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TechnoratiBlack paint now covers the words "Death to Arabs" on the door of Nidal Jabari's grocery store in Hebron. The Palestinian says he hardly gets any business these days because of settler harassment.
In the plaza in front of the high-walled Ibrahimi mosque over Abraham's tomb, the silence is shattered by dueling loudspeakers — Israeli nationalist songs vs. the muezzin calling the Muslim faithful to prayer five times a day.
A strictly enforced timetable sets separate hours for Jews and Muslims to pray at the tomb.
Whole streets along the way to the tomb have been cleared of Palestinian stores, leading to what the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem calls the "economic collapse of the center of Hebron."
The decline has been most marked in the eight years since the Palestinians unleashed their second uprising against Israel. Of the hundreds of Israelis killed in suicide bombings and other attacks, 31 were Hebron settlers. During that time, 195 Palestinians died in Hebron fighting while curfews confined the Arab population to their homes in the Israeli-controlled section of the city for months at a time. Thousands simply moved away.
Some shops and businesses were closed by army order, others because of extensive restrictions on Palestinian movement.
"If a customer is stopped by the Israeli army he will not shop there," said Hisham Sharabati, a human rights worker. "It's an indirect message that says 'don't come back to this area.'"
The Israeli government maintains it has had no choice but to adopt stern measures to protect the settlers from militant violence.
The settlers used to enjoy broad public sympathy. Viewed as pioneers, they were allowed to operate with impunity for decades. But now they sense that this sympathy is waning as Israelis increasingly are seeking ways to disentangle themselves from the West Bank and end the war. And this in turn is driving the hard-liners to greater extremes.
After the army demolished an illegal settlement outpost near the city, settlers attacked an Israeli policeman, vandalized a Muslim cemetery and slashed the tires of two dozen Arab-owned cars. What most irked Israelis was a settler declaring on the radio that the troops involved in dismantling the outpost deserved the same fate as Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held captive for more than two years by Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip.
Nowhere are tensions more acute than at a four-story, unfinished house where 14 Jewish families live under round-the-clock army protection. Twenty months later they are still there. The Defense Ministry has decided they must go, but evacuation deadlines haven't been met.
The settlers have named it House of Peace, but clash frequently with their neighbors. On a recent day, settlers carrying automatic rifles walked in and out past a photo of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the Jewish militant leader assassinated by a Muslim extremist in New York in 1990.
"When a Jew bows his head in the Land of Israel and doesn't believe that the country belongs to us, the Arabs feel wonderful and they hurt us," says Ruth Hizmi, a mother of seven and grandmother of six who lives in the House of Peace.
"When they feel that Jews are strong ... they go away." Continue »
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