Occupation 101: Hebron from JD Lasica on Vimeo.
This is the second of two parts on my trip through the West Bank. It also appears on The Huffington Post. See part 1: Documentary short: A drive through the occupied West Bank.
Here’s a 22-minute video of life in Hebron, the history-rich ancient city in the West Bank that is now a source of conflict between Palestinians and Israeli settlers, with Israeli security forces placed squarely in the middle.
I took out an afternoon during the weeklong Traveling Geeks trip in April 2008 to visit the West Bank. I was not able to produce it earlier for various reasons, but it’s particularly timely now with the conflict in Gaza bringing to public attention once again the treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories.
Serving as tour guide was Mikhael Manekin, co-founder of Breaking the Silence, a human rights group made up of former Israeli soldiers who participated in the occupation. Accompanying Mikhael and me was Naomi Schacter, director of development of Shatil.
The documentary short offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse into the obstacles that many Palestinians face in their day-to-day lives under Israeli occupation.
Highlights
Some highlights from the piece:
• The video shows Palestinian houses where the residents have not been allowed to leave through the front doors of their own houses for the past seven years. They’ve had to crawl through the roof or a hole in the back walls.
• During the military curfew imposed during the second intifada, soliders in Manekin’s Golani unit were ordered to kill any Palestinians who were out in the street between 8 at night and 6 in the morning. A few soldiers have come forward to discuss the murder, torture and harassment of Palestinian civilians.
• At all times during our visit, the Israeli soldiers were friendly and convivial. I was fascinated to learn that the unit that patrols Hebron — the 50th Batallion of the Nahal Brigade — are made up of soldiers with the greatest sympathy to Palestinians and who come from socialist or semi-socialist youth movements that generally oppose the occupation.
• Manekin and his colleague, Breaking the Silence executive director Yehuda Shaeul, are routinely subjected to harassment by by the activist settlers of Hebron. Manekin says in the piece: “I’ve actually been attacked as a soldier and as an activist, by settlers when the father actually yells, ‘Only kids under 14 can attack.’ Under Israeli law, youths under 14 cannot be held accountable for their actions in a court of law. On this afternoon, Shaeul and his group of German members of Parliament were attacked by rock-throwing settlers. (At night, Manekin added, the settlers come with sledgehammers to ruin Palestinian buildings.)
• The Breaking the Silence organization took off after a public exhibition of photos that soldiers took during their occupation of Hebron and the occupied territories, leading the veterans to begin collecting testimonials from other soldiers. “We wanted our parents to know about” what the soldiers had been subjected to, Manekin says.
This work of citizen journalism serves to throw a spotlight on what’s happening; fashioning a solution is much more complicated. I set off for this highly unusual personal tour (Manekin usually takes busloads of 30 Israelis, not a lone independent U.S. journalist) with just a Samsung palmcorder, with no lights, no wind guard and no spare battery pack, so I captured as much as I could in 90 minutes of footage, edited down to:
Part 1: A drive through the occupied territories (19 minutes)
On Vimeo (Flash)
On Ourmedia (H. 264 QuickTime)
Part 2: Occupation 101: Hebron (22 minutes)
On Vimeo (embedded above)
On Ourmedia (H.264 QuickTime)
Additional background
Breaking the Silence has collected thousands of testimonies from soldiers who serve and have served in the occupied territories from the second intifada through today. Through these testimonies, the organization seeks to add a much needed perspective on the moral repercussions of serving in the territories. As part of the process of raising awareness, Breaking the Silence conducts regular guided tours to the city of Hebron, which gives a combination of historical, legal and political information regarding the reality in Hebron and most importantly, a true glimpse into the implications of the occupation on people’s lives.
Mikhael Manekin of Breaking the Silence was born in New York and immigrated to Israel at the age of 12 with his family. He was recruited in November 1998 to the Israel Defense Forces and served in the infantry (Golani Brigade) as a platoon commander in the West Bank. He spent a year and a half securing check-points all over the West Bank as lieutenant. In 2002, Manekin was discharged from the army and left Israel briefly to work with HIV/AIDS patients in South Africa. Manekin received his bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies and History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Related:
• Flickr photo set of our afternoon in Hebron.
• Part 1 of this series, providing context on the trip to the West Bank
• TPMCafe: Hamas is growing in power–in the West Bank, too–directly as a result of this grotesquerie [in Hebron]. It is absurd to think of Gaza as a separate matter.
Note: This will be my last citizen journalism post on this blog, as I’m splitting it off into three parts in the next two weeks: Socialmedia.biz to cover social media, Socialbrite.org to cover causes, and jdlasica.com to cover citizen journalism and everything else that falls outside the scope of the other two blogs.
Also see part 1: Documentary short: A drive through the occupied West Bank.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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