Shopping or Safety? Court Supports Israeli Settlers

Shopkeeper Mohammed Salim Sharif gazed through the six-foot-high chain-link fence that for more than a year has restricted access to his housewares store and watched the steady stream of what might otherwise have been customers pass by along Shalalla Street.

The fence, he told a weekend visitor, is depriving him and eight other merchants of their livelihood.

“Is it fair to make us live in a cage like birds?” he asked.

Sharif and his neighbors got the answer Monday from the Israeli Supreme Court. The safety of a dozen Jewish families living on the upper floors of the building is more important, the court said, than the incomes of the Arab shopkeepers on the ground floor, even though some of them have occupied the shops for generations.

Won’t Second-Guess Military

The court refused to second-guess the Israeli military commander who ordered the extraordinary security measures on Shalalla Street, although there has never been any attempt to use the shops in a terrorist attack on the Jewish settlers upstairs.

And it ordered the three merchants who brought the legal action to pay 500 shekels each (about $310) to cover court costs.

“I am deeply disappointed,” said Felicia Langer, the shopkeepers’ Israeli attorney. “It is a high court, but where is the justice?”

Langer, a member of the Israeli Communist Party, does most of her work as a lawyer on behalf of Palestinian Arabs.

The court’s decision barely rated a mention on Israel radio newscasts Monday, even though the Shalalla Street fence became a cause celebre for a short time after the army put it up on Jan. 15, 1986. It was dealt with as just another case where the Israeli legal system deferred to the judgment of the security services in a conflict between the authorities and the 850,000 Palestinians who live on the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Insight Into Struggle

But the fact that such cases are so routine offers much insight into the daily struggle between Israeli Jew and Palestinian Arab in the occupied territories.

The fence extends for perhaps 50 yards along the street, leaving only a narrow path in front of the nine shops it blocks. Access to the path is controlled at both ends of the fence by Israeli soldiers who search anyone wishing to enter.

While the soldiers behaved courteously last weekend, there are filmed incidents in which they harassed Palestinian visitors. Some visitors are forced to take off their shoes, and the soldiers, after inspecting them, have at times thrown them to the ground.

According to the shopkeepers, their businesses have suffered because would-be customers understandably prefer to deal with stores where they are not required to go through the sometimes humiliating security check.

The merchants have tried to lure customers back by hanging some of their wares on the fence, turning it into a makeshift display window for shoes, housewares, bedding supplies. But this has done little good.

“You can see that across the street there’s another furniture shop,” said Ghaleb Zaloum, whose furniture store is one of those blocked by the fence. “Where do you think people would rather shop?”

The shops are in a building known to the Arabs as Daboya and to Israelis as Beit Hadassah. It was a Jewish hospital before 1929, when most of Hebron’s Jews fled because of Arab rioting in which scores were slain.

Militant Jewish settlers reoccupied it in 1979 and refused to leave. The Israeli government finally approved it as one of four permanent Jewish enclaves within the otherwise Arab city of about 80,000 people. All four enclaves are on former Jewish land.

Nevertheless, the Israeli authorities, who took over management of the property after the Six-Day War in 1967, honored long-term rental agreements with the ground-floor Arab tenants, despite pressure from the settlers to evict them.

When renovation of the upper floors was completed and the Jewish families were about to move back in, the army urged the shopkeepers to leave, offering to compensate them and to install them in new premises elsewhere in the city.

When the merchants refused, the army put up the fence, saying it was necessary to prevent the placing of terrorist bombs in the ground-floor shops.

The shopkeepers charged in their legal action that the real reason for the fence is not security but harassment aimed at forcing them out.

“It is clear that the (military authorities) maltreat the petitioners for the sole purpose of placating the Jewish settlers in Beit Hadassah,” Langer argued before the High Court. “For the sake of the settlers, the authorities are prepared to dispossess the petitioners of their income sources, humiliate them and turn them into prisoners inside their own shops in the place which has been their home for generations.”

Furniture dealer Zaloum said: “After they get these shops, you’ll see. They’ll give them to Jews to open stores here.”

The three merchants who went to court said their businesses support a total of 66 people.

Hebron is widely regarded as perhaps the most volatile place on the West Bank because of the tension between militant Jewish settlers and mostly fundamentalist Muslim Palestinians, but Langer argued that the army offered no evidence of a specific security threat in ordering the fence erected.

She said that for the court to accept unquestioningly the army’s security decisions is tantamount to authorizing the establishment of a “demilitarized zone” around any Jewish presence on the West Bank to ensure separation from an Arab population seen in general as a security threat.

Noam Arnon, a spokesman for the Beit Hadassah settlers, said in an interview with the Jerusalem Post that the situation is abnormal but it is right that the Arabs be moved. His reasoning was the same as that adopted Monday by the court.

“What’s more important,” he asked, “the livelihood of a few people or the safety of dozens of families?”