Peacekeeper leaving West Bank town of Hebron: "Cleansing is being carried out"

The ancient West Bank town of Hebron has been a site of religious violence for quite a while, stretching back well before Israel's creation. But now the chief of an international peacekeeping force, who is now leaving his post, has said that Jewish settlers have systematically been driving Palestinians out of the section of Hebron around where the settlers live. The town has several hundred settlers in the old downtown area and around the holy Tomb of the Patriarchs. Security control in the town was divided between Israelis and Palestinians during the Oslo period. The TIPH--Temporary International Presence in Hebron-- force mainly observes what is going on, but can't intervene. It is a very strange gap in coexistence here--the antithesis of any sort of democracy.

The TIPH chief acknowledged the huge number of suicide bombers from here, but he also observed that the settlers had attacked the international observers hundreds of times. Expect this story to turn up on FOX News right away. This story jumped out at me for its sheer horror...

"The activity of the settlers and the army in the H-2 area of Hebron is creating an irreversible situation. In a sense, cleansing is being carried out. In other words, if the situation continues for another few years, the result will be that no Palestinians will remain there. It is a miracle they have managed to remain there until now."

This view of the situation in the Israeli-controlled area of Hebron comes from Jan Kristensen, the former head of the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH), who completed his one-year term of office last week. Kristensen, 58, is a former lieutenant colonel in the Norwegian army and has also held various positions in UNIFIL (the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon).

H-2, the 4.3 square kilometers of Hebron assigned to Israeli control by the Hebron Agreement, contains all of the city's Jewish settlers. When the intifada began, it had 35,000 Palestinian residents. Kristensen had no exact figures for how many Palestinians have since left but he said, "more and more people are leaving the area and it is effectively being emptied. The settlers' activities, which are aimed at causing the Palestinians to leave, and the army's activities, which impose severe restrictions, create an irreversible reality. Anyone whose economic situation permits him to do so, leaves.

"There are roadblocks in the area all the time. Once there were more than 100 days of continuous curfew, with only brief interruptions. The markets are closed, the roads are closed, and if you're a Palestinian who does not appear on the lists, you can't enter. The settlers go out almost every night and attack those who live near them. They break windows, cause damage and effectively force the Palestinians to leave the area.

"I don't see how this situation can change, and I see no possibility that the IDF will once again open the area and enable the Palestinians in it to lead normal lives. Personally, I don't believe it is possible for normal life to exist in Hebron between the communities, even if there are agreements between the leaders."

TIPH, originally established after Baruch Goldstein murdered 29 Muslim worshipers in Hebron in 1994, is comprised of volunteer observers from six countries - Norway, which runs the operation, Italy, Denmark, Turkey, Sweden and Switzerland. Its annual budget is about $2 million, not including the observers' salaries, which are paid directly by their governments.

The 71 unarmed observers patrol the city under an agreement between Israel, the Palestinians and the other six nations concerned - the UN is not involved. Almost no one in Hebron - not Israelis, Palestinians nor international agencies - believe TIPH has done much good, yet inertia has caused its mandate to be renewed every three months. For its European sponsors, its main value lies in creating a precedent for international observers in the territories. It was fear of such a precedent that made Israel insist that neither the UN nor any other international agency be involved.

Over the last year, TIPH has branched out into humanitarian activity, such as transporting students and teachers to schools during curfews. This has infuriated the settlers, and Kristensen said that settler attacks on TIPH personnel rose 60 percent in July-December 2003 compared to the first half of the year. There have been "many hundreds of incidents," he said, ranging from spitting and cursing through blocked cars to being pelted with eggs and stones.