During this reporters visit to Hebron, I learned 450 Israeli settlers and 3,000 IDF, eighteen- to twenty-one-year-olds patrol the streets with their weapons at the ready. The IDF refused access through one of the many checkpoints to me and my guide Jerry Levin, former CNN Mid East Bureau Chief in the 1980's who was kidnapped in Lebanon and held for nearly a year by the Hezbollah.
Jerry is now a full time volunteer with CPT/Christian Peacemaker Teams. Jerry told me, “Most of the soldiers don’t like the CPTs. Whenever they won’t let us through, we just go another way, and always, eventually, get where we want to go.” [4]
The village of Hebron had once been a thriving Palestinian neighborhood, but now the narrow, winding stone streets between the colonists and the indigenous people are only connected to the other by a deeply sagging netting that the squatters hurl huge rocks, shovels, electronic equipment, furniture, and all manner of debris upon with hope it will break and hit an unfortunate Palestinian upon the head.
Jerry Levin informed this reporter, “It gets cleaned out about every year or so. Come back in a few months, and this netting will be much closer to your head. The settlers just throw whatever they want onto the netting; they do what ever they want and get away with it. The CPT’s run interference by nonviolent resistance; we get the children and woman to where they need to be going and back again. Sometimes, the settlers curse and stone us all; it keeps it interesting.” [5]
Hundreds of now empty formerly Palestinian homes have been spray painted by the colonists with Stars of David and graffiti such as: “GAS THE ARABS.”
Minister of Intelligence in South African Government, Ronnie Kasrils recently returned to Palestine’s West Bank and Gaza Strip, and wrote how it was "like a surreal trip back into an apartheid state of emergency. It is chilling to pass through the myriad checkpoints -- more than 500 in the West Bank. They are controlled by heavily armed soldiers, youthful but grim, tensely watching every movement, fingers on the trigger…A journey from one West Bank town to another that could take 20 minutes by car now takes seven hours for Palestinians, with manifold indignities at the hands of teenage soldiers…The monstrous apartheid wall cuts off East Jerusalem…Bethlehem too is totally enclosed by the wall, with two gated entry points. The Israelis have added insult to injury by plastering the entrances with giant scenic posters welcoming tourists to Christ’s birthplace." [6]
On the cover of my memoirs from OPT, Meir Vanunu provided the photo of the enormous Orwellian sign Kasrils refers to, that hangs upon The Wall next to the checkpoint that leads from Jerusalem to her sister city, Bethlehem:
"PEACE BE WITH YOU" it claims and can be viewed on the homepage of http://www.wearewideawake.org/
The Wall or as Israel prefers to spin it as a 'security barrier', "is designed to crush the human spirit as much as to enclose the Palestinians in ghettoes. Like a reptile, it transforms its shape and cuts across agricultural lands as a steel-and-wire barrier, with watchtowers, ditches, patrol roads and alarm systems. It will be 700km long and, at a height of 8m to 9m in places, dwarfs the Berlin Wall. The purpose of the barrier becomes clearest in open country. Its route cuts huge swathes into the West Bank to incorporate into Israel the illegal Jewish settlements -- some of which are huge towns -- and annexes more and more Palestinian territory." [7]
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
