It is hard to put down in words what actually happened on that Thursday, partly because its all I have talked about, thought about, since, and partly because I don't really want to relay the facts about the violence instead of talking about the people effected. I wasn't actually in Hebron, I had been in Jerusalem to attend a demonstration where Um'Kamel was marching to her original home in West Jerusalem, and had just recieved news over the phone. Israeli army special forces arrived at around 2 o'clock to finally carry out the eviction of a few hundred extreme right settlers who had occupied a house on the road to the old city of Hebron two years ago. After the high court ruling to evict the occupants the settlers had repeatedly promised that they will make Palestinians "pay in blood" if they were actually evactuated. In the few weeks before the evacuation they lived up to that promise, every night Palestinian homes were barraged with stones and molotov cocktails, settlers from all of the surrounding illegal settlements would coordinate synchrinized attacks on the Palestinian neighborhood around the house, all while the Israeli army and police would sit and watch, waiting for an active Palestinian response that they could punish with excessive force. We spent many nights with the families in the neighborhood, dodging rocks as we tried to get some footage of the events, and tried even harder to get the authorities to respond to the settler violence. Over countless cups of tea and coffee we became very close with these families, ignoring the strange and sad circumstances of our meetings. It became evident that the authorities were not their to keep peace, but instead protect the settlers, to allow them to terrorize a neighborhood of families that were expected to sit and wait passively for their homes and lives to be destroyed.
The evacuation only took a little over an hour, the heavily armed settlers wanted their pictures for the press to look sad and desperate, many of them sewing gold stars of david to their sleeves, disgustingly exploiting the tragedy that was the holocaust. Though thorough in removing the settlers from the actual home, the special forces seemed to have no qualms about leaving a mob of angry settlers in the middle of the neighborhood they had already terrorized for weeks. Mobs of settlers lit fire to everything in sight, spray painted both the mosque and its adjacent cemetary with things like; "Mohammed is a pig" and "Death to the Arabs", and attempted to cause the largest amount of harm to any Palestinian in their path.
The next day it seemed that the settlers had accomplished their goals, the city looked like a junkyard, burnt cars and broken windows scattering every street, spray paint covering homes, seemingly every Palestinian man you saw wrapped in fresh white gauze. No one died on Thursday, by some miracle Hosne Abu Sa'afan, who was shot in the heart has survived the attack along with the three other Palestinians shot by settler fire, but what remains is instead a reality of massive realized fears. Anyone who had the unfortunate experience of even coming near the occupied Rajibi house knew that these people, a term I use loosly when referring to these maniacs, would want someone's blood on their hands when they were finally made to leave, but none of the predictions prepared the Palestinian families for what happened, no matter how prepared or resistant they were it didn't change the fact that every one of them had to watch their children suffer, watch their homes destroyed, and know that no one was there to stop it. As much as I want to stress how desparate this situation was, I would never want you to believe that any of the families I met were helpless, they are, like almost every Palestinian I know, strong and proud of their strength, united, and aware of the injustice being carried out against them, but sometimes all of the strength in the world can't help you when your home is turned into a war zone. A few days after the attacks, as I sat helping prepare cookies for Eid with his family, my friend Attif admitted that he now considers moving his family to Jordan, that after everything he and his siblings and children have gone through, it just isn't worth it anymore, he knows he will never sell his home, but as he watches his son run to the roof to shoot a toy gun at the looming settlement every morning, he knows that he can't stay. On top of the violence he must deal with he has to also face a harsh economic reality, the occupation is more than physical violence, it has ripped the heart out of any city in the West Bank, made it impossible for domestic goods to be transported or sold, for infrastructure to go up or for businesses to grow, the Israelis have capped the palestinian way of life so even if they want to stay eventually they wont be able to.
It is harsh realities like this one that sometimes make the work that I do here feel incredibly futile and impossible, because you are forced to see how institutionalized and thorough this occupation is, roads built to specifically cut off cities with the use of one jeep, settlements placed to hault urban expansion, water being stolen to cut off industry, strategic bombings of infrastructure and eventually the complete siege of the entire west bank with the wall that the world watched them take years to build. You attempt,for the sake of these realizations, to sometimes stop asking why, to stop allowing yourself to remember that this is not an accident, that the palestinians I have spent months with are meant to suffer in the exact manner that they are, its all written down in Israeli law. You start to feel yourself instead only thinking of the now, of the when where and how, trying to delay the inevitable, trying to find those few moments when the resistance makes sense again, when you see something other than resignation or defeat, and you remember why you are here, to support that, to stand behind that. One of the greatest lessons I have learned here is that true resistance is one of the most amazing things to witness, to watch someone completely disrespect and illegitamize an illegal force opressing them, by simply not being afraid anymore, by not just doing everything to gain freedom but simultaneously being free.
