It’s Racist Of Israel Not To Let Us Ban Jews From The Other 3% Of Hebron

by Subhi Sh’hada

Hebron, September 3 – I need not inform the reader that my hometown bears the distinction of one of the most radicalized locations in the region, if not the world. A hardcore group of several hundred Jews, with military protection, has settled in the immediate vicinity of the Ibrahimi Mosque, where various patriarchs are buried. Our hometown boasts my own clan, one of the most extreme Hamas-affiliated groups in the land. A larger settlement of radical Jews resides on the outskirts of the city, but 97% of the city itself lies under the administrative aegis of the Palestinian Authority and Jews may not enter. As human rights advocates continue to note, this racist curtailment of rights cannot continue: we must rid the entire city of Jews, not just the vast majority that was already ethnically cleansed.

Palestinians have endured decades of occupation, all with the ostensible purpose of ensuring freedom of worship for a bunch of Jews. But that freedom of worship came from nowhere – where was Israel when the Ottomans and others before them banned Jews altogether from the Tomb of the Patriarchs? This sudden Israeli interest in protecting its people reeks of something more suspicious, and we in Hebron have long called it a mere pretext to violate our right to a Jew-free city. Our ancestors killed, pillaged, and raped until all the Jews left in 1929 – what now gives them the right to be racist and undo that effort?

All the more galling is the brazenness with which the Israeli military shields these radicals from our righteous wrath. They cleared the vendors from Sh’hada Street into a spacious, modernized shopping center a short distance away, and now prevent Palestinian vendors from returning to man their run-down shops, all in the name of keeping “terrorists” away from the Jewish settlers. But it is the Jews who are terrorists, defiling sacred Islamic land with their Talmudic rituals such as praying and just generally not dying enough in repeated massacres. The war criminals prevent us from correcting that historical injustice and pile wrongdoing on top of wrongdoing.

The only equitable solution to the racist segregation plaguing the city of Hebron, as many of us have been stating all along, is the removal of the Jews. Only thus can we remedy the intolerable Apartheid system that now allows Jews to walk around freely in the 3% of the city they control, and restricts Palestinians to a mere 97% of it.

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