Right next to the base there’s a religious yeshiva (the 'Shavei Hebron' seminary) and next to it there’s the Hebron Chabad emissaries' house, and their mission is to, like, do nice things for soldiers and maintain good relations between the Jewish population and the soldiers – to put it nicely. My interpretation, how I experienced it, to put it less nicely, is [that their mission was] to constantly remind the soldiers whose side they’re on. It became apparent in that both on Fridays and on Saturdays, they’d bring us to them for meals, everyone who wasn’t on guard duty.

Bring [you] where? Their house, their second story is like this kind of hall. It’s a really big room, and you can fit loads and loads of tables in rows. It’s like a real event. Pretty much everyone who’s in Hebron comes there, [anyone who is] not at the [guard] post at that moment, comes. Because when you have the [military] cook’s food – it’s doubtful whether he knows how to cook, and on a Saturday he definitely hasn’t got the energy to cook, and he’s not allowed to, so he cooks on Friday, and it gets warmed up on Saturday and it’s this dry Hamin (a slow-cooked stew traditionally eaten on Saturday) – so in contrast to that, when you’re given meat dishes and salads, and everything is in like disposable dishes and you don’t have to worry about dishes afterward, and you’re given soft drinks and things like that, then regardless of what you believe, of course you’re going to go there. Like, because you’re already stuck here for 21 [days], [some] people got 28 days at the base, of course you’re going to go eat delicious food, that’s what keeps you going. And then there, I think that in conversations with them, it feels like they’re always trying to remind you that, see, we, like, take care of you, like, be on our side.

Do you remember, like, what they say? I think they talked about how like we’re all Jews, and we have to be [there] for each other. They really emphasized it, the Jewishness, as [being] distinct from the Arabs. There’s us, our side, and there’s them. Now, there was this incident where a few Jewish kids, seven, eight, were really provoking the Arab kids, and they stole their bikes or something. There were, like, two guys soldiers at the post.

The Jews stole from the Palestinians? Yes, the Jews stole from the Palestinians and then the soldiers got involved and gave them back the bike like as part of maintaining order in the place. The Jewish community heard about it, and they, like, got on their case, they really took it hard in the sense of, “How can you be on the Arabs’ side? We’re so here for you, and [look] how you betray us.”

Did someone say this to you? There’s this stand where they make coffee for soldiers, Anat’s Cafe. And then when they heard about it, they swapped the sugar for salt that day at that stand, on purpose, exactly on that day.

They took revenge on you. Yes. And it was like, “What are you, children, what are you doing swapping the sugar for salt.” We laughed at how pathetic it was, and also – how is that what you’re bothered by.