Reactions to the news from people in Hebron, West Bank

I was in Hebron on Sept. 11, 2001. I remember old men approaching me on the street, eyes full of tears, telling me that God would help me and my fellow citizens. Other Palestinian friends called us, sobbing, as they described what they were watching on TV.
The catastrophe happened at the end of a summer of egregious Israeli settler violence on the street, and we knew we had to prepare ourselves for the worldwide racist backlash against Arabs and Muslims. I think both of these factors and my grief for the victims contributed to a sense that my head and heart were creating a reaction I had not felt before and for which I had no name.

Almost 10 years later, I felt something similar when I entered our main apartment at 6:30 a.m. on May 2, and one of my team members told me that he had been listening to President Obama’s speech on the killing of Osama bin Laden. The reactions of people on the street sort of flowed over me, and I examined them with interest and with that nameless feeling.

Two of my colleagues walking back from monitoring a checkpoint that morning heard an Israeli settler telling a soldier, “It’s great that bin Laden was killed; CPTers should be next.” A friendly Israeli border policeman at the mosque checkpoint, who assumed we would be celebrating, told another CPTer (Christian Peacemaker Teams worker) and me, “Saddam Hussein is gone; Bin Laden is gone. When we kill Nasrallah [the Secretary General of Hezbollah], Israel and the U.S. will have peace.”

I told him, “There will be others to take their places.”

“Then we will kill them, too,” he said cheerfully.

I asked a Hebronite friend what most Palestinians in Hebron were saying about bin Laden’s death. Most, he said, do not care. A small minority were upset about the killing.

A much larger minority, himself included, thought bin Laden deserved his fate. The Quran forbids the killing of civilians, he said, and it has an absolute prohibition on Muslims killing other Muslims. Bin Laden was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Muslims in the United States, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and Jordan.

“I just wish it had been a Muslim who killed him,” he said.

For years, a Martin Luther King quotation has been taped on the wall of our apartment in Hebron. Although I am still waiting to understand my feelings, the poster brings me some comfort:

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie or establish truth. Through violence you murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Kathleen Kern of Rochester, N.Y., serves with Christian Peacemaker Teams.