Students Boycott Apartheid

Things that go bump in the night, and other Hebron stories

Jul 4, 2009 Uncategorized | Author: meg

There were a great deal of things about Hebron that were maddening and sickening to witness. The boulders on grates above Palestinian streets thrown by Israeli settlers from apartments above, the security cameras buzzing from atop street corners hinting at the repressive surveillance which props up the apartheid regime, the racist anti-Arab graffiti scrawled in Hebrew along the city’s walls, and the young, arrogant and bored Israeli settlers who operate with virtual impunity to racially profile and harass the residents of Hebron– all of these realities were deeply disturbing in their own right. So too were the testimonies we received from Hashem A. about the violence enacted upon his family (including a child, then aged 9, whose teeth were smashed in by an Israeli woman) by right-wing ideological settlers in his neighborhood of Tel Rumeida, and the videos we watched of marauding settlers destroying gates and homes and attacking the Palestinian residents of Hebron under the watchful eye (and with the active support) of the Israeli army. The trees around Hashem’s house, all cut, the windows with metal grates to prevent further smashing, and the heaps of garbage lobbed down from settlers living above his home–all of these images remain burned in my brain, as does the text of a sticker that Baruch Marzel, leader of the right wing extremist settler Kach movement (and Hashem’s neighbor), purportedly has hanging in his home: “I’ve killed an Arab, and you?”
But none of these stories–horrific manifestations of the cruel depths of Zionist racism–struck me as deeply as Hashem and his wife Nasreen’s gentle patience and palpable love for their children, and the trembling indignation in Hashem’s voice as he told us about them. The children have ongoing monthly psychological counseling with Doctors Without Borders to manage the stress of the violence  which has been enacted upon them. They can’t sleep with the light out, he said, and they require the windows to be securely locked and shuttered in order to acquire what approximates a good night’s rest. I cannot imagine the horror of being a parent faced with the task of allaying a sleepless, frightened child’s fears with the knowledge that the things that bring them terror are not nightmares, but flesh-and-blood fanatics whose violence is governmentally sanctioned. The soothing reply of “but it’s not real” rings hollow in this case. The luxury of such a response remains out of reach for those living under Israeli occupation and apartheid.