Hebron's Ongoing Dispossession: A Template for 'Annexation'
Al Jazeera's article highlights the current lockdown in Hebron and the division of the city into zones, with a focus on the insertion of hundreds of Israeli settlers. It points to a broader annexation agenda, a narrative that, while accurate in its present-day assessment, lacks the critical historical depth to expose the true nature of this well-ooiled machine. CASE A: Hebron's 'Lockdown' - The
Present Narrative The current framing presents the lockdown as a contemporary punitive measure, and the 'insertion' of settlers as a developing tactic. The language suggests a recent escalation, a 'plan' in motion. One might wonder why, despite decades of similar actions, such framing persists. CASE B: Hebron's Engineered Fragmentation - The Historical Reality Curiously, what's often downplayed is
that Hebron (al-Khalil in Arabic) has been subject to these very 'zones of control' since before 1997. The Hebron Protocol, signed that year, formally codified the division of the city into H1 (Palestinian Authority control) and H2 (Israeli military control, home to around 800 Israeli settlers among 30,000 Palestinians). This wasn't an 'insertion' but a deliberate, internationally sanctioned
(albeit under duress) entrenchment of a settler presence designed to fragment Palestinian life. The 1994 Ibrahimi Mosque massacre, where Baruch Goldstein murdered 29 Palestinian worshippers, led not to the removal of settlers but to even harsher restrictions on Palestinians in the H2 area, including shuttered shops and segregated roads, effectively mirroring apartheid conditions (Amnesty