‘This Road is for Jews Only’
Video:
Israeli soldier assaults child playing on Jews-only road
themselves. A soldier steals a 4 year
old girl’s bike and throws it away into the bushes because she shouldn’t be on
a ‘Jews only’ road. This is Zionism,
what a Jewish state is like in practice.
Settlement is colonisation and that means those you conquer and occupy
are not quite human beings – in the words of Deputy Defence Minister Eli Dahan,
they are beasts. Indeed Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu when outlining the idea of a fence around the whole of the State of
Israel said it was to ‘keep the wild beasts out’. Enjoy and then maybe we can get a few
questions from Zionists like the Jewish Labour Movement in the Labour Party as
to whether this too is part of their national identity.
Eight-year-old Anwar Burqan was playing with her young sister and brothers
in al-Ibrahimi Street, near their home in Hebron’s al-Salaima
neighborhood on 25 July when their games were interrupted by Israel’s pervasive
military occupation.
The video above, filmed by local resident Raed Abu Ramileh and published
by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, shows some of what happened.
According to Anwar’s account, she was riding a bicycle belonging to one of
her brothers when an Israeli Border Police combatant ran over, stepped on the
bicycle and took it away from her.
The child can be seen raising her arm in apparent reflexive self-defense.
As can be heard in the video, the combatant shouts at her to “go home” and
the child bursts into tears. The rifle-bearing soldier then throws the bicycle
into the bushes.
“Only Jews walk here”
As cruel as this assault
– threatening behavior that puts another person in fear of immediate physical
harm – is, it is no random act, but rather enforcement of Israel’s segregation
policy in the occupied West Bank city.
As B’Tselem states, in 2012, Israeli occupation forces erected a chain-link
fence along al-Ibrahimi street, a major thoroughfare, “leaving the main road on
one side of the fence, and a narrow, unpaved and rough pedestrian path on the
other.”
Palestinians were prohibited from using the main, paved street and forced to
use the narrow unpaved section.
B’Tselem has published videos showing Israeli occupation forces implementing
a strict Jews-only policy on the main road.
“This side’s for Jews and that’s for Arabs,” a soldier tells field
researchers Musa Abu Hashhash and Manal al-Ja’bri in this 2013 video:
In this video from last year, an occupation soldier asks a Palestinian field
researcher, “Are you an Arab?”
The soldier then tells him, “Only Jews walk here.”
B’Tselem notes that Israel lifted the segregation policy after 2013, but has
reimposed it with vigor since January 2015.
Taking over the Old City
The segregation causes particular hardship to Anwar’s father, Amer Burqan, who
uses a wheelchair.
The separate-and-unequal access to al-Ibrahimi Street is part of Israel’s
broader policy of segregation in Hebron’s Old City, imposed for the benefit of
Israeli settlers ever since Baruch Goldstein’s massacre
of 29 Palestinians in the city’s Ibrahimi mosque in February 1994.
As part of this policy, Hebron was separated into two zones: “H1” and “H2.”
H1 is nominally administered by the Palestinian Authority and is home to
more than 120,000 Palestinians.
H2, under full Israeli military rule, includes Hebron’s historic Old City as
well as the Ibrahimi mosque.
Israeli occupation forces severely restrict the movement of more than 30,000
Palestinians in H2 while Israeli settlers move about freely under army
protection.
Thousands of Palestinian households and businesses have been driven out
of the area.
Settlers have aggressively seized Palestinian properties in the Old City,
leaving much of the city center a ghost
town.
As the video at the top of this articles shows, no Palestinian, not even
children playing near their homes, are spared the everyday violence of Israel’s
settler-colonialism and apartheid.
