Remember when I was in the West Bank?

Ok, now this is really old, but its been sitting on Jared's USB port for a while, only to now make it to the internets. It's from Palestine, so its kinda serious kids.

Some time ago Jared took me to Hebron, where he says is one of the most interesting (and terrible) places to see the occupation. I don’t know a whole lot about the history of Hebron, but essentially it’s a Palestinian city that has had parts of it taken over by settlers. This is especially interesting (and especially fucked up) because the settlement is right in the middle of a functioning Palestinian municipality, and involved driving many Palestinian families out of the buildings that they lived and worked in.

We took a service to Hebron straight from Bethlehem – a kind of a cross between a bus and a taxi. First we walked through a bustling Palestinian city, which is one of the commercial centers of the West Bank. We walked through some smaller, more narrow streets in the market, and arrived at a checkpoint. We showed them our passports, got through, and voila – we were in “H2”, the settler-controlled area. One very contested place is a mosque that half of has been taken over and turned into a synagogue, I think? It’s the site of something that has to do with Abraham (Jared says it’s the Tomb of the Patriarchs, where Abraham was buried), so its holy for Muslims, Jews and Christians, and now is this totally bizarrely divided building, with a checkpoint in between the two entrances. It was both Ramadan and Shabbat, so we couldn’t go into either one.
Then we walked around for a while in the city that is now also a settlement. Apparently this settlement is a particularly right-wing group of settlers, and it was one of the strangest places I’ve ever been. Most settlements, I understand (I’ve never been), are constructed to feel like real cities, or suburbs. Actually a lot of settlements from the outside look a lot like urban sprawl. But this was right in the middle of a town. It felt deserted, although there were a few small groups of people walking around. There were soldiers all over, who periodically stopped us to look at our passports (and on one occasion to talk jovially to me about how we all have family in Chicago – really, soldier?).

But this had no feel of a place where anyone lived at all, and the most striking thing about it was all of the boarded up buildings that looked like they used to be shops and that now seem like no one lives there, or that no one would want to live there. Especially in comparison to the markets and shops and streets of the Palestinian part of Hebron, which were bustling, and which felt like part of a real society. H2 just didn’t feel like a real place that children grow up and people eat dinner in.

The other thing that was profoundly creepy about it was that a lot of these boarded up shops and buildings had the Star of David spray-painted on them. To me, this was so instantly reminiscent of the terrible history of anti-Semitism, and so the use of that symbol to claim stolen land (designated as such by international law), was disturbing on a really deep level. Whatever your views are on the occupation in general, this, to me, was such a striking misuse of a symbol that is meaningful to so many people, and a symbol that has been horribly used against those people to whom it is the most meaningful. Every time I saw it I had a little jolt of shock – for what it made me think of from the past, and for what it meant there.