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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element" dir="ltr"> <font
size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/15/in-hebron-israel-removes-the-last-restraint-on-its-settlers-reign-of-terror/">https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/15/in-hebron-israel-removes-the-last-restraint-on-its-settlers-reign-of-terror/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">In Hebron, Israel Removes the Last
Restraint on Its Settlers’ Reign of Terror</h1>
<span class="post_author_intro">by</span> <span
class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/author/jonathan-cook/"
rel="nofollow">Jonathan Cook</a> - February 15, 2019</span></div>
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<p><em>Nazareth.</em></p>
<p>You might imagine that a report by a multinational
observer force documenting a 20-year reign of terror by
Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers against
Palestinians, in a city under occupation, would provoke
condemnation from European and US politicians.</p>
<p>But you would be wrong. The leaking in December of the
report on conditions in the city of Hebron, home to
200,000 Palestinians, barely caused a ripple.</p>
<p>About 40,000 separate cases of abuse had been quietly
recorded since 1997 by dozens of monitors from Sweden,
Norway, Switzerland, Italy and Turkey. Some incidents
constituted war crimes.</p>
<p>Exposure of the confidential report has now provided
the pretext for Israeli prime minister Benjamin
Netanyahu to expel the international observers. He
shuttered their mission in Hebron this month, in
apparent violation of Israel’s obligations under the
25-year-old Oslo peace accords.</p>
<p>Israel hopes once again to draw a veil over its violent
colonisation of the heart of the West Bank’s largest
Palestinian city. The process of clearing tens of
thousands of inhabitants from central Hebron is already
well advanced.</p>
<p>Any chance of rousing the international community into
even minimal protest was stamped out by the US last
week. It blocked a draft resolution at the United
Nations Security Council expressing “regret” at Israel’s
decision, and on Friday added that ending the mandate of
the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH)
was an “internal matter” for Israel.</p>
<p>The TIPH was established in 1997 after a diplomatic
protocol split the city into two zones, controlled
separately by Israel and a Palestinian Authority created
by the Oslo accords.</p>
<p>The “temporary” in its name was a reference to the
expected five-year duration of the Oslo process. The
need for TIPH, most assumed, would vanish when Israel
ended the occupation and a Palestinian state was built
in its place.</p>
<p>While Oslo put the PA formally in charge of densely
populated regions of the occupied territories, Israel
was effectively given a free hand in Hebron to entrench
its belligerent hold on Palestinian life.</p>
<p>Several hundred extremist Jewish settlers have
gradually expanded their illegal enclave in the city
centre, backed by more than 1,000 Israeli soldiers. Many
Palestinian residents have been forced out while the
rest are all but imprisoned in their homes.</p>
<p>TIPH faced an impossible task from the outset: to
“maintain normal life” for Hebron’s Palestinians in the
face of Israel’s structural violence.</p>
<p>Until the report was leaked, its documentation of
Israel’s takeover of Hebron and the settlers’ violent
attacks had remained private, shared only among the
states participating in the task force.</p>
<p>However, the presence of observers did curb the
settlers’ worst excesses, helping Palestinian children
get to school unharmed and allowing their parents to
venture out to work and shop. That assistance is now at
an end.</p>
<p>Hebron has been a magnet for extremist settlers because
it includes a site revered in Judaism: the reputed
burial plot of Abraham, father to the three main
monotheistic religions.</p>
<p>But to the settlers’ disgruntlement, Hebron became
central to Muslim worship centuries ago, with the
Ibrahimi mosque established at the site.</p>
<p>Israel’s policy has been gradually to prise away the
Palestinians’ hold on the mosque, as well the urban
space around it. Half of the building has been
restricted to Jewish prayer, but in practice the entire
site is under Israeli military control.</p>
<p>As the TIPH report notes, Palestinian Muslims must now
pass through several checkpoints to reach the mosque and
are subjected to invasive body searches. The muezzin’s
call to prayer is regularly silenced to avoid disturbing
Jews.</p>
<p>Faced with these pressures, according to TIPH, the
number of Palestinians praying there has dropped by half
over the past 15 years.</p>
<p>In Hebron, as at Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, a Muslim
holy site is treated solely as an obstacle – one that
must be removed so that Israel can assert exclusive
sovereignty over all of the Palestinians’ former
homeland.</p>
<p>A forerunner of TIPH was set up in 1994, shortly after
Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli army doctor, entered the
Ibrahimi mosque and shot more than 150 Muslims at
prayer, killing 29. Israeli soldiers aided Goldstein,
inadvertently or otherwise, by barring the worshippers’
escape while they were being sprayed with bullets.</p>
<p>The massacre should have provided the opportunity for
Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s prime minister of the time, to
banish Hebron’s settlers and ensure the Oslo process
remained on track. Instead he put the Palestinian
population under prolonged curfew.</p>
<p>That curfew never really ended. It became the basis of
an apartheid policy that has endlessly indulged Jewish
settlers as they harass and abuse their Palestinian
neighbours.</p>
<p>Israel’s hope is that most will get the message and
leave.</p>
<p>With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in power
for a decade, more settlers are moving in, driving out
Palestinians. Today Hebron’s old market, once the
commercial hub of the southern West Bank, is a ghost
town, and Palestinians are too terrified to enter large
sections of their own city.</p>
<p>TIPH’s report concluded that, far from guaranteeing
“normal life”, Israel had made Hebron more divided and
dangerous for Palestinians than ever before.</p>
<p>In 2016 another army medic, Elor Azaria, used his rifle
to shoot in the head a prone and badly wounded
Palestinian youth. Unlike Goldstein’s massacre, the
incident was caught on video.</p>
<p>Israelis barely cared until Azaria was arrested. Then
large sections of the public, joined by politicians,
rallied to his cause, hailing him a hero.</p>
<p>Despite doing very little publicly, TIPH’s presence in
Hebron had served as some kind of restraint on the
settlers and soldiers. Now the fear is that there will
be more Azarias.</p>
<p>Palestinians rightly suspect that the expulsion of the
observer force is the latest move in efforts by Israel
and the US to weaken mechanisms for protecting
Palestinian human rights.</p>
<p>Mr Netanyahu has incited against local and
international human rights organisations constantly,
accusing them of being foreign agents and making it ever
harder for them to operate effectively.</p>
<p>And last year US President Donald Trump cut all aid to
UNRWA, the United Nations’ refugee agency, which plays a
vital role in caring for Palestinians and upholding
their right to return to their former lands.</p>
<p>Not only are the institutions Palestinians rely on for
support being dismembered but so now are the
organisations that record the crimes Israel has been
committing.</p>
<p>That, Israel hopes, will ensure that an international
observer post which has long had no teeth will soon will
soon lose its sight too as Israel begins a process of
annexing the most prized areas of the West Bank – with
Hebron top of the list.</p>
<p><em>A version of this article first appeared in the
National, Abu Dhabi.</em></p>
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