as Abraham was a “friend” of Allah), repopulated it, and converted the rotting structure atop Abe’s boneyard into a mosque, called the Ibrahimi Mosque.

In 1967, the Jews came back. Look up “The Six Day War” on Wikipedia. And religious Jews, waving the Torah in one hand and rifles in the other, rushed into what was now a densely populated city of Arab Muslims. They built a settlement in the heart of the city, and to this day they remain: an armored enclave of yarmulke-wearing fanatics quoting lines from the Book of Genesis.

Some stats on Hebron:

500 Jewish settlers
2000 soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces
120,000 pissed off Palestinians

Let’s just say that tensions are high.

* * *


The labyrinthine marketplace surrounding the Mosque, once a thriving bazaar with hundreds of vendors, is a ghost town. All the shops have moved west, to where the roving, clashing gangs of settler and Arab youth can’t ruin business.

A knot of roughhousing Arab youngsters caught me on my way through the silent alleys.

“Hey, Chi-iiii-na! Ni how!”

“Korea! Ko-reeeeee-ah!”

“Jah-pan! Jah-pan!”

One kid, younger than the rest, sauntered up behind me, hands shoved in his pockets, smiling smugly. I watched him out of the corner of my eye as he preened for his friends, tailing the oblivious foreigner. Then he aimed a kick at my knees.

A howl from the watching boys erupted.

I turned; he sprinted back towards the safety of his gang, bellowing gleefully. He skipped merrily away, taunting me over his shoulder… and ran straight into a slap to the face.

I stared. Every boy in that group was shouting at the kid in torrent Arabic. The eldest, a kid no older than sixteen, cuffed him hard, again, in the ear. He burst into tears, then grabbed an old rusted bucket and swung it at his peers in a wild circle. They responded with swift kicks and a flood of harsh words.

I turned my back on the scene. Spare the rod, you know the rest.

Another boy chased me down, apologizing profusely in passable English.

“But you know, it’s the Jews. They make things… er… very bad.”

Pardon me?

“The Jews. Because of what they do, we are angry. The boy, he angry. He get crazy. He…er…urm…”

I got the point.

* * *


In 1994, Baruch Goldstein, a local settler, walked into the Ibrahimi Mosque and gunned down twenty-three Muslims as they knelt in prayer. I believe he was ripped apart by the survivors. Ever since, the mosque has been segregated into Muslim and Jewish portions.

I went first to the Muslim entrance, and joined a short line of waddling, headscarved old women and sullen-faced young men. The usual precautions: large plastic barricades, roped-off S-curve queues, metal detectors, and teenaged Israeli soldiers in their olive green uniforms, nonchalantly toting their M-16s. Another day at the office.

“You have knife?”

No.

“You have bomb?”

No.

“Are you Jewish?”

What?

“Here, Muslim. Here, no Jew. Jew, go other side. Are you Jewish?”

I’m Chinese, dude. The boy-soldier stared blankly at me. He didn’t seem to understand that there are as many Chinese Jews as saber-toothed tigers. I resisted a sudden urge to pinch the oozing zit on his nose.

Okay. I’m not Jewish.

“Go. Next!” He beckoned at the crease-faced grandmother behind me.

The Muslim section of the tomb was a plain, darkly-lit, whitewashed hall. Noon prayers were forty minutes away. I left after five.

* * *

A large crowd of kids spilled out onto the streets and ran, shouting and laughing, around the corner towards the Jewish entrance. They were all wearing yarmulkes. Many had side-curls. A pair of chaperones, both bearded men with yarmulkes, had M-16s slung over their shoulders. Neither wore uniforms.

I followed them.

A sour-faced Arab shopkeeper watched them file past his little shop. Those kids, he said, were settlers. The Jews from Kiryat Arba and the surrounding settlements and outposts would routinely schedule field trips to the Abe’s grave. Sometimes huge tour buses would arrive from Jerusalem, or New York. They would be loud, they would be yarmulked, they would be side-curled, and they would speak in Hebrew or New-Yawk-Tawk. They would walk and act with an infuriating air of entitlement, as if to tell the old man: “Hebron is ours, not yours.”

He then pointed out the invisible lines on the ground. Behind the Mosque stood a walled off, wire-fenced “security area” barred to Palestinians. It stretched all the way from the Mosque itself to Kiryat Arba, the main Jewish settlement, and comprised a sealed off, depopulated urban area and several “security roads” where settlers could drive without having their cars riddled with stones or bullets. For a square kilometer behind us were the abandoned corridors of the Old Bazaar.

For all intents, there was a Jewish bubble surrounding the Ibrahimi Mosque, beyond which no Palestinian could pass without the permission of an armed trooper.


The streets in front of the Mosque were controlled by the Israelis. Palestinians arriving to worship at the Mosque were required to file along a narrow sidewalk formed by big orange and white barricades, keeping all Palestinians off the street itself.

In the middle of the street stood the Gutnick Center, an Orthodox Jewish community center. Beyond the invisible line formed by this building and the opposite side of the street, Palestinians could not pass. Around the far side of the Gutnick Center was the entrance to the Jewish half of the Mosque, called by Jews the Tomb of the Patriarchs.

But I can go?

The old shopkeeper’s eyes narrowed. “Are you Muslim?”

No.

“Are you Jewish?

No!

“Christian, then? Yes, of course you can go there.”


I followed the settlers up to the gate. The kids ran about, playing tag, or sitting in small clusters, chattering in Hebrew. I noted rather belatedly that they were all boys. A dozen picnics started. A small knot of boys, all of them with side-curls and skullcaps, posed noisily for a picture by a tall settler with a gun. They shouted cheerily at me.

“Shalom! Shalom! Welcome to Israel! Welcome to Hebron!” I smiled and waved (I reserve the right to smile and wave at all children), and the boys cheered. The older man smiled, too- warily, but proudly. He nodded at me, then turned away. A folk song started- lively, with clapping hands; Eastern European in lilt and melody.


The old shopkeeper was right. These Jews were behaving as though they were in their own backyards. They weren’t tourists. They weren’t strangers; an alien population implanted by armed force on top of shackled masses of natives. They were home.

And this is probably what is most damaging to the psyche of Hebron’s Palestinians. They cannot understand how settlers can so blithely, so wholly, and with such conviction, ignore the reality that Hebron is Arab.

The existence of a costly military occupation, of 120,000 caged Arabs, of 1400 years of Arabic culture and government, of territorial claims backed not by Biblical verses, but by title deeds, house keys, and the continuous occupation of generations- these didn’t even remotely intrude upon the settlers’ Biblical wet-dream.

* * *


Of course, the Israelis had kept the important part of the Mosque for themselves.

The Muslim section, as I’ve mentioned, is simply a dark, open hall. The Jewish portion is smaller, sectioned off into study rooms and synagogues. However, it also contains the tombs of the patriarchs and matriarchs.

Hey, to the victors go the spoils.

The room straggled with bearded ultra-orthodox. All ignored me. They leaned over scrolls and books, chanting quietly. The walls were lined with bookshelves and framed posters overflowing with the ornate Hebrew script.


I picked up a bound Torah and flipped to a favorite chapter. I knew the words in English; the Hebrew was utterly arcane. An old caretaker approached me; wizened, dark, Ethiopian. “You read Hebrew?”

I read him a line, pronouncing the words phonetically. (Arts language credits!) The old guy beamed, his eyes disappearing into wrinkle-crinkles. “You are Jewish!”

No.

“You are not Jewish?” His face fell, and his eyes reappeared. They seemed confused.

No, sir. Christian.

The forbidden C-word. He sighed and turned away. Oy vey.

* * *


By the sides of this main hall were rooms walled off by iron grates. These were the tombs of Abraham’s family. In front of one grate, a shawled settler woman wept and prayed fervently, rocking back and forth. A small black sign embossed with gold Hebrew lettering hung from the grate:

“AVRAHAM AVINU”

Abraham, our father. Here was the old man himself. Around the sides, on similar grates barring similar rooms, similar signs hung. Jacob, our father. Sarah, our mother. Leah, our mother. The signs were all in Hebrew, and the Jews managed the tombs and prayed around them.


But beyond the grates, inside the rooms, the Patriarchs and Matriarchs had been given a Muslim memorial, surrounded by Muslim trappings. The large, peaked coffin or monument that marked the spot of burial was draped by large cloths with Arabesque embroidery. The walls of the small, square rooms were decorated with the calligraphy and patterns unique to Islamic art.

They looked identical to the tombs of Muslim figures I had seen in shrines and mosques in Cairo and Damascus. They looked like the tombs of Saladin, or Sayida Zeinab. The same coffin. The same cloth. The same decoration. The same grates walling off the coffin. The same square block of a room.

The Jews try to lay sole claim to the legacy of the Patriarchs, but the evidence belies this. As much as the settlers want to write off the Arabs and the Muslims as a bastard offshoot, Arab history is written upon the cities and the land- even the tombs.

And the Jews, try as they might, cannot change this. They cannot change the character of Hebron, or Nablus, or East Jerusalem, any more than they can change the character of Abraham’s Muslim tomb.

All they can do is hang a sign outside in Hebrew.

As if on cue, the call to noonday prayers sounded- bellowed deafeningly, and almost maliciously, from the minaret of the adjoining Muslim hall.

Not a single Jew in the room moved a muscle. No one looked up; no one voiced a word of annoyance. They kept chanting, reading, praying; pointedly ignoring the Arabic wails now echoing through the halls.