Saturday, July 19, 2014

Settler tour

Soon after my ISM friends and I reached Hebron, there was something called the "settler tour". What basically happens is that a settler tour group walks through the Palestinian markets, escorted by some twenty or more armed soldiers.

Palestinians must make way, and their passage is blocked by the settlers and army escorting them. Some stalls need to be temporarily blocked, so the settlers can have their tour.

This leads to a lot of resentment and anger and humiliation.

During the tour, the adults bring their children along also, and this is what gets me very angry. Many of the Israeli settler children, seeing the violence that is meted out against Palestinians by the army and sometimes also their parents, also begin to act violently, like threatening people and attacking Palestinian kids on their way to school. They begin to act out what they see the adults who they look up to, doing. During the rare occasions when some Palestinians use deadly violence against settlers, their children sometimes die also. It is terrible when kids are taught to hate and abuse others, and placed in harm's way by adults who bring them to a place like Hebron, to "settle" it due to a gross misinterpretation of a religion that forbids abusing other human beings.

Of course, Palestinian kids suffer even more. Daily, they face checkpoints and can be abused at any time by the army and the settlers. If a settler or soldier is attacked or harmed by Palestinians, the Israeli Army and police will intervene. When a Palestinian is attacked by settlers, usually nothing is done. Often, the abusers are the soldiers themselves. Unlike a family of Israeli settlers who emigrates to Hebron and can leave when they choose to, the Palestinians living there for the most part have no choice.


May there one day be justice in Hebron and all of the Holy Land, so Palestinians and Israelis can live together in justice and dignity and peace.

Some of the soldiers who are escorting the settlers. The people in red caps are CPT members. Due to deportations and denial of entry to activists by Israel, I will not show their faces.

The settlers continuing their tour. At every step, armed soldiers guard them and surround them.

Soldiers providing a human wall for the tour as it stops. The Palestinian vendor behind them is temporarily blocked from his customers.

Palestinians are forced to make way for the tour.


After being finished, the settlers are taken back to the army base that is protecting them.
Having satisfactorily disrupted the Palestinian marketplace for an hour or so, many of the soldiers go back inside also.

At least there was no violence during the tour today, and no one got physically hurt. 




Maciej Moskwa, whom I just met today. Maciej is a freelance Polish photojournalist, working for Testigo Documentary. He is an extremely courageous person, with a passion for justice. Maciej's work often takes him to parts of the world where there is a lot of suffering and war, and he writes about what he sees. His stories and photos often do not get accepted by mainstream newspapers, who unfortunately aren't very interested in the things he writes about, so to make ends meet he works taking wedding photos. Maciej was recently in Syria, where he witnessed and reported about atrocities and crimes against civilians, from both sides in the conflict.

If you want to read more of his work, I would like to refer you to:
http://www.testigo.pl/stories/by/maciej-moskwa/



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