From The Inside Looking Out

Report #6 - School Daze in Hebron (Director's Cut) Part 1

I wouldn't have left Hebron the last day in August except for the inconvenient fact that Sis' and my visas were on the verge of expiring. My reluctance to leave was because the day following would mark the start of school in Hebron. And, the new school year would undoubtedly mean the inevitable resumption of almost daily fright and exasperation for too many students, faculty and school administrators.

Too true.

Each E-mailed weekly update or more urgent news alert from CPT Hebron, which we downloaded each day during our speaking tour in the Middle West and East Coast was a persistent reminder that our misgivings were being more than justified. It was not pleasant to read about the dreary story being told anew over there: the frequent disruptions of classes by soldiers barging into playgrounds and classrooms, the terrorizing of students and adults inside and outside the schools with tear gas and percussion grenades, and even more lethal weapons, as well as the constant capricious shut-downs by Israeli soldiers and Border Police. All the foregoing, the reports confirmed, were once again the infuriating rule rather than the exception. And I wasn't there to help.

So it was with great relief my first morning back in the Old City that I joined colleagues on their early morning patrol of schools in CPT's monitoring area near the historic Ibrahimi Mosque (and synagogue). Four of the schools are lined up almost side by side along a single block fifty yards down a sloping street from a major checkpoint, which separates Israel's tightly guarded mosque special security zone from the rest of Hebron.

As we made the half mile walk from the CPT apartment to the schools, my partner Kristin Anderson, told me that expectations for the week was an increase in military harassment, because the upcoming Friday night and Saturday Jewish Sabbath would mark an important event on the settler calendar: the reading of the section of the Torah detailing the story of Abraham's coming to Hebron. An influx of ecstatic religious and secular ultra nationalist Orthodox Jews was expected-several thousand perhaps-to celebrate the event. In anticipation, the Israeli Army the day before had slapped a curfew back on the area, which had been enjoying a couple of week's relief from that debilitating indignity.

Because religious occasions with nationalist overtones have in the past inspired settler rampages in the Old City, the days preceding have always meant not only heightened military alert but also an inevitable testy edginess by the sizeable Israeli Army and Border Police contingents charged with maintaining order in H2 (the sector of the city awarded to Israel by the Wye River accords).

Less than 500 settler residents-guarded by 2,000 soldiers and border policemen-live in H2. They have been increasing the size of their tiny enclave for more than two decades relentlessly, stealthily and illegally, and only reluctantly sharing it-to put it mildly-with the 30,000 Palestinians still hanging on there.

So, when we showed up in front of the Hebron Boys Basic School gate , we were not surprised to find that the two soldiers usually manning the check point had sallied forth down the hill and were quietly telling the Headmaster to shut down. No reason was given: just shut down.

However, as students kept arriving at the gate and even though the soldiers' presence was potentially intimidating, they made no move to physically stop the kids from going in. It appeared that maybe CPT's presence might help the Headmaster successfully get the two seemingly relatively diffident soldiers to relent.

But shortly before the 8 AM bell rang, after being defied for about a half hour, one made a call into his portable phone, and as the bell began clanging, an Army Jeep-as if on cue-rolled up. An officer leaned out the window and tersely told the Headmaster that he had ten minutes to clear the school, As the angry and equally frustrated Headmaster told his teachers to send the students home, he complained, "This is fifteenth time since school starts that the soldiers do this! How can we teach? How can students learn?" (A few days later, after checking his attendance book, he scrupulously told me that actually his school had been shut down only fourteen times since the start of school.)

The next day, as the school was ending, CPT received a frantic call from the Headmistress of the only girl's school on the block. "Please come," she said. "Soldiers come into school and take one of our girls." As colleague Christine Caton and I hurried down the hill from the checkpoint to the school we came across a boy, maybe six or seven years old, crying in the street, and through his tears asking for help. We guessed that he was the girl's brother; and when we met the Headmistress inside the school, it turned out we were right.

The girl, the Headmistress told us, is a fourteen year old, and was being detained by the soldiers at the check point. But, when we had passed through it on the way down the hill to the school, we hadn't seen anyone being held there. So we guessed that when the soldiers saw us coming they hid her.

Sure enough, as we walked back to the check point-the tearful boy following about 25 yards behind-we saw the soldier grab a girl they clearly had been detaining and push her into an empty room in a building alongside the checkpoint. The little boy pointed to the girl and himself, and then stopped-as if waiting for something good to happen.

When we asked the soldiers why they had come into the school, ordered the girl out of class, and then tried to hide her from us, they told us it was none of our business. Then they led her-defiantly it seemed-out of their hideaway room and over to the other side of the street where one of the soldiers ordered her to stand facing the wall.

When we walked over and started talking to her, we were told to go away. We said that not going away is our job. The soldier snapped back, "You will not talk to her, and you will stay over there," pointing to a spot about fifty feet up the street from the girl.

Then it became a waiting game, perhaps simply to frustrate our attempt to free the girl and show us who was boss. In the interim I started taking pictures. The expected happened. One of the soldiers yelled, "No pictures. No pictures."

I shuttered the camera, not wanting to take the chance of having my memory card confiscated and crushed. (It has happened before.) But that reminded me of a potential option with respect to visual documentation, which I hoped might help free the girl. "I'll call TIPH on my cell phone," I told Christine, which I did noisily so that the soldiers could hear my summons.

TIPH (Temporary International Presence Hebron), is a much larger (and officially recognized by all sides) observation presence in Hebron. A creation of the Oslo II Accords, its 42 man and woman operational staff is recruited from several partnering European nations and Turkey. TIPH observers patrol the city, usually in twos, documenting and filing reports on potential or actual violent incidents, or just those that are simply humiliating or inconveniencing. TIPH reports are not made public; but they are filed with the governments of the organizing coalition, as well as Israel and the Palestinian National Authority.

With respect to picture taking, when the agreement forming TIPH was hammered out, both still and motion picture photography was specifically permitted. Nevertheless, Israeli soldiers don't like their too often scandalous and over-the-top bullying, belittling, and often rough violent behavior caught live on TIPH's very candid cameras, so those involved very often will try to bluff the observers into stopping their picture taking by telling them that the Army has the right to order them to shut down.

The observers, of course, know better. So they keep right on shooting, even while the soldiers (who know better than to physically attempt to prevent them) are screaming angrily at them to stop. I've seen many a normally soft spoken and always polite TIPH observer go at it jaw-to-jaw with soldiers or officers-much like umpires digging in their heels at the in-your-face attempts at intimidation by baseball players-and never have seen one back down yet. What usually happens is that the soldiers, knowing darn well what the truth about picture taking is, finally back down and off.

Just the fact that the incident is being caught on tape can sometimes cause the bullying (or whatever) to wind down and stop. That is what happened in the case of the girl we were trying to help. The next day, as I was on patrol in front of her school, she shyly walked up to me and said softly, "Thank you."

But those two incidents were minor compared to what took place two days later on the Jewish Sabbath marking Abraham's coming to Hebron.

(To Be Continued)