Hebron is a sick and contagious city. A core of hatred and oppression metastasizes from its alleys throughout the occupied West Bank, since the conquest of this Palestinian city by the Israeli army in 1967. Israeli directors Idit Avrahami and Noam Sheizaf have clinically documented this ” laboratory of occupation”.
They approach the city of the biblical patriarchs by the rue des Martyrs, a shopping and central street, which extends into the old town from the tomb of Abraham. They retrace the establishment of Israeli settlers from 1972, the sharing of the holy place that they obtain at the end of the 1970s. The film follows the development of a military control apparatus intended to protect the militants of “greater Israel”. », reinforced control at each episode of violence – whether attributable to Israelis or Palestinians. The Jewish presence thus increased, gradually emptying the old city of its Arab inhabitants.
In Israel, this film has drawn criticism from the government of Binyamin Netanyahu. “Works that harm the country will not receive funds in my care,” Culture Minister Miki Zohar announced in January. Several screenings have since been canceled.
Contrasting emotions
The release of Mr. Zohar is paradoxical, because this documentary is above all an Israeli military story. His main sources are officers who served as military governors of Hebron (some in a wider area). Their testimonies structure the film. If they express themselves above all as professionals, who deploy the means to achieve a political goal that it is not up to them to question, their words reveal some contrasting emotions.
They protect the settlers, they break two successive intifadas (in the 1980s and 2000s), they learn to cooperate with semi-autonomous Palestinian forces, after the Oslo peace accords of the 1990s. Their soldiers themselves evolve. Some are becoming radicalized, as revealed by the murder in 2016 of a wounded and unarmed Palestinian by the Franco-Israeli Elor Azaria, who will be released after nine months in prison.
“Today Hebron is no longer a shameful place. On the contrary, it has become a model, a symbol,” said Yehuda Shaul, co-founder of the NGO Breaking the Silence, which he helped to create during his military service in Hebron. He encourages soldiers to testify about the abuses they witness. It was there that the army invented methods subsequently reproduced throughout the West Bank: separation of populations, reserved roads, nocturnal harassment of families, registration of an entire population by facial recognition.