Persecution

Today we did mosque patrol. Every Friday, CPT monitors the checkpoint at the Ibrahimi Mosque to accompany Muslims as they try to go for prayer. For an hour, we stood to the side of the caged-in entrance to the checkpoint, watching.

Normally, about 400 men, women, and children come on Fridays, but since October 7, the Israeli security forces have made it more difficult, with longer waits, so fewer people are coming. Some are staying at home to pray rather than subjecting themselves to being crammed together and possibly not even getting through to the mosque in time for prayer anyway. Others come carrying cardboard to pray outside the mosque or even outside the checkpoint, anticipating that they won’t make it through the gauntlet in time to enter the mosque.

The gauntlet is pretty daunting: standing body-to-body in a very tight space for a long time until the green light goes on and 2-3 people can jam themselves through a turnstile. Then they have to go through a metal detector and present their IDs to a guard inside a glassed-in booth who checks his or her computer, one person at a time, to see if they have any criminal record or other marks against them. Of course, having a criminal record is not uncommon, especially for men, in this occupied state. Nearly all Palestinian men have been detained or spent time in Israeli prisons.

There is a side door into the cage, on the far side of the turnstile and some people were being admitted there, especially women and children. Monitoring who got to go through was a person identified to us as the Palestinian “checkpoint manager.” He has been doing this role for years and evidently knows all the soldiers well. I wondered if he was some sort of a collaborator with Israelis, but he did seem to make things go easier than if there had been no one on the Palestinian side managing things.

Standing next to us as we watched, and chatting with one of our CPT guides, was a man whom I sensed was a cop - stiff stature, unsmiling face, aloof attitude. Turns out, sure enough, he was a police officer with the PA, there to “facilitate.” Our guide asked him if he could expedite people getting through and he told her he couldn’t do anything. Israel has all the power even in areas under PA authority.

We heard later that this guy was telling our CPT guide that he was angry with Hamas for making things worse here in Hebron, including with the arduous task of getting to the mosque to pray. He works for Fatah, the PA party roundly despised for its collaboration with Israel and the IOF. It’s telling that he blamed another group of Palestinians rather than the occupation itself. Later, our guide commented about how divided Palestinians are amongst themselves. “We still need to work on ourselves,” she said.

Time passed at the checkpoint and eventually people were let in by small groups rather than just 2 or 3 at a time. The prayers at the mosque started late, to accommodate the enforced delays, but even so, many people didn’t get through in time and many ended up outside praying on their cardboard prayer “rugs.” 

A person in our delegation commented later that Christians in the US, especially of the fundamentalist variety, believe they are persecuted because of their religion, but they don’t know what persecution even looks like. They should try being a Muslim in Palestine simply trying to go pray in your mosque on your holy day.