Day 3: Keep right
We’re posting blogs written by Greenbelt director Paul Northup during the Greenbelt trip to Israel and Palestine last week. Today, finding warm welcomes in a divided Hebron…
In the old town of Hebron there is a road that evokes an unsavoury resonance in the onlooker. Perhaps especially a European one. It’s a road that is divided by a weighty concrete barrier. On the right-hand side, the Palestinian residents of the old town can walk until the checkpoint crossing point, before making their way off into their neighbourhood to the left. The rest, and widest part, of the road is for the Jewish settlers to drive to and from their illegal settlements – right in the heart of the city, built literally on top of the Palestinian old city and soukh.
It is difficult to explain how sick to the stomach it made me feel to see this apartheid at work and to wander through these deserted streets, with their shopfronts welded shut by the Israeli Defence Force (the IDF). This once vibrant market town in the southern West Bank is being choked to death, constricted on every side, from within and without, by fanatical idealogical ‘settlers’.
And yet, on this very road, right opposite the IDF checkpoint at the foot of the hill coming down from the Tomb of the Patriarchs and across from an Israeli cafe, quite deliberately blasting out klezmer music, we sat and drank tea and coffee with a Palestinian family who refuse to give up their shop there. Even though they cannot walk out freely onto the road in front of their shop, they continue to appeal to tourists coming to visit Hebron to browse and chat. Their welcome was warm. Their shop was packed with good things to buy: quality local craft at great prices. Their smiles were infectious.
Theirs is an act of non-violent resistance. In a city where the incoming Jews have a strategy of making life so intolerable that the resident Hebronites begin to leave, here is a family that, despite all the odds, is remaining, strong and dignified.
All over the West Bank we encountered such bravery and beauty in the face of ugliness and injustice. And although made to ‘keep right’ on the road, it is the Palestinians who are keeping right in terms of their struggle and resistance against occupation.
Find out more about Palestine by coming along to a free event in London on 23 April with Jeff Halper of ICAHD. Click here »
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