Breaking the Silence in Hebron

Our bus, full of internationals and Israelis, drove through the paved roads of the Jewish Settlement of Qiryat Arba on our way to Hebron. We were all there for a tour conducted by a group of former Israeli soldiers who are now active in speaking out about the horrors of occupation. Their organization, aptly named “Breaking the Silence,” has been giving tours of Hebron for the past four years. That day, however, we never made it into Hebron.

Hebron is the only city in the West Bank with a Jewish settlement in its center. It consists of two areas: H1, home to around 120,000 Palestinians and under the control of the Palestinian Authority, and H2, where 30,000 Palestinians remain under the control of the Israeli military who protect the 800 settler inhabitants. At the center of the old city of Hebron is the tomb of the patriarchs where Abraham and his descendants are believed to be buried, and is thus holy to all three Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. H2 remains the source of much tension and conflict between the settlers and Palestinians who live there.

We could not make our destination because of the large crowd of settlers who blocked our bus from entering. At first, it was a small crowd of children but soon grew to include women and older men, along with the leaders of the extremists who live there. Several police were there to escort us (Breaking the silence had just won a decision in the High Court to continue conducting their tours with the cooperation of the local authorities), but they were not enough. At one point, our tour guides got out of the bus to speak with the police and document the situation for the court. It was a circus. Our guides were filming the settlers and the police response, or lack thereof, and the settlers were filming us while the police filmed everyone. The children tried to block Yehuda, one of our guides, from filming but he was crafty and tall enough to evade them. One of the men had a bullhorn and began preaching to us in Hebrew, but I didn’t get what he was saying. The police couldn’t move them out of the way because they are not allowed to physically contact the children, or the babies whom some of the settlers placed in carriages in front of the bus.

These are the most extreme of the settlers. They are ideological settlers who want the Palestinians to be expunged from the land they believe was given to them by God. For the EAs in Hebron, most of their time is spent protecting Palestinians from settler harassment, including walking the children of Cordoba school to and from school each morning in an effort to dissuade the settler children from throwing stones and attacking them, although not always successfully. Most settlers, on the other hand, are not like this. They are economic settlers who are living in the West Bank because of the subsidized housing provided by the Israeli government, and they do not present a physical threat to the Palestinians.

In the end, after waiting over two hours, we were told we could drive a few hundred meters into the old city of Hebron, but our guides declined because they didn’t want to give the authorities the satisfaction of allowing us to conduct a partial tour, which would not have been beneficial when they bring their case to court, yet again.

But the day was not totally lost. We went with Yehuda to the South Hebron hills and heard from a family who have had there olive trees uprooted and wells poisoned and have courageously stayed their ground in the face of consistent settler harassment. And we got to hear Yehuda, a three year veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces who spent over a year stationed inside H2, give his testimony of what he saw. We heard about the IDF’s policy of constant presence through things like incursions, with or without intelligence of a threat, into homes so as to make sure the Palestinian communities fear them. We heard about the IDF using Palestinians as human shields to inspect suspicious objects on the side of the road thought to be bombs, or to approach homes of suspected militants. And we heard about the strategy of urban warfare whereby the military blows holes through the homes of Palestinians so they don’t have to walk through the streets where they might be vulnerable to attacks. Finally, we heard why he helped start “Breaking the Silence.” He said he was deeply disturbed at how what he saw and did became normalized; how soldiers lose their humanity by slowly and consistently crossing the lines of morality; how decent human beings become monsters, with serious mental health consequences after leaving service; and how all of this can happen without even noticing it.

Of course, those serving in the IDF are not unique. Decent people involved in military actions around the world experience the same thing to be sure. The question is can something be done to end the suffering of the Palestinians and the young IDF soldiers who become dehumanized because of occupation. I personally think that something can and must be done to end the cycle of violence and dehumanization. Thankfully, people like Yehuda are forcing Israeli society and soldiers to question what occupation does to them. They have been to over 1,000 classrooms telling children about the ugly side of occupation, a contrast to the heroic images they are inundated with from an early age. They are doing important work and their story needs to be heard.