Hebron

There is a steel mesh net suspended over the old market street in Hebron’s H2 zone, installed by the municipality to catch the garbage thrown from the windows of settler buildings above the souk. Broken bottles, eggs, paint, and occasionally something worse land on the mesh instead of on the vendors and their produce below. The vendors work beneath it every day. They have been working beneath it for years. The net, in its total mundane specificity, communicates something about life in Hebron that no amount of political context can convey with the same efficiency. You look at it and understand immediately that people have found a way to continue with ordinary commerce inside an extraordinary situation.

I walked into the old city from Bab al-Zawiyeh — the informal boundary that marks the edge of the Palestinian-administered H1 zone and the beginning of the jointly administered and then Israeli-controlled H2 zone — on a Wednesday morning. The transition is not gradual. One street is dense with Palestinian commerce, motorcycles and vegetable stalls and a bakery with its counter open to the road. The next is quiet in a way that has been imposed rather than chosen, the shuttered shops a visual record of a process that has been ongoing for decades. I walked down Shuhada Street, once the main commercial artery of the old city, now accessible only to settlers and the Israeli military, and the silence there had a particular quality that I kept turning over for days afterwards.

The Ibrahimi Mosque — the Cave of Machpelah, sacred to Muslims, Jews, and Christians as the burial place of Abraham and the patriarchs — is the epicentre of all this. The building is split: one half a mosque, one half a synagogue, with separate entrances and separate times for major holidays and armed soldiers at every door. I entered the mosque side, removed my shoes at the entrance, and stood in a vast medieval chamber with hanging chandeliers and carpeted floor and a cage of iron bars in the centre that covers the cenotaph of Abraham. The prayers of two religions happening simultaneously on different sides of a wall produced a sound that was not harmony and not conflict — it was something else, a kind of acoustic coexistence that seemed to require enormous, unacknowledged effort from everyone.

The Hebron glass is the thing the rest of Palestine buys as a wedding gift. Blown in workshops in the old city since Byzantine times — the same turquoise-green colour produced by the same mineral content in the local sand — the glass is sold in the souk in the forms of vases and carafes and decorative pieces that hold the light in a way that most glass objects do not. I bought a small bottle, deep blue with a thin neck and a slightly off-circle base that made it obviously handmade. The workshop I bought it from was run by a man who had learned the craft from his father and who demonstrated the blowing technique on a gather of molten glass with a speed that made it look like breathing.

The pottery quarter, Kharas and the villages around it, produces terracotta work that you see throughout Palestinian households — water jugs, storage vessels, olive oil dispensers — made using techniques and clay bodies that are archaeologically continuous with ancient Palestinian pottery traditions. Hebron, for all that has been done to its urban fabric, retains these productive continuities in a way that feels like a form of argument: these crafts are still here, still running, still made by the same hands in the same ways.

When to go: Spring and autumn. The old city is navigable year-round but the heat in summer is intense in the lower market areas. Arrive with a local guide or contact one of the human rights organisations that run tours of H2 — the political geography of the city is genuinely complex and having context helps you read what you’re seeing.