Kids are jumping around. Dancing. A perspiring, lanky gray haired guy is fiddling nonstop and Harry Borrey, fresh from a brief kidnapping experience in Gaza is singing things like “We Shall Overcome” and telling various Israeli soldiers that he loves them. And in Hebron, there are a lot of soldiers for Harry to love.

More on Harry and his love for occupation soldiers and Gaza kidnappers in a moment. Now, a bit about Hebron:

Hebron wasn’t the dingy, torn up place I was expecting it to be. At least, not right away, Not at the outskirts of town. The rim of Hebron, at least when approaching it from the direction of Jerusalem, is a neat, manicured city with a mix of modern commercial buildings, new apartments and modest, but comfortable looking houses tucked into hillsides and or lined up on quiet, not quite suburban streets. With traffic medians and something that nearly resembled smooth flowing traffic, which is a rarity in many places Palestine as people here have a few more problems to deal with — what with a mammoth army constantly threatening to flatten them — than when to yield at intersections.

In cities like Ramallah, the crumbling structures and burned out building, the shellshocked look of a war zone, is at the outside of the city. In Hebron, it’s in the heart of the community. As we traveled closer to the center, it quickly became evident that the occupation wasn’t about keeping people from leaving this city, but rather, was maintained to keep them from going too far into it. Hebron is a city of 200,000 Palestinians. Controlling their movement, their ability to get across town, or even on some occasions leave their homes, are somewhere around 2,400 soldiers who are stationed there for the sole purpose of making the 600 or so Israeli settlers there stay in charge. The settlers in Hebron, literally live on top of the Palestinians.

I traveled to Hebron on Saturday with three others working with the International Solidarity Movement to give a little moral support to this demonstration, about which we had received the slimmest of information. My traveling partners being Lauren, Walter and Caroline. In order: a Londoner here working on a thesis about NGOs; a college student from Austria, and a Palestinian Italian woman researching HIV in London when not looking around the ancestors’ land and getting harassed by soldiers for wearing a veil.

“Oh great!” Rann had said. “Hebron freshmen.” Rann, an Israeli peace activist, has been running around these regions for some time now, Jumping into the front lines of anti-occupation protests, He and other Israelis — whether they live most their lives in Israel or not — have passports that, while not shielding them from tear gas or the occasional rubber bullet, do guarantee them an instant “right of return” whenever they want to come, and no fear of deportation. Still, the closest he came to succinctly describing the reality of the situation in Hebron was saying “it’s crazy. fucking insane.”

We’d decided to go to Hebron while staying at the Faisel hostel across from the Damascas Gate in Al Quds, if you want to employ the Arabic name much to the glee of the people who used to enjoy it as their capitol. You could call it it East Jerusalem if you want the rest of the world to know what you’re talking about and yet still feel like being political, as East jerusalem is occupied Palestine (not sudden presence of soldiers on this side of Jaffa Street). Or there’s just ” Jerusalem” if you’re of the sort the doesn’t think such a place should be split, shared or whatever.

It’s difficult not to want to just default to “whatever” after any sort of stop in Hebron. The place could be considered a holy shrine to all those seeking to renew their pessimistic outlook on humanity. Maybe you’re a feeling a little too “up with people” after a marathon of “Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman” reruns on the PAX channel. Maybe you’ve come down with that little bit of hope that there is at least a little spark of good in each and every one of us. Well, come on over to Hebron. Take a look at what people are capable of doing to one another.

Now, about Harry. We met up with Harry Borrey and his pals, along with some Palestinian ISM coordinators not far from where they wanted to do their demonstration at one of these internal checkpoints. Asa, a coordinator for ISM Hebron, wanted some ISM folks there, so we came. At the time we’d decided to go, we hadn’t realized it was going to be a musical review.

As it turned out, this was an action pretty much planned and carried out by a group called Michigan Peace Team, which, while not itself religious, has a lot of pastors and holy rollers here right now. David Smith of St. Paul, Minnesota (apparently you don’t have to be from Michigan to be in Michigan Peace Team) played old timey songs on his violen. The guys also made some signs for kids to carry, reading thing like, “let music be our passport through this checkpoint” and things like that. It was a little too cute for my traveling companions and I, but that’s how these old guys do things.

The settler area is set up in the old city of Hebron. At the first checkpoint where we’d stopped, called Section 81, or something like that, a large metal bunker sat in the middle of the street and two narrow doorways were guarded by soldiers. Some Palestinians who haven’t been entirely driven out of the area can still pass through the checkpoint during limited times of the day. They’re not likely to be get much in the way of visitors from the other side, though, and 81 is just one of many checkpoints they’ll face that will take them blocks out of their way home so as to keep them segregated from Israeli settlers, who aren’t impeded by checkpoints at all. History has pretty clearly illustrated that separate laws seldom are established to treat people equally. Add this example to the growing list. A Palestinian trying to get to the Ibrahimi Mosque, or the last remnants of what was once a thriving street market, has to show her or his ID at least three times in as many blocks, and will have to present it again just as many times to the same soldiers when he or she leaves less than an hour later.

I don’t know if having Dave Smith play his violin for soldiers was the best demonstration to have, but it wasn’t an ISM thing, so whatever.

AP photo by Nasser Shiyoukhi: David Smith of St. Paul, Minnesota, plays his violin in front of Israeli security forces near an Israeli checkpoint in the West Bank town of Hebron, Saturday, July 30, 2005. Foreign and Palestinian peace activists Saturday staged a protest against the presence of numerous Israeli army checkpoints within Hebron.

But as Dave’s music selection delved deeper into a medley of southern gospel favorites, there just seemed to be to me something a little unPalestinian about this action. It was as though these guys wanted holy roller tune first to get through the checkpoint first,, carving the way for the Palestinians stolling behing it, perhaps like a mini reenactment of the crossing of the Red Sea with a little help from the divine. From what I’ve seen, miracles don’t happen in the Holy Land, and it sort of obscured the issue.

In Bil’in, Sulfeit, Nablus and elsewhere, there’s a very homegrown feel to the nonviolent resistance to the occupation. Local activists can get out the numbers when they need to because they come up with ideas that register with the populace. These tend to be based on practicalities rather than abstract ideologies or themes like “peace through music.” They protest the destruction of agricultural land, theft of property, limits on travel, curfews, lack of direct access to nearby schools and hospitals, hold vigils for political prisoners, and mass marches to closed checkpoints.

These things have nothing to do with differing religions or cultures. They’re about having the right to live as human beings. While the vast majority of images we see back in the United States seems to attempt to depict some sort of equally yoked combatants engaged in a fair dispute over a small splotch of land, nonviolent resistance is by far what the majority of Palestinian opposition to the occupation looks like. For some reason, when an unarmed Palestinian man or woman is being knocked to the ground and kicked in the abdomen by Israeli soldiers, there seems to be far fewer cameras around.

This is why I tend to think it’s imperative to take the lead from the locals. Harry and his muscial friends mean well, and the people in Gaza and the West Bank genuinely welcome their friendship and help in resisting the occupation. But the action in Hebron attracted a few curious children, a handful of Hebronites interested in pretty much any sort of protest, and that’s about it. The Associated Press photo that ran was simply of this Dave playing his fiddle for some Israeli soldiers who were looking on with a mix of amusement and bewilderment.

It’s not about music or the gospel getting passed a checkpoint. ‘t’s not about foreigners being kept out either. These old white guys could have gotten through without the Palestinians they were there to help gain freedom of movement. For that matter, so could Walter, Lauren and I if we would have just shown up, held out our IDs and left our Hebron friends behind. Caroline likely have been stuck on the other side (note veil, Palestinian heritage) with the locals. We could have walked around, mingled with the religious maniacs who think, as Gore Vidal once put it, “that the great realtor in the sky had given them, in perpetuity, the lands of Judea and Samaria.”

While there might have been some sort of lurid anecdotes to share from such a visit, it would have been completely beside the point when it comes to the freedom of travel for Hebron’s vast majority of citizens. There’s nothing religious about that. There’s no cultural difference between Palestinian and Israelis that dictates that one is fine having less freedom than the other.

But the guys meant well, and as I watched Asa smile at the kids dancing around the music and playing with the Americans, I suppose it’s easy to conclude that the whole thing wasn’t entirely unfruitful. But Harry’s story is interesting aside from all this. According to the The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights:

According to PCHR’s initial investigations at about 0645 on Sunday July the 24th an armed Palestinian wearing military garb broke into an apartment inside a residential block in the centre of Rafah. The apartment is inhabited by 4 US citizens. Under threat of arms the suspect kidnapped Harry Borrey, 75 years old. He was ordered to get into a civilian car stopped near the building. 3 other masked and armed individuals were inside the car. He was then taken to an unknown location. The reason for the kidnapping has not been made clear by the perpetrators.

Usually, when a yankee gets kidnapped, the media goes nuts, Israel uses it as a great PR for for its campaign to pummel Gaza some more and the U.S. State Department tries to seem concerned. With Harry, none of that happened. A few minor league newswires carried it when they caught wind, but other than your farther right Free Republic and Washington Times type rags, it wasn’t picked up. Why would that be? Maybe it’s because it was released by a Gaza human rights group, or maybe because the story wasn’t easy enough to tell. Harry wasn’t kidnapped because he represented the decadent west, as the Washington Times had put it, terrorists continuing targeting of Americans. They wanted to blackmail someone else in town.

The PCHR an the few wire services that bothered to report the incident didn’t go into is why this little group of guys wanted to kidnap a a retired priest from the Archdiocese of St. Paul/Minneapolis and teacher at Baldwin Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, in the first place. It wasn’t to release some macabre video via Aljazeera, of a beheading, or to net a big wad of cash form friends or family. There was no political or ideological statement to be made by the kidnappers. They just wanted to get Harry to admit on video that he worked for the CIA.

Harry’s about as covert as a southern Baptist choir on Sunday, and about as religious. So no big scoop there. But these guys had it in their head that if they could get Harry to say he was a spook they could blackmails any locals who may have had dealings with him.

Unfortunately for them, anyone who’s had five minutes of dealings with Harry would not come away with the notion that anyone’s national security was at risk by his being there. Throughout our walk through Hebron, he engaged soldiers in lengthy conversations about why they were there, wouldn’t they rather be back at home, and why he wants them to be as secure as the Palestinians. If this was some subtle code being exchanged between he and collaborators, it seemed to be annoying the crap out of them. And putting them a little on edge by telling each and every one “I love you.” Harry loved his captors as ell.

“They didn’t mistreat me at all, it was one of those situations where I fell in love with my captors,” He’d said. He was released in a couple of days. Come to think about it, the constant barrage of “I love you” might be a tactic that the CIA could consider when wanting to break down someone’s resistance. Lauren, Caroline, Walter and I were sure as hell ready to let him go after a bit of it.

It’s difficult to listen to someone repeatedly croon brotherly love to a guy with an M16 who’s main job is pushing little old guys in beduin garb around. After leaving the first checkpoint, we wandered through the now mostly deserted streets of Hebron’s marketplace. For he last four years, constant limits on travel had killed the market, located just behind settler houses. The market’s streets were shielded with metal grates and if you look up as you walk, you can see why. Strewn across the them are empty cartons, food scraps, empty packages, and other things collectively referred to as trash. Before the metal grates went up, Hebron’s market streets were becoming the landfill for garbage tossed out the back windows of settler homes.


We reached another checkpoint after the market streets. This one was different than the last, which blocked the entire road. It was in a courtyard full of rubble and decimated, buildings. The small metal bunker was behind a mess of barbed wire strewn across the entrance. As harry and the MPT guys played violin and talked at length with soldiers, about every five minutes or so little old men would emerge from a nearby ally across the courtyard in attempts to cross it and head into the city. Each time, a young soldier would briskly walk over to these guys, knock them back yell at them and push them back into the ally.

“They are not allowed to pass here, yet they keep on trying,” the soldier had told me with a little irritation.

“Where are they going?” I asked. “Maybe it’s just the shortest way.”

“They are not allowed to pass here,” he said.

“It’s not like there’s anyone here,” I said. “don’t you think they’re just going to some old guy hangout over there. Is it really going to bother anyone that they’re just heading to the barber shop or something over here?”

“He’s not allowed through,” the soldier said. Then, another little old man emerged from the ally, and he took off after him.

I asked the other guard there if he thought the little old guys were dangerous. “Maybe he’ll have a knife or something,” the guard said. It’s hard to imagine what one of these guys hobbling on a cane would be able to do to one of these soldiers, in their twenties, buried under helmets, kevlar and automatic rifles, but they obviously didn’t feel safe around them.

We wanted to leave. Harry and the MPT guys wanted to talk. Asa was trying to get us to the mosque to finish his tour of occupied Hebron. Something in the conversation had finally trigged the religious twitch in one of the soldiers. Maybe it was one of their “we’re all god’s children” references or something. He snapped that “This is our land, we’ve always been here.” On further inquiry, always goes back to the origins of the earth, sometime between 5,500 and 6,000 years ago. At last, a religo-settler perspective. To be fair, let’s explore it:

Upon setting up a presence in wholly Palestinian Hebron, following the Six-Day War and driving the surrounding area into economic and physical ruin, settlers in Hebron have adopted the notion and stated it public that it’s their intention to drive all Palestinians out of Hebron. But that won’t be enough. The Hebron settlers tend to abide by a not-too-popular religious/political viewpoint that calls for the greatest of Greater Israel, with borders encompassing the Sinai, part of northern Egypt including Cairo, all of Jordan, a big chunk of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq. It’s amazing George W. Bush didn’t include the Hebron settlers as part of his “Coalition of the Willing.”

“To me it’s child abuse,” Rann had said the night before the trip there. “They are training their kids to think that this is their holy right and to see everyone around them as dangerous.”

Maybe that’s why Baruch Goldstein busted through the doors of the mosque in ‘94 and mowed down 29 people in the back as they knelt in prayer. While settlers might be outnumbered and feel the need to stay behind their own private army, this is still the largest mass murder to date in Hebron. As a result, the temple and the mosque are carefully segregated by walls and metal grates over windows. Security searches, carried out by Israeli soldiers have been been made more severe for all those entering the mosque, but with settlers now blocked form getting in, it’s only the Palestinians who are getting searched. Getting in requires three stops and searches, at each one, the soldiers are in view of the last checkpoint.

“Why are we doing this,” Caroline asked one of the soldiers. “You just saw us get searched by those people right there.”

It’s a strange sort of sharing that goes on in between the mosque and the settlers. Maybe one of the few places settlers and Palestinians get close to one another without some sort of an altercation. There’s a window with metal bars in the mosque, just passed the shrine to Adam’s footprint facing the Cenotaph to Abraham (or ibrihim, if you prefer). Across that room, there’s another barred window from the settler section, next to the synagogue. With an expanse of maybe ten feet between them, these Muslims and Jews pass by their own narrow windows and peer in briefly in brief shared reverence without exchange and move on.

Harry seemed to be able to fill the gap, though. Upon leaving this greatly revered Muslim holy site, the retired priest abruptly grasped a a young Jewish soldier by the shoulder and exclaimed “I prayed for you in there.”

The settlement buildings scattered through the middle of Hebron are no where near the chopping block when Israel talks about some of it’s West Bank pullback. So long as a group of 600 people and their own fighting force numbering in the thousands gets to control just about every aspect of the lives of 200,000 people, it’s hard to see what sort of advances could ever take place in the Bush “road map” thingy, a document that claims to have a “Palestinian state” in mind. The Hebron settlers — with their religious zeal to expel Palestinians as just a first step — are as great an obstacle to actual coexistence as the wall is. Who would stand for this in their own homes? Why should these people put up with it?

Tags: , , ,
Subscribe to comments Comment | Trackback |  

Browse Timeline


Related Entries




Site Map | Spam Poison | Archives | Contact | About | Creative Commonsω DREW3000. Now with more Open Sourciness.