Hebron’s Old City has one main street.  It connects the Ibrahimi Mosque to Bab il Balideyya, an open square next to the Beit Romano settlement and military base.  Along this cobblestone road, narrower streets branch off, meandering deeper into the Old City, intersecting with other less trafficked alleys.  At night, the Old City is dark, with only the main road lit, and there, only in scattered places.

Undeterred by heavily armed border police at the Qitoun checkpoint that CPTers monitor because schoolchildren and teachers must walk through it, the teenager who sells ka'ak (a chewy sesame bread) argues with soldiers every morning until they finally unlock the gate to the checkpoint and let him and his cart through. On Martin Luther King Day, however, they were ignoring him, so he finally walked back over to the gate, picked up a rock, broke the padlock, and pushed his cart through. The Border Police pushed him back and locked the gate. Another day, another time, they could have beaten him up or arrested him as has happened many times to young men his age in Hebron, and he must have known that, but he was literally determined to go about his business.

On the night of 11 January 2012, the Israeli military demolished the outpost settlement that overlooks the neighborhood of al-Bowereh on the northeastern edge of al-Khalil/Hebron. Often in the past, when the Israeli military has demolished outposts (including this particular outpost), settlers have attacked Palestinian civilians, their homes, and animals in what Israelis refer to as “price tag” attacks.  In recent months, settlers have also attacked Israeli soldiers tasked with carrying out the dismantling of outpost settlements, the building of which is illegal under both Israeli and international law.

On 12 January 2012 at 5:20pm, Israeli soldiers forcibly entered the Zaru family home near the Qitoun checkpoint in al-Khalil (Hebron), assaulting the mother and two sons. The invasion was a result of an earlier encounter between the soldiers and Anas, the older of the sons, age 18 and developmentally disabled. That morning, Anas was coming home through the Qitoun checkpoint after refilling the cooking gas tank for the household. When he tried to enter the door of the checkpoint corridor, the soldiers closed it. He knocked repeatedly on the door until the soldiers shouted at him, “Why are you knocking?”

“CPT!  CPT!  Come, come!  The soldiers have a man!”  Her voice startled me.  Jean, Rosie, and I had been on afternoon patrol, but I had lagged behind to look at a few shops in Hebron’s Old City.  Though I did not know the woman requesting my presence, she knew who I was because of my red hat and gray vest bearing the Christian Peacemaker Team logo.  I was alone, inexperienced in the field. 

 On the night of 28 November, a Palestinian man threw two Molotov cocktails at the Israeli military checkpoint in Hebron’s Qitoun neighborhood. In response, the military and border police fired tear gas, entered houses in the neighborhood, and forced about fifty men to stand outside in the cold for almost exactly two hours while they checked their IDs. The military arrested one Palestinian man and detained three more after they allowed the residents of the neighborhood to return to their homes.

On Tuesday, 15 November 2011, six Palestinians stood at the bus stop outside the settlements of Psagot and Migron, and boarded a bus used by settlers to travel to Jerusalem.  When CPT’s Hebron team heard about the action on the internet, they sent three members to accompany the six Freedom Riders, as the activists referred to themselves.

Although no law explicitly forbids Palestinians from boarding the Israeli buses in the West Bank, racial and ethnic discrimination and the fact that Palestinians are not allowed to travel to Jerusalem where the Central Bus Station is, create a separate system of transportation that is off-limits to the Palestinians, but open to Israelis.

A friend sent me an email with this subject heading: "History Is Knocking, Stop The Machine!  Create A New World!"

The first paragraph hooked me: 

 There comes a time when efforts to avoid the truth begin to fail, when one can no longer go about daily life and pretend that all is okay.  If you are like most of us, you are experiencing this.  There comes a time when one can no longer shut out the atrocities of U.S. foreign and military policy: trade agreements that destroy farming; mass unemployment; especially among communities of color; illegal detention and torture; increasing drone attacks resulting in mass civilian deaths; and once again a President who lies the United States into another war for oil and bankers.

 I immediately signed up to be at Freedom Plaza in Washington DC on October 6.  

 At approximately 10:00 a.m. on 11 October 2011, members of CPT’s Hebron team received a call telling them that the Israeli military would not allow teachers to pass through the gate at the side of the checkpoint 56 on Duboyya Street—which it had previously agreed to do—but had to pass through the metal detector.  Soldiers provided no justification for the change in policy.

Some of the children returned from the school seeking information as to why teachers were not in school and clashes at the checkpoint followed, which resulted in seven children being taken to the hospital.

Abu Jamal is head of a well-known family in Halhul, to the north of Al-Khalil.  It is a beautiful hilltop town, surrounded by fields and lovely gardens.  Like other cities in the Palestinian Authority-administered Area A, its population has grown from some 3,000 in the sixties to 30,000 now.  Because of this growth, the infrastructure also has needed to expand.  For the last few years, the town has needed to open a new school each year.

Living east of the green line border, Abu Jamal and his sons, like many other people, may no longer legally work in Israel.  They invested in greenhouses, cultivated eggplants and tomatoes, and were generally successful at first.  When I asked him how his farming is going, he shrugged his shoulders, and his face showed immediately that things are becoming worse.  “We don’t have the water we need,” he said.  “Just three hours of water access per week is not enough.  Buying water in tanks is too expensive.  We can’t do anything.”