Just outside the old gold market in Hebron, now the rubbish market, a heavy man named Abd al Khaleq Sedr had invited us in for tea. He took us first to his roof. None of it was visible from the market below, but from the rooftop it was possible to see that Sedr's house was right next to the Israeli settlement of Beit Hadassah. It was a perilous location: Soldiers had welded shut not only the Sedrs' door to Shuhada Street, but all their windows facing south. The other windows were blocked by the same thick screens that covered every vulnerable aperture of every inhabited Palestinian dwelling in H2, a zone of the city controlled by Israel's military.. "All the time, they throw stones," Sedr said of the settlers. "If I say good morning, they say sharmuta [an Arabic word meaning whore]."
He smiled grimly and told a few stories. Nothing extreme, the kind I would hear in almost every house I visited in Hebron. Every Palestinian house, that is. A month and a half earlier, Sedr said, the soldiers claimed a child had thrown stones from his roof. They came in to search the house, shoved his brother’s four-year-old daughter, and, when he became angry, beat him. They ended up breaking his arm.
A few months later, after I left the city, I found a link to a video shot by Abd al Khaleq’s brother Shadi. The incident it recorded was not anything out of the ordinary – it was, in the local parlance, normal – but it managed to capture a great deal in a few short minutes, not just about Hebron, but about the whole sad comedy in which everyone was caught.
The video began with a settler appearing on the edge of the Sedrs’ roof, which was protected from its neighbours with a fence and a single coil of razor wire. A Palestinian flag flew from a low pole on the corner closest to Beit Hadassah. The settler, a thin bearded man in a white shirt and a wide, white skullcap, had climbed up from the adjacent rooftop. He was clinging to the fence, and appeared to be struggling.
“Why are you coming on to my roof?” Shadi asked.
The settler answered in a stilted Hebrew accented heavily with Russian. “Just to take down the flag,” he said, coolly, as if he had come to fix the cable.
Shadi repeated his question in a Hebrew that was equally stilted, and heavily accented with Arabic.
“Okay,” said the settler, who appeared to be stuck, “I won’t come over. I just want to talk to you.”
“The entrance is over there,” said Shadi. “Come through there.”
The settler asked for the flag. He even said please.
Voices echoed up from below, egging him on: “Take the flag!” The camera panned. Dozens of settlers had gathered behind Beit Hadassah. Some were shouting and making obscene gestures. “Film this, you son of a whore,” one yelled.
The settler, it was now clear, was standing on top of a ladder, fully snarled in the razor wire, unable to go up or down. Shadi reached out to untangle him. “It’s okay,” he said, “let me help you. You are welcome.”
Another settler, standing at the base of the ladder, yelled up: “Don’t touch him!”
Shadi pulled his hand back. The settler wanted to talk. He was earnest and composed, as if he and Shadi Sedr had casually struck up a conversation while standing in line at the post office and had raced past the small talk to what really irked them. He objected to the flag again. He thought it was Jordanian. Or, more likely, he knew exactly what it was but couldn’t bring himself to say the word “Palestinian.”
"You live in Israel, " he said, "not in Jordan. "
It wasn’t an issue Shadi seemed interested in pursuing. “What if I came on to your roof,” he asked, and took down an Israeli flag? “Would that be good?”
The settler thought about it. He shrugged. He even said, “Sorry.”
Then he appeared to reconsider.
“This roof is mine,” he said. “It is all mine. The whole country is mine.”
He was still stuck, still tangled in razor wire. He couldn’t advance, but he couldn’t back down either. He couldn’t move at all without tearing his own flesh, but he was sure of himself and apparently oblivious to the precariousness of his position. A soldier had arrived and had begun yelling up at Shadi in Arabic, ordering him to go back inside his house. The settler kept talking.
“This is the Land of Israel,” he insisted. “This is my country. And everything that is here is mine.”
