Loading ...What Can We Personally Do to Get Lasting Peace Between Palestine and Israel?
I am by nature an optimist. When I visited Palestine recently with a cross-party group of MPs, I went with the hope that the two-state solution was still a possibility, but now I’m not so sure.
On our second day, we reached the town of Hebron in the south of Palestine just as the sun was setting. It is a beautiful place, built from the soft, buttery rock that surrounds it. The sense of history is palpable, it feels like the biblical town you saw in Sunday afternoon films when you were little – there are even donkeys!
As we drove, we passed checkpoints, but we were never stopped. As we reached the centre it dawned on me that something was amiss. It was like a ghost town and where were all the people? Right in the middle of Hebron there is an illegal Israeli settlement of approximately 35 families. To protect the families, the Israeli Defence Force have effectively made the surrounding area a no-go zone for the native Palestinians. (I later found out that our minibus had Israeli plates, that’s why we weren’t stopped at the checkpoints.)
The area the settlers had chosen was right in the middle of the old town, next to the main market street. Formerly, this was the bustling heart, now all of the shops are boarded up and the market long gone. But there are still Palestinians living above the shops. Overnight, their front doors were welded shut so they could not gain access the street. I know this to be true as our guide was the Sergeant who supervised the work. To get out, the residents have to climb up on to their roof, clamber onto a neighbours’ roof and exit onto another street. Imagine doing this is you are elderly, are carrying food or have a baby in a buggy! All this to protect the settlers who illegally decided to occupy their town.
Source: www.huffingtonpost.co.uk