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Tuesday 2 December 2008

‘You get your film and go home’

Because he had a point, the young Israeli. We had arrived in clamorous, divided Hebron, on the West Bank, to shoot a film for Channel 4 about the iniquities suffered by the indigenous Palestinians, who constitute about 99.5 per cent of the population of this rather lovely old city. A city which, unfortunately, contains what is said to be the tombs of the Patriarchs — Abraham and his missus, Sarah, and their kids Isaac, Rebekah, Leah and Chardonnay. OK, I made the last one up. Tombs of some significance, then, to the Orthodox Jews as well as the Muslims.

And so, here was an iniquity: Orthodox Jewish settlers have taken over a bunch of residences on the hilltops and the Israeli soldiers are stationed, in some force, to protect them. This means a life of unending misery and hassle for the Palestinians who are required to traipse through a multitude of checkpoints every day, sometimes being detained for three or four hours at a stretch, just to get from home to their place of work, or to take the kids to school.

What the settlers have done is certainly illegal under international law and in some cases, one should assume, illegal under Israeli law. So, 120,000 Arab people are subjected to enormous disruption and, through the presence of the army, unequivocal oppression in order to protect the rights — or, more properly, wrongs — of 500 or so religious zealots who act with impunity. Who was it said that the true test of a democracy is how its minorities are treated? Israel treats its tiny minority of Orthodox Jewish settlers in Hebron with enormous understanding and indulgence, regardless of how often they break the law or attack Palestinian kids going to school. Must be a good democracy, then.

And so we’re here, on this scrubby patch of land, to witness a telegenic iniquity, a microcosm of the larger Hebron iniquity. Apparently, some Palestinians were building a large house on this hill when, late one night, some 200 settlers swooped down and took it over, evicting the Palestinians, who have since erected a tent to one side of the dwelling with the Israeli soldiers in between (although not of course, ideologically speaking, really in the middle). Both sides claim legal rights to the land and property, and I have had sufficient dealings with lawyers in the last four years not to delve too deeply into the rectitude of each claim. Just to say that in a normal world, when you buy a house, you exchange contracts and send round a removal van when the last people have left; you don’t creep along in the dead of night with 198 of your friends armed with baseball bats. Also, you usually move in when the house is finished, rather than when there’s no roof.

More articles from: Rod Liddle | this section

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