Hebron, Sansana (Meitar Crossing), South Hebron Hills, Sun 5.8.12, Morning
We left Beer Sheva at 9.30. The Meitar terminal was empty. Route 60 was relatively lively. It seems that driving is one way to pass the long hours of the fast for the Palestinians, but as for our friends the Israelis, goodness knows what their goal is as they whizz past us on the no-passing lines at top speed. We didn’t encounter any soldiers or army vehicles on the way to Hebron. Hebron itself is also quiet. Near Jewish Tel-Romeida, alongside the graffiti wall, a soldier tries to stop a small boy with a spade. The child evades him and goes home through a slit in the graffiti barricade. Here he indulges in an act of terror on an unsuspecting shrub that has squatted illegally over a window. The soldier grumbles 'don't want him wandering round with that thing (the spade)’ and returns to his watchtower with suspicion written all over him. All the other checkpoints (Tarpat, 160 etc) are quiet. A TIPH car stopped and the commander of TIPH told us Hebron had been quiet for the last couple of weeks, mostly likely because of Ramadan. A large sign posted by the Efrat organization that objects to abortions informs us that the birth rate is the answer to survival or some such. We return via Route 317 which is also livelier than its usual total desolation. At the crossroads between Routes 317/60 a large sign demands 'Israeli sovereignty over all Judea and Samaria.' Quite superfluous for, as Natan Alterman said in 1967: 'The thing about this victory is the fact that it erases the difference between the State of Israel and Eretz Israel. The traveler in the hills of South Hebron will surely concur.
...Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world..
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and every where
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity...
From Second Coming W B Yeats