Hebron Story

Here's a link to an excerpt of my latest article, on Hebron. I covered the left and right-wing tourism to the city, which is 18 km southeast of Jerusalem in the West Bank.

Hebron is a strange place - it's a major Palestinian city, pop. 166,000 with a Jewish settlement of 1,000 right inside the city center. Since the Second Intifada, Jews and Palestinians have been forbidden from going inside each other's sections of the city, but there are thousands of Palestinian families who live in the Jewish section and can't walk, drive or open stores on parts of the street.

The left-wing groups, such as Breaking the Silence, emphasize the restrictions on the Palestinians. The settlers point out the fact that the Palestinians are terrorists who shoot at them and make it impossible to live in the city. They gloss over the fact that the tiny Jewish community in Hebron has disrupted the main North-South traffic artery, caused the closure of the central marketplace of the city and made a large permanent IDF presence necessary.

For the story, I went to Hebron three times - once with each group, and once alone. It was nearly impossible to hear the left-wing tour because the settlers protest it in force. When we first got into town, the settlers were so hostile that one woman stood in the women's public toilet and blocked off one of the stalls, just to make us wait longer to use the restroom.

On the right-wing tour I kept noticing men in sidelocks covered in dust pushing wheelbarrows, because the settlers believe in "Jewish Labor" - as in, not employing any Arabs.

And when I went alone, I snapped pictures for a few minutes before two police officers demanded to see my identity and looked at me warily, saying "I know your face, you've been here a lot before," despite the fact that that day was only my second time in town.

This was my first political story this year - as opposed to environmental - and it really sucked the lifeblood out of me. I didn't wash dishes or do laundry for about two weeks. But there was something very exciting about talking to Orit Struk, the head of the Jewish settlement's legal department, and then hanging up and getting on the phone with Yehuda Shaul, one of the most outspoken critics of Israeli policy in Hebron. This is really the magic of being a journalist - you can have access to people who never talk to one another, and you can get a thorough understanding by listening to both sides.