Israel/Palestine

THE ZEALOTS

On a late winter's day, a slight, blue-eyed boy rode a bicycle down an empty street in the militant Jewish ghetto of Hebron, in the West Bank. Clipped to the boy's hair was a green kipa, crocheted and oversized in the style of the settlers. A damp wind was blowing, and a bank of clouds hovered over the city, but the boy was jacketless. Scattered piles of rubble and garbage, flecked with broken glass, lined the road.

The buildings along what the Jews call King David Street and the Arabs call Martyrdom Street are tightly packed and decaying. The Jews live mainly on the east side of the street, and the Arabs live to the west. When I visited, much of the area was under curfew. The Jewish zone, where some Arabs live, is "sterile," a soldier told me: only Arabs who hold the proper pass are allowed to enter. The soldier, a paratrooper in the Israeli Army's Fighting Pioneer Youth Brigade, was guarding Hadassah House, a three-story building where several families of settlers live. A brigade of soldiers, coils of razor wire, and hundreds of concrete barriers stand between Hebron's fewer than eight hundred Jewish settlers and its hundred and fifty thousand Arab residents.

Across from Hadassah House is a school for Arab girls, called Cordoba, after the once-Muslim Spanish city, On one of its doors someone had drawn a blue Star of David. On another door a yellowing bumper sticker read, "Dr. Goldstein Cures the Ills of Israel." The reference is to Barch Goldstein, a physician from Brooklyn, who, in 1994, killed twenty-nine Muslims when they were praying in the Tomb of the Patriarchs, just down the road. Across the closed door of a Palestinian shop someone had written, in English, "Arabs are Sand Niggers."

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/05/31/among-the-settlers