Do you have conversations with the settlers? Yes. After all the events at Shaharabati house (a Palestinian family who lived next to the Avraham Avinu settlement was chased out of their home by settlers), our soldiers feel very hurt each time, and they don’t understand what they’re actually doing there, in Hebron. We even have right-wingers – the extreme right-wingers stayed on – but the right-wingers say: Enough, I don’t want to serve here, I don’t want to protect them. We talked about writing letters to the Jewish settlers, talking to them. Lately you can see a certain effort on the part of the Jewish settlements, following, I don’t know whether it’s the fact that lots of media teams came in, after that. Suddenly you have this settler who comes to the posts with a can of instant coffee every morning, you have one who regularly goes to all the army posts with instant coffee and sweets. And all this has only been taking place lately.

Is this something new? Yes.

Do you go over to them for Sabbath meals? Yes, always. Friday nights. The head of Habad, a person I really like, Danny, I forget his name, a good guy. He invites more or less the whole company to his home for this meal. There are a lot of settlers who invite us over.

Everyone who’s not on Carmel A, B, C goes there? Yes.

Your company commander authorized this? He encourages it. He also goes over to eat there. At the end of the day, they, the Hebron settlers, they differentiate. On the one hand, they hate the guts of the Border Police, on the other hand, they love the army and understand what it’s doing there and all.

And they hate the Border Police because? Because it has non-Jews. They hate Border Police because they’re policemen.

These are things you hear from them? The most classic example was in Hannukah, when they give out sufganiyot (traditional doughnuts). At Hannukah they give out sufganiyot, so one of the kids is talking with his Bnei Akiva (youth movement) leader, who tells him: “Just don’t give them out to Border Police.” I saw them bringing sufganiyot to the Border Police in the end anyway, but that sentence, just don’t give them to Border Police.

“Because they’re non-Jews,” is that something they say to you? First of all, it’s something that I don’t think is so accepted. On the one hand they really support it, on the other hand, I don’t know if that’s the main thing. The main thing is that they’re police. Period. Police above everything.

Why do they hate the police? Why do they hate the police? Because the police can do things to them that the army can’t. The police can arrest them, the police can interrogate them.

Does the police do that? No. The police uses a camera. It’s the main weapon of the police in Hebron, every policeman has a camera. Almost each and every one of them, I think, has a camera in Hebron, because they know that’s their main weapon against them.