CPTnet
26 November 2007
HEBRON BLOG: "Even if Arabs had human rights--"
by Jessica Frederick
[Note: The following entry from Frederick's blog has been edited. The
original can be found at <http://ordinary-folks.blogspot.com>]
One of my teammates printed off "An open letter to Secretary of State Dr.
Condoleezza Rice," signed by representatives of the Israeli settler
community here in Hebron. The settlers here live right in the midst of--in
some places, literally on top of--Palestinian neighborhoods. They tend to be
the most ideologically radical of settlers in the occupied Palestinian
territory. Which means . . . well, lots of things. They openly state they
want to clear Hebron of its Palestinian inhabitants and make it an
exclusively Jewish city. Currently, there are somewhere between 400-800
settlers (depending on what source one consults) living in a city of
approximately 120,000 [Palestinians].
Anyway, back to this letter. I'm thinking I might post it later (right now
I only have a hard copy), but one sentence in the letter jumped out at me. I
have read the sentence read several times, mostly out of incredulity:
"Even if Arabs have personal human rights, they have never had any
collective national rights in this country."
"Even if Arabs have personal human rights"? I'm hoping desperately that this
is simply a poorly chosen word, that the authors really meant, "Even
though." (Though, frankly, I would still disagree with the statement, even
if this is what the authors really meant.)
But, from this letter and the interactions my teammates and I have had with
the settlers, I'm skeptical that this was a slip of the tongue. Earlier in
this letter, the authors write that "[t]he Arabs . . . never contributed a
thing to [Israel's] development. Under Arab rule, most of the country was
unpopulated and desolate . . ."
Near one of the schools in Hebron, there is settler graffiti that says, "Gas
the Arabs," and "Arabs are sand nigg**s."
"Even if the Arabs have personal human rights." That phrase knocks the
mental "wind" out of me, like someone hit me too hard in the chest.
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