Battle Lines Harden at the Heart of Old Hebron

By Luke Baker and Sean Maguire

HEBRON, West Bank (Reuters) – Nidal Awawi’s narrow house in the heart of Hebron’s old city is surrounded on three sides by Jewish settlers. The neighbors see one another but they do not speak, silent in their enmity.

The three-story stone house, in the corner of an Arab souk, has been in the family since 1887, Awawi says, and used to be at the heart of Hebron’s Palestinian community, the largest in the West Bank with around 150,000 residents.

Now the house, where Awawi lives with his wife and eight children, stands alone on the front-line of a standoff between the settlers, who number around 500, and the Palestinians.

What happens here hinges on Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s "realignment" plan, under which he intends to dismantle isolated settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and consolidate settlers in large, well-protected blocs.

Olmert wants to revive peace talks before enacting the plan, but there seems little hope of that for now.

It is not yet clear whether the Jews living in central Hebron, among the most hardline of the 240,000 settlers in the West Bank, will be among those uprooted. Hebron, a flashpoint for the conflict, is holy to both Jews and Muslims.

For the moment, the government is adopting a tactical silence on the potentially inflammatory issue.

Whatever decision is made will enrage one community: either the settlers will be up in arms at being removed, or the Palestinians will be angry that they are staying.

As they wait, both sides are waging a strategic war; the settlers are trying to take over more homes as they expand their community and the local Palestinian authorities are moving more Arabs into the broken center of the old city.

SHOWDOWN

Awawi, 36, took over the family home 10 years ago. The first time his Jewish neighbors, who live about two feet from his bedroom, offered him money to move out was in 1998, he says.

"They said they would pay me $1 million, but I refused," he said, sitting on a balcony, where he has put up wire-caging to stop settlers throwing stones at him and his family. Two more offers, accompanied Awawi says by death threats, were made and refused. Some of his Arab neighbors did move out.

His house is joined to a newly built settlers’ building, where Israeli soldiers patrol the roof, sheltering from the sun under camouflage netting.

For centuries, Muslims and Jews lived side-by-side in relative harmony in Hebron, site of the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the place where Abraham and his wife Sarah are buried and a monument that is holy to Jews, Muslims and Christians.

That peace was shattered in August 1929, when the Arabs in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine went on a rampage, killing 67 Jews and wounding scores more.

The British removed the remaining Jews from Hebron. It was only after 1967, when Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan in the Middle East war, that they began moving back.

PULLOUT PLAN

David Wilder, an American-born Jew with a pager and mobile phone on one hip and a pistol on the other, is a spokesman for the hard core of settlers in old Hebron.

"They don’t want us here — there are a lot of people who want us out — but this is our land," says Wilder, 52, who moved here in 1984 with his wife and seven children.

"We’re like a microcosm of the state of Israel — we’re surrounded by Arabs who don’t want us here."

The presence of the settlers, protected by an estimated 1,500 Israeli soldiers who try to prevent almost daily clashes with Palestinians throwing stones, has turned the center of the ancient city into a dead zone.

The dusty streets, some lined by concrete blast walls, are lifeless at midday, the shops shuttered, their fronts sprayed with anti-Arab and anti-Jewish graffiti.

Many young settlers carry M16 assault rifles on their backs. Some Palestinians carry concealed knives or stones.

Wilder is not convinced they will be forced out.

"I think we’ve got a reasonably good chance of stopping Olmert from going through with this," he says. For now, the settlers are pressing their case in talks with the government but Wilder did not rule out stronger tactics.

Miryam Grabovsky, 26, a settler in Hebron for five years, has been removed from two homes after courts ruled she was occupying them illegally. But she is determined to stay.

"We won’t leave, no one will make us leave by ourselves," she said. "If someone touches a lion cub, there is nothing that will stop the cub’s mother from attacking," she says when asked if the settlers might use violence to defend themselves.

Emad Hamdan, who runs a project to renovate houses in the old city and move Arab families back, fears any forced pullout of settlers will erupt into violence. And he is worried the settlers could create an enclave by linking four isolated settlements.

"These settlers are a strange body, they have to get out, but I think it will only be done by force," he says.

Awawi stoically believes time will favor the Arabs.

He cites the example of Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish settler in Hebron who in 1994 shot and killed 29 Muslims as they prayed at the Tomb of the Patriarchs. Worshipers overwhelmed him in the midst of the attack and beat him to death.

"Even if they have guns, who protects them?" asks Awawi, who spent seven years in Israeli jails for fighting the occupation. "Goldstein killed 29 of us but he ended up dead. The one who has the right is strong."