No Country for Old Men

Haim Bajayo is a living witness to history. Born in 1935 in Hebron to a Jewish family, Bajayo witnessed how a neighborhood where Jews and Muslims lived together peacefully was transformed by racist nationalism into a cultural battlefield.

Hebron today is within the borders of the occupied West Bank, and is home to some 86 Jewish settler families living amongst tens of thousands of Palestinians. These families, unlike Bajayo’s and other indigenous Jews, moved in following Israel’s 1967 land grab, and brought with them plenty of IDF soldiers to ensure their safety and the Palestinian’s misery: the IDF significantly restricts Palestinian freedom of movement, have indiscriminately fired on civilians, and protect settlers when they engage in communal violence against Arabs.

The attitude of the settlers sits in direct contrast with many local Jews from Bajayo’s generation. Case in point, on Wednesday, a left wing Knesset delegation was greeted with an insane barrage of irrational hatred:

One man was accused of drinking Jewish blood because he was drinking a can of Arabic coke. The settlers shouted ‘This is not Palestine, it is not Arab land and you’d better get used to it!’.

American survivors of the relatively tame Cola Wars are probably surprised that this simple brand choice conjures up such intense feelings, since by our standards, Mountain Dew is ‘extreme’. Perhaps their racist mentality can best be summed up by a slight modification of a familiar slogan: ‘Do the Jew’.

If Haim Bajayo had a slogan, it would probably simply be ‘coexistence’, a sentiment he is literally taking to the grave. This week, the 75 year old Jew visited with Hebron Mayor Khalid Al-Useili to ask permission to be buried in the city’s Muslim cemetery, to honor the neighborly spirit he remembers from times past, and from the stories he was told by his grandfather. Bajayo explained:

 “I want to be buried in Hebron. I won’t go to a Jewish cemetery at any rate, because it’s under the settlers’ control. I’m requesting a modest burial spot in a Muslim cemetery.”

Contrast this with the attitude of the Israeli government, which is uprooting an ancient Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem to ironically make way for the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance. To make matters worse, this week a complaint was filed alleging negligent excavations of the bodies. Perhaps instead of a museum they should be building tolerance's graveyard.

This week was not Bajayo’s first visit with a Mayor of Hebron. In 1977, as settler encroachment into the area was increasing, he met with then-Mayor Fahd Al-Qawasmi to turn over his family's long-held property:

“As long as [the settlers] are in Hebron, there is no chance of reaching an agreement” to end the six-decade conflict, he told the mayor. “I don’t want any of my property or my house back as long as Palestinian homes and lands are not returned. The same day the Palestinians regain what was taken from them in 1948, I’ll come to you and say, ‘I have a house … registered in the real estate department.’” 

 Elsewhere, the issue of deeds past haunts Israel like a phantom. Palestinian refugees who possessed property within Israel’s pre-67 borders are consistently denied their ownership by the courts, while settlers aiming their sights at Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood are successfully claiming ownership of houses previously occupied by Jews during Ottoman rule in the 1800s. Compared to the other precedent often utilized, the Jewish kingdom circa 200 BC, this seems almost reasonable, but not quite. It’s complicated: Palestinian refugees from 48 were settled there by Jordan and UNRWA in the 50s, before a shady ruling in the 70s granted the neighborhood to Jews, who then in the 80s signed an agreement with the Palestinian residents establishing them as protected tenants.

Since last summer, a settler-affiliated company, Nahalat Shimon, with the help of Jerusalem’s Mayor, have been evicting these long-term residents to make way for religious extremists who refer to the neighborhood as Shimon Hatzaddik. And you thought hipster gentrification was obnoxious.

One hopeful development, however, is the rise of a new movement of Jews protesting weekly in favor of protecting Sheikh Jarrah’s embattled residents. Unlike those from Haim Bajayo’s generation who can remember a peaceful past, most of these new protesters are young, and many are religious. In America, the perception is often that it is the religious Jews who are preventing peace, while the secular Israelis are more reasonable, more tolerant. As activist Amos Goldberg explains, this is a misconception:

“…we have to remember that the greatest wrongs against the Palestinians were perpetrated not by the settlers, but by secular nationalism. To pin the blame on the settlers is a type of internal cleansing process that you find in Israeliness.”

For other religious activists, the settler movement represents a perverse version of Judaism they need to counter by representing true Jewish values. Ben Sasson explains:

“From my point of view, being in Sheikh Jarrah is the full and supreme realization of my religious existence… When I don’t show up on a Friday, I feel as though I have not put on tefillin in the morning. When I am here, I am fighting against the expulsion of people who will become refugees for a second time, but also against the settlers − because they are trying to expel me from the boundaries of legitimacy. They are double enemies: They are trying to plunder the homes of the Palestinians and, by contrast of course, also the religion to whose God I pray.

…If you take away their Uzis and kick out the police, sit us down and remove the media − they will leave with their tail between their legs. In the Middle Ages disputations were held between learned Jews and Christians. Sometimes the Jews won, in which case they had to escape to avoid being killed. If you bring [the settlers] for a disputation now, I will win. All the Jewish sources are on my side. Their whole activity is twisted. What they are doing is desecration of God’s name, in the most explicit way.

…Ezekiel 33: ‘O mortal, those who live in these ruins in the Land of Israel … and you shed blood, yet you expect to possess the land!’”

 Religious and secular activists have come under attack from both the state and right wing thugs, and polls show the increased mainstreaming of racist views in Israeli society at large, but regardless they have been persistent in demanding human rights and dignity for their Palestinian neighbors. Sadly, the very question of whether they will have any Palestinians as neighbors is now at hand.