IDA AUDEH
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March/April 2023, pp. 47-48
Waging Peace
DURING THE LAST weekend in January, Palestinian human rights defender Issa Amro spoke to audiences at Busboys and Poets and Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ in Washington, DC. Amro, a 42-year-old engineer and activist in Hebron, is a cofounder of the Youth Against Settlements organization, which works with Hebron’s residents to resist the violence of the Israeli settlers living in their midst.
Hebron’s Jewish settlements spawned two of the more openly fascist members of the new Israeli government. Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the Religious Zionist party, is finance minister and oversees the Civil Administration, which approves settlement building and controls Palestinian lives; Itamar Ben-Gvir, an Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party leader who was once convicted of racism, is now national security minister, with responsibility for the police and an enormous budget at his disposal. Amro, who is committed to nonviolent resistance and has been arrested too many times to count, has had interactions with both. “These are dark days in Palestine and especially in Hebron,” he told the Busboys and Poets audience on Jan. 27.
Activist Miko Peled introduced Amro and began by inviting him to describe Hebron. It is clear that he loves the city (“the most beautiful Palestinian city”) and its residents. In the old city of Hebron (a UNESCO World Heritage site), residents must place nets over their doorways to catch the garbage that settlers on upper floors throw down on them regularly. The physical and psychological terrorism are unrelenting.
The perpetrator of the 1994 massacre of 29 Palestinians in Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque, American-Israeli doctor Baruch Goldstein, is considered a hero by the new Knesset members. About two years after the massacre, the Hebron Redeployment Agreement was signed, which split Hebron into two sections: H-1, to be under the control of the Palestinian Authority, and H-2 (the old city of Hebron), under the control of Israel. About 20,000 Palestinians and a few hundred Israeli settlers live in H-2.
Living under such conditions is clearly exhausting, not to mention scary. “You don’t feel safe in your own home, and you certainly don’t feel that your family members are safe,” Amro said. Israel established 22 checkpoints in an area less than one square kilometer, as well as 100 movement barriers. They also make it impossible to get essential services. Since an ambulance requires a permit to reach Palestinians in the old city, you can only hope that you never have a medical emergency. Many Palestinians have been unable to live under these conditions, and they’ve moved away.
“The settlers don’t physically throw you out of your house, but they make it impossible for you to stay,” Amro noted. But that could change: since the recent Israeli elections, emboldened settlers run through Hebron chanting, “burn Hebron.” Throughout Palestine, in fact, settlers go to Palestinian neighborhoods with specific messages of doom: “We will bring a second Nakba” and “we will do to you more than what they did to you in 1948, we will finish the job.”
Amro explained that the settlers are working to remove the Palestinian identity of Hebron through such things as pressuring residents to leave and changing place names to Hebrew names and putting street signs in blue and white, the colors of the Israeli flag. Shuhada Street, the main commercial thoroughfare, is closed to Palestinians.
Amro said the acknowledgment that Israel is an apartheid state by human rights organizations was late in coming, considering that the evidence has been in plain sight for a long time: “We live under Israeli military law, and the Israelis living next to us live under Israeli civilian law,” he noted. “This is the precise definition of apartheid: two sets of laws in the same area for different people.”
The situation in Hebron is what is in store for all Palestinians in the future, Amro tells us. He sees Hebron as a microcosm of the Israeli occupation. “We are trying to counter the settler strategy to evacuate the Palestinians. We are trying to create an infrastructure for the Palestinians to remain.”
He expressed gratitude to the audience for their activism and insisted that visits from internationals break the sense of isolation that Hebron residents sometimes experience, while also giving them hope.
Although Amro was reluctant to tell the audience what to do, he rattled off a list of creative options that people could consider to express their solidarity. He urged the audience to “make fighting the occupation part of your daily routine. Every day, think about what you can do to fight the occupation and make it costly.” Media campaigns are helpful; letters to newspaper editors and elected officials are helpful. Educate taxpayers that they are giving $3.8 billion a year to fascists like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. “And we want you to protect the human rights defenders back home. We need that from you. And we need you not to lose hope. We are all in the same fight.”
The entire inspiring talk, which includes an account of how a group of determined activists snatched a Palestinian home in Tel Rumaida out of the grip of settlers who had long been eyeing it, can be viewed at: <https://bit.ly/40cuVfQ>.
—Ida Audeh
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