Visit to Hebron

I recently got to join my parents on a trip to Hebron, the largest city in the West Bank and home to a cropload of Jewish settlers. We met with Mr Khaled Osaily--the city's mayor, who was super kind to show us around the place and invite us over to his kick-ass house. Awesome living quarters aside, Hebron is a city full of spicy history and action, and not really the good kind. As the favourite hangout place of Abraham and his posse back in the day, the Cave of the Patriarchs, located in Hebron, is the second holiest site for Jews after the Temple Mount, but also happens to be highly venerated by Muslims and Christians, as they too like a bit of Abraham and that. Anyway, fifteen or so years back one Jewish settler doctor decided to pay the jam-packed Ibrahimi mosque (located over the cave) a visit during Ramadan prayer time, bringing with him a token of friendship in the form of a massive machine gun, hosing the mosque down with bullets and killing 29 people before being bludgeoned to death by the angered crowd. Since then the mosque has been partitioned, part of it becoming a synagogue, with bullet-proof glass separating the two sides from "stray" doctor bullets.

              Here is a terrible picture of the bullet-proof glass hanging out right next to the cenotaph of Abraham

We then had a stroll through Hebron's deserted markets. Legend has it that once upon a time the markets were filled with merchandise and visitors, until they began to pose a massive security risk to the settlers who decided to settle directly above them.. Having settled above the bustling Palestinian markets the settlers decided the ideal place for garbage and general toxic waste disposal would be.. tum dum dummm--the busy market streets! Here are a few pics of the kind of things people's heads and merchandise  served as a dumping ground for.

                     

Giant plastic barrels, bricks, wood boards and  tables are not the type of objects I normally dispose of at MY house, but then again I also prefer a different exit route for my trash. 

All in all it was a pretty fun day, I got to hang out with some soldiers wielding machine guns and have awesome lunch at mayor Oseily's house!

Mayor Oseily's home-made Hebronian food FTWWWW