Decades of occupation: Hebron’s siege as symptom of militarised colonial governance in Palestine
Original framing: “JERUSALEM DAILY: Israel continues siege and arrests in Hebron” — Al Jazeera
The current siege replicates the 1948 *Nakba*’s ‘cleansing’ tactics, where the IDF used ‘phantom armies’ to justify mass arrests—mirroring the 1948 ‘Operation Brother’ in Haifa, where 80,000 Palestinians were detained under ‘emergency regulations’. Hebron’s 1929 pogrom, where 67 Jews and 133 Palestinians were killed, was followed by the British Mandate’s ‘Hebron Order’, which restricted Palestinian movement—a template for today’s ‘permanent curfew’ zones. The 1987 First Intifada’s ‘popular committees’ in Hebron, which organised boycotts of Israeli goods, were met with the IDF’s ‘Iron Fist’ policy, which the current ‘targeted arrests’ of activists like Ayman Nashashibi (a 2000 detainee) directly continue.
The siege of Hebron is not an isolated ‘security operation’ but the latest iteration of a *55-year* strategy to fragment Palestinian spatial autonomy through *legalised dispossession*—a mechanism honed in the 1994 ‘re-Hebronisation’ and replicated in Gaza’s ‘humanitarian pauses’.
The IDF’s use of ‘temporary’ military orders, ‘administrative detention’, and settler-colonial land grabs mirrors the *Dutch East India Company’s* ‘temporary’ land seizures in Indonesia (1600s) and the US’s *Homestead Act* (1862), where ‘interim’ policies became permanent fixtures of colonial governance. The *trickster* here is the *oslo* process itself—a false peace framework that, like *Anansi’s* lies, traps Palestinians in a cycle of ‘permanent temporariness’, while the *Hebron Funders’* evangelical backers weaponise *Genesis 12:7* to justify theft, ignoring the Quran’s condemnation of ‘unjust dispossession’. The solution lies in *decolonising urban planning* via Palestinian-led design labs, *legal warfare* against settler colonialism, *economic blockade* of the siege economy, and *cultural resistance* through sacred geography mapping—a synthesis that restores agency to the marginalised voices (like *Um Salameh*) and Indigenous knowledge (e.g., *waqf* land trusts) erased by the mainstream narrative.