Hebron’s Palestinians Resist Israel’s “Evil” Occupation, Violent Settlers & Daily Humiliations A dialogue with Issa Amro, Winner of 2024 Right Livelihood Award

Banner: Issa Amro, taking a picture of a group of Palestinian woman hosts and international visitors at his community centre, The Old City of Hebron
(Photo: Zarni, Jan. 2025)

This dialogue with Issa Amro is the second in the FORSEA Solidarity Series on the Voices of Resistance from Palestine. Our inaugural episode was with the renowned Palestinian liberation theologian and activist Dr Munther Isaac. He discussed Israel and its settler colonial project of building a state on Palestinian land by ethnic cleansing and proceeded to characterises it as a “terrorist entity.” In this second dialogue the well-known non-violence resister Issa from Hebron articulated what it means to live under Israeli military occupation and the apartheid state.

Watch the dialogue here at FORSEA YouTube Channel.

As part of the Sabeel-organized delegation of international scholars, writers and activists, I travelled from Jerusalem to the Old City of Hebron in early January. The city is historically important and considered holy to all three monotheistic religions – Judaesim, Christianity and Islam. It also bears a global recognition as a UNESCO World Heritage site, that is, a place of significance belonging to humanity at large.

According to the Jewish Visual Library, Abrahim and his kin were (believed to be) buried in the cave or Tomb of the Patriarchs some 3,700 years ago. Muslims believe that Prophet Mohamad stopped in this city before he ascended the Heaven at the Dome of Rock, now Al-Aqsa Mosque. This sacred site, known to the Muslims as Ibrahimi Mosque, became blood-soaked when a Brooklyn-born American terrorist Baruch Goldstein, a medical doctor by profession, massacred 29 Palestinian Muslims and left 125 injured before he himself was captured and beaten to death by the Palestinians who survived his terrorist attack, in-between the US-brokered Oslo Accords I and II (signed between the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Isreal in 1993 and 1995 respectively).

Goldstein was a follower of Kahanism,a religious Zionist ideology which portrays most Arabs living in Israel as the enemies of Jews and Israel itself, while advocating for a Jewish theocratic state, where non-Jews have no voting rights. The leader of the Jewish Party, a key proponent of this outrightly Messianic Fascist agenda, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who until 2 weeks ago, was minister of national security in the far-right coalition government of Netanyahu, came from the surrounding settlements in Hebron.

Very understandably, our main host – and his fellow nonviolence resisters – described the settlers – and the Israeli occupation force troops as “really evil”.

Over the last few decades in exile, I have been extremely fortunate to have visited dozens of World Heritage sites in Australia, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Latin America and Anglophone N. America. Some are “dark sites” such as killing fields and extermination camps in the Balkans, Cambodia, and formerly Nazi-occupied Europe. Some sites are deemed cultural heritage to the world for their extraordinary natural beauty. Some are noted for their architectural and historical significance.

No other World Heritage site in the world I have visited radiates this impression of manufactured, systematized and sustained “evilness” – save Nazi death camps – in the way the ghostly sight and atmosphere in “the ghost town” of the OId Hebron does.

Issa Amro’s ghostly old city is occupied by 4,000 armed Israeli soldiers, and security officers who guard several hundred extremist, religious Zionist settler families who have moved into the now depopulated Palestine houses – just like what the Zionist settlers did during and after the Nakba of 1948.

Given its religious significance to Jews, Muslims and Christians – the children of Abrahim – one would have thought the place would reek spirituality and evokes awe and admiration in any visitors on a whirlwind visit.

Instead, the Old Hebron reflects the Occupation’s aims of making life unsustainable and impossible for native Palestinian residents: “No physical safety. No social services. No school. No ambulance or health service. No water. No electricity.”

Issa said, Israeli state does not evict us, but just makes life impossible, so that we would chose to leave our houses and land. The logic is that thus abandoned homes, businesses and neighbourhoods would become Lebensraum (‘living space’) for Zionist Jews from the United States, Canada and elsewhere in the diaspora would move in.

Ninety percent of the settlers are said to be American Jews.

Issa explained that Palestinians in Hebron are not allowed to identify themselves as Palestinians when they go through checkpoints, which are ubiquitous throughout Hebron. No outward or visible symbols of Palestinian identity or nations can be seen anywhere in the Old City. Instead, the entire place is dotted with signs of Jewish historical and archaeological sites, blue Israeli flags, images of ultra-Orthodox rabbis, check-points with portable barbed wire road barriers, surveillance cameras and sniper booths.

Additionally, reminiscent of how degradingly Nazi troops and Waffen-SS treated the Jews in the ghettos in the Nazi-occupied Europe of 1930’s and 1940’s, today’s Israeli security troops in Hebron typically humiliate, physically abuse, throw verbal insults, confiscate cell phone or clothing, strip-search, seek to provoke, arbitrarily detain Hebron’s resident Palestinians, young and old, and simply subject the resident Palestinians, young and old, to numerous degrading treatments. All their misdeeds are carried out routinely with blanket impunity not just in Hebron but all across the Occupied Territories.

Palestinians are subject to the occupier’s military “law” while the Jewish Israelis are subject to normal civil law one finds in functioning democracies around the world. In the categorically apartheid system which Israel has built, all Jews, Zionist or not, in Israel and in the diaspora, are accorded incomparably greater rights – including the right of return – political and civil rights, and full and equal citizenship rights vis-à-vis millions of Palestinians, in various zones of occupation in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, as well as Palestinian citizens of Israel, living in the 1948 territories of Israel.

One of Issa’s fellow resisters – a young Palestinian man in his late 20’s – we spent the afternoon with, was arrested multiple times since October 7, and tortured in Israeli detention, including deliberate cigarette burns on his body. I expressed my deep admiration for his steely will and resilience.

Such Fascist-like treatment is justified in the discourse of ultra-Zionist extreme religious bigotry officially backed by 4,000 armed Israel soldiers 24/7, reinforced by settlers armed with the state-issued M-16 automatic submachine guns. In my half-afternoon visit, I saw Israeli teenagers walking, with newly issued machine guns strapped on their shoulders, to and from the Tomb of the Patriarch, a large mosque-cum-synagogue.

I have also been to several war zones such as Ukraine and Eastern Myanmar. I felt a far greater sense of un-safety in the occupied Hebron, walking past one Israeli checkpoint after another.

In this intense 15-minute-videorecording, you will hear directly from one of the best known, and principled resisters against Israel’s vicious settler colonial occupation.

You will appreciate what it means to live under the relentless, sadistic and cruel apartheid system aided by advanced surveillance technology and manned by settlers with automatic sub-machine guns and various branches of Israeli police and defence forces.

Faced with such evil system that is utterly devoid of human conscience or compassion, but designed to break the Palestinian will to live on their own land, the Palestinians such as Issa Amro and his band of resisters, deserve every bit of material, financial, moral, diplomatic, and strategic support from the world at large.

For they refuse to abandon their homes, lands and olive trees in Hebron and have taken the idea of “non-violence resistance” to a whole new height.

Maung Zarni

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