Andrew O’Hagan writes from Bethlehem
London Review of Books
When we reached Hebron, we found a ghost town where no one would have blinked to see tumbleweed roll past the checkpoints that tell Palestinians whether they can walk on the left or the right of the street. On several occasions, settlers came jogging past; they were out for a run with the person at the front carrying an AK-47, and each jogger bearing the menacing grimace of Liberty Valance. Most of the shops in Hebron have been closed down and the general atmosphere is of a people being harassed, obscured, denied and cancelled. Broken masonry and piles of litter seem to line every street, as if a siege mentality expresses itself in a resistance to public orderliness. A net had been strung up over a dark alleyway leading from one checkpoint to another, and it was now filled with the international debris of big-brand fizzy drinks and sweets and chain stores. A Palestinian who lived nearby explained that they’d had to put the net up ‘because the Israelis who live up there were dropping things down on the heads of people passing.’
VIDEO: Jerusalem camera catches brutal attack by Jewish teens on Arab youths
By Uri Blau, Ha’aretz, 28 May 2008
Dozens of Jewish teens were caught on camera outside a Jerusalem mall carrying out a brutal attack on two Arab youths on Holocaust Remembrance Day earlier this month.
Some two weeks ago, indictments were filed against 11 youths, eight of them minors, suspected of having perpetrated the attack in the Pisgat Ze’ev neighborhood. According to the indictment, the boys responded to a message on the ICQ instant messaging internet program calling for “Jewish blood” to “put an end to Arabs running around the Pisga.” According to the indictment, the Jewish teens gathered outside the local shopping center armed with knives, sticks and bats and attacked two Arab teens, aged 16 and 18, from the nearby Shuafat refugee camp.