CAIRO – He is dubbed by far-right extremist Jews as a \"Hamas in kappa,\" a man who undermines the \"Jewish state\" through his guided tours in the occupied West Bank city of Al-Khalil (Hebron), but ex-Israeli solider Yehuda Shaul says he is enlightening foreigners about rights violations and abuses by settlers in what was once a teeming Arab city.
\"All this was done on the back of thousands of Palestinians who were more or less expelled from their lives,\" Shaul told the Independent in an interview published Saturday, January 26.
\"This is not Jewish. I\'m an Israeli, I\'m a Jew and I care what my society looks like, about what are the values that are at the heart of my country. And Hebron is a huge problem for my society and my country. There is a clear plan to cause the Arab population to leave the centre of Hebron.\"
Shaul\'s tour starts in the main Shuhada Street in the city center which runs through what is now the settlers\' security zone.
The street, where only Israeli vehicles are permitted, runs through rows of empty Palestinian shops and houses boarded up with steel shutters, many daubed with Stars of David.
Shaul then pass to the left to reach the Palestinian Abu Ayesha and Abu Heikel houses.
The houses sum up the dilemma and abuse of Palestinians overwhelmed by sprawling settlements in Al-Khalil.
They are surrounded by wire mesh to protect its dwellers from stones and garbage frequently thrown at it by harassing settlers, who did every thing in their power to force the two Palestinian families out of the central city\'s street.
Burning cars, water pipe attacks and setting fire to olive fields are a few but to mention examples of abuses.
When Abu Heikel\'s son desperately reported the settler attacks to police citing recorded clips at the ubiquitous CTVs, the reply was more blunt and concise.
\"The cameras were for the settlers\' security, that is,\" he was told.
According to a report earlier this month from the two most respected Israeli human-rights organisations, B\'Tselem and the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), \"violence, arbitrary house searches, seizure of houses, harassment, detaining passers-by, and humiliating treatment have become part of daily reality for Palestinians and have led many of them to move to safer places\" in Al-Khalil.
Palestinians have abandoned more than 1,000 homes and at least 1,829 businesses in the city center since September 2002.
Settlers are housed in several tiny enclaves built since 1980 in the heart of the city, which is home to more than 167,000 Palestinians.
Moral Price
Shaul served in an elite army snipers unit in Al-Khalil during the second Palestinian Initfida.
During the last few weeks of his military service which he spent in the holy city of Bethlehem, he had \"an enlightened moment.\"
He understood what he called the \"terrible moral price\" exacted by the occupation from the young soldiers who serve in the West Bank and Gaza.
Over the time, Shaul began to find himself \"in the very terrifying place [where] there is no justification for 90 per cent of the actions you took part in.\"
He recalled with bitterness how he was ordered by his commander to shoot at Palestinians stepping out of their homes in Al-Khalil at the peak of the second Intifada (2002-03), using deadly sophisticated grenades.
\"A grenade is not a bullet,\" Shaul explains. \"It hits something and explodes, kills everyone in a radius of eight metres and injures everyone in a radius of 16.\"
\"What\'s going on here? I\'m supposed to shoot grenades into a city where people live?\" he wondered.
\"You play it like a video game with your joy-stick on top of the city – boom, boom, boom.\"
Now Shaul he wants to omit this nightmarish experience from the book of his life.
It is something \"you would prefer not to think about,\" he says, adding it is the \"worst thing I did.\"
Shaul had co-founded the Breaking the Silence, the growing group of dissident ex-soldiers, who spoke out against the \"immoral\" practices and abuses committed by the Israelis against the Palestinians.
Laboratory
Shaul said Al-Khalil is a miniature example of the human rights violations and abuses committed by both soldiers and settlers at the wider West Bank.
\"If you zoom out of Hebron, if you look at the segregation, the methods, the tactics, Hebron is like the laboratory where things are tested before being used outside,\" Shaul said.
There are up to 164 Jewish settlements in the West Bank, eating up more than 40 percent of the occupied territory.
All Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories are illegal under international law.
The Israeli peace activist urged settlers and the government to rethink the moral value they pay for keeping such settlements.
\"We just ask them: \'What do you think? You saw the price in human rights, in morality, in the lack of law, the price that Palestinians pay for 800 settlers in the heart of their city (of Al-Khalil). And you saw the price the Israeli regime pays and Israeli society pays for running this place and you have to decide for yourself.\"
Shaul, who describes himself as devout and religious, has conducted or organized more than 200 tours of Israelis and foreigners in Al-Khalil.
Last October, he and another former soldier, Avichai Sharon, briefed the international Middle East envoy Tony Blair on the appalling living conditions of the Palestinians in the city.
The 24-year-old man was described by celebrated Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, to whom he acted as a guide in the city two years ago, as \"one of the righteous this country has\".
He, however, attracts such hatred from settlers.
The other day, Shaul struggled to conduct his \"enlightening\" tour against one of the ultra-orthodox settler\'s noisy filibuster.
At one point, Shaul walks across the street to a watching senior police officer and asks him to move this settler on; the officer replies, \"You can carry on. He\'s not stopping you.\"