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!’.