Remarks by Noam Hofshtetter, General Director, Shalom Achshav, at the Peace Now Demonstration that took place in Hebron on Sun

Remarks by Noam Hofshtetter, General Director, Shalom Achshav,
at the Peace Now Demonstration that took place in Hebron on
Sunday December 22, 2002
under the call “Get out of Hebron NOW!”

I see behind us a few of those from the most extremist of the settlers, who are not very satisfied that we have arrived here. On Thursday, after the symbolic evacuation of the new outpost they tried to establish on this spot where we stand, a police officer asked me, by telephone, ‘is it still relevant? do you still want to demonstrate?’ In Jerusalem, a few days ago, I received some friendly advice: ‘Go to Gaza, demonstrate in front of Arafat’s compound’;…. even my friends sometimes ask in bewilderment: ‘what’s with all these demonstrations? What did you leave behind in Hebron?’

Let me tell you what we left in Hebron. I first came to Hebron as a soldier. I came to ‘protect’ several settlers who are still here, as they celebrated the Bar Mitzvah of one Moshe Levinger’s sons in the Cave of the Patriarchs. At that ceremony, the father blessed his son with the words, ‘may you continue to overturn the stands of the Arabs in the marketplace.’

Today, I will tell those extremists, many others like them ‘what we have lost in Hebron’. We are here to give the government of settlements and its supporters—the fanatical settlers—a clear message: We too are committed. The Occupied Territories are not your private kingdom; they are not your special Apartheid Gardens, not your special place for tyranny, hidden in the back yard of the state of Israel. Israel’s opposition to the occupation knows no boundaries: we have come to expose this ugly back yard for the entire country to see—and we will come here again to your showcase and we will ask whether or not there is anything to be ashamed of.

We are here to deliver a message to Hamas, Jihad and those who share their ideology –including the settlers of Hebron, Izhar and such. We stand here quietly to say: your path is violence and murder; we have stopped dying for you. We have stopped killing in your service. Every Jew and every Palestinian who has died is blood on your hands – martyrs to your unholy cause.

We demand the return of what you have stolen from us: those things that ‘we left behind in Hebron’: We demand the return of our dream of a democratic state of Israel: for it is facing destruction in Hebron. We demand the end of the occupation and rule by the government of Israel over another people – in Hebron, in Jerusalem and throughout the West Bank and Gaza.
We demand a political and geographic border for the state of Israel, not a messianic or Biblical one that the fanatics of Hebron have tried to achieve.

We demand the return of our humanity, which we abandoned in Hebron. No Promenade will be built, no more Palestinian homes destroyed.
We demand an end to the curfew and siege of the 150,000 Palestinians who live here and of the 3,000,000 Palestinians throughout the West Bank and Gaza.

In the name of our humanity, we stand upon our right not to deny the humanity of others: not directly and not indirectly. The right to live with honor and dignity; the right to provide for their families, to learn, to receive medical care, to move freely, to congregate as a nation, to create a state. For the sake of all of these, we demand the end to the occupation, this accursed occupation, that is destroying us from within – the same occupation that Occupied Hebron and the road that we traveled to reach here demonstrates above all else.

Peace is not sacred; it sanctifies: our humanity, our life, our freedom and our equality. All who say ‘peace’ but deny these basic essences of humanity are blind. We come with a commitment to peace. Standing with us are those hundreds who were not allowed because of security limits and those millions – from Palestine and Israel who value and seek peace. Our commitment will tear down the border that you tried to create with an army. Our path remains the path of peace: it will defeat the settlements, the para-military outposts, the siege and even the pain and the hatred. And we will pave a new road: the road to peace between Israel and Palestine.