Hebron, City of Terror
by Ran HaCohen

Israeli "security analysts" describe the Palestinian city of Hebron as a "city of terror". This is true: Israel’s state terrorism is nowhere as brutal. If you wish to see ethnic cleansing at work, Hebron is a good instance. (...)

So far, the junta’s policy has proven quite effective. Driven away by economic strangulation and fear of settlers’ violence, the population of 12.000 Palestinians who inhabited Hebron’s Old City has dwindled to 5.000 souls since the division of the city in 1997. As for H1 in its entirety, Israeli Channel 1 estimated last week that 20.000 out of its 40.000 Palestinians left their homes. The camera showed rows of Palestinian houses with windows left broken in spite of the cold winter, a clear evidence for a successful policy of ethnic cleansing. Deserted houses are then taken over by settlers, who get the chance to harass the next row of Palestinian neighbours. Depicting Hebron as a purely Jewish city, the maps of Israel’s Foreign Office are thus not just a distortion of reality: they express both a desire and an actual policy of ethnic cleansing, which is carried out with horrendous efficacy in this terrorised Palestinian city. PS: I am well aware of standard Israeli propaganda, so anti-Palestinian readers need not bother to remind me of the 67 Jews massacred in Hebron back in 1929. May they rest in peace. Their children and grandchildren (none of whom is among the present Hebron settlers) have repeatedly condemned the atrocities carried out by the settlers, who claim to be heirs to the massacred, but in fact desecrate their very memory by their crimes.
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