STANDOFF IN HEBRON: No peace of the rock

December 2, 2002

STANDOFF IN HEBRON: No peace of the rock
___By Elaine Ruth Fletcher
___Religion News Service
___HEBRON--One lone vehicle, a tour bus, rumbles through the empty streets of Hebron. Stores are shuttered. Hebron's tens of thousands of Palestinian Arab families stay in their homes. Just one child can be seen picking his way through rubble alongside his doorway. Jewish settlers are permitted on the streets, but only a few dare.
___As a delegation of the Christian Coalition visited the city late last month, Hebron was a ghost town, locked in the grip of the bitter struggle between Jews and Muslims over control of the Cave of the Patriarchs, whose monumental first-century mausoleum marks the place where the biblical Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are said to be buried.
___An Israeli army curfew has been in place sinc

AN ORTHODOX JEW blows a shofar, a trumpet made from a ram's horn, at the Cave of the Patriarchs in the ancient Canaanite town of Hebron. Rina Castelnuovo/RNS

e Nov. 15, when soldiers escorting Jews from prayers at the cave back to the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba were ambushed by Islamic militants. The shootout left 12 Israelis dead as well as three Palestinians.
___About 10,000 Jews live in Kiryat Arba. Another 800 settlers live in three Israeli-controlled enclaves in the heart of old Hebron, many residing in Jewish properties that have belonged to the Jewish community since the Middle Ages. Surrounded by Palestinian neighborhoods on all sides, the Jewish homes have been subject to intermittent sniper attack since the Palestinian Authority assumed control over most of the city's Arab neighborhoods in 1996.
___Now, however, it is the settlers' turn to strike back.
___Israel has reinvaded the Arab neighborhoods that claim the strategic high land around the city, home to 100,000 Palestinians. Hebron is once more an occupied territory like virtually every other city in the West Bank. But the solutions in Hebron, like the religious tenor of the city itself, are also more extreme than anywhere else.
___In response to the Nov. 15 attack, Israeli government offices are drawing up plans to link Hebron's isolated Jewish enclaves in one continuous settlement running through the center of the city to the Jewish suburb of Kiryat Arba. In this city of the patriarchs, there are no spiritual compromises--only winners and losers.
___"I believe that God handed us this land on a silver platter," said Sondra Oster Baras, a Jewish Israeli who heads a local office of a group called Christian Friends of Israeli Communities. "It would have been morally wrong for us to give it back. If we were to fail to possess the land in the way Abraham did, by walking it, by settling it, we would have sinned against God. This is the most fundamental premise of the settler movement."
___Baras was referring to the Israeli victory of the 1967 Arab-Israeli wa

THE WIFE of slain Palestinian Firas Abu Mayyaleh, who was killed by Israeli troops in unclear circumstances, holds her child during the funeral in the West Bank city of Hebron April 17. (REUTERS/Nayef Hashlamoun Photo)

r, in which Israel fought Arab forces on three fronts and took control of the Jordanian-controlled east Jerusalem and the West Bank highlands.
___The West Bank is the heartland of the Palestinians and the ancient spiritual homeland of the Jewish people, where revered biblical sites are located such as Shilo, Bethel--and most important of all, Hebron, the city where Abraham lived.
___Now, it is in Hebron, Baras said, where the battle for redemption is destined to be played out in the most intense way, where Jews and Palestinians live in such close proximity, and where the war over land is fought acre by acre.
___The Cave of the Patriarchs, the core of the religious dispute, is a 2,000-year old structure whose huge rock facades resemble those of Jerusalem's Western Wall and date the edifice to the time of the biblical King Herod.
___The sacred monument sits atop two underground caverns, which have been used as burial cavities since the early Israelite period. For millennia, this place has been revered as the site where Abraham and his sons were buried, the place where Abraham, the founder of monotheism, made his first territorial acquisition in the Holy Land, a land purchase recorded in Genesis for the grave of his wife, Sarah. Over the centuries, Jews, Christians and Muslims all have fought each other for a foothold here--alternately using this site as a synagogue, a church and a mosque.
___"This is our home. These are our roots. And these are not only the roots of Judaism, they are the roots of monotheism. If you take off the roots of a tree, you know what happens to its trunk," said David Wilder, spokesman for the Jewish community of Hebron.
___Wilder was addressing the five-member Christian Coalition delegation. Speaking to the group, Wilder stood in the small hall of the "Abraham" room of the mausoleum. The room, decorated with centuries-old Arabic calligraphy citing Koranic verses, has in more recent years been turned into a synagogue.
___During a few periods in the past, the different branches of the Abrahamic tree managed to coexist peacefully in the same sacred space. After Muslims conquered the site from Christian Byzantine rulers in 638 A.D., Hebron's Jews, grateful to be released from harsh Byzantine rule, led the Muslim Caliph Omar to its hidden underground cavities. As a reward, the Jews were granted permission to build a synagogue in the courtyard of the mausoleum.
___But by 1266, more fundamentalist Muslim Mameluke rulers banned Jews from entering the cave, permitting them to come only as far as the seventh step of the entrance. In 1929, the ancient Jewish community of Hebron was wiped out entirely in Arab riots. It wasn't until 1967, when Israel conquered the West Bank, that a new and more strident breed of nationalistically minded Jews returned to Hebron to reclaim abandoned properties and settle again--and to pray within the Cave of the Patriarchs for the first time in hundreds of years.

THREE-YEAR-OLD Ori Weinberg gives a farewell kiss to his father at a military funeral Nov. 17. Israeli Col. Dror Weinberg, 38, was killed in Hebron along with 11 other soldiers and security men Nov. 15 in an attack claimed by the militant Palestinian group Islamic Jihad. It was the heaviest Israeli death toll in the divided city of Hebron since the start of the the Palestinian uprising two years ago. (REUTERS/Yossi Zeliger Photo)

___For nearly 30 years after that, Jews and Muslims shared the sacred site in an uneasy truce. But after the 1994 massacre of 29 Muslim prayer-goers by Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein, Israeli military authorities divided the cave into Jewish and Muslim sections.
___Neither side is happy with the arrangement.
___"I promise you that a day will come when this entire area will be accessible to us," said Wilder, pointing to a heavy door, now bolted, behind which stands the larger and religiously more significant Muslim section of the structure.
___"People tell us if there was a peace agreement then we would have access to these spaces; well, our Arab neighbors are more honest," Wilder added. "They tell us that if they ever get control of Hebron again, at best, we'll be able to pray outside on the steps.
___"Look at Joseph's tomb in Nablus. Look at the ancient synagogue of Jericho. Do Jews have access? No. We Jews have access today to the holy sites of Hebron only because we live here."
___The modern Jewish residential neighborhoods of Hebron are clustered around three traditionally important sites--the 16th century Avraham Avinu Synagogue, the 19th century Beit Hadassah health clinic building, and the biblical-era ruins of Tel Hebron, on a hill overlooking the center of the city.
___Over the past 10 years, the three isolated Jewish enclaves have gradually expanded to become the links in an almost continuous chain. The busy commercial route linking the enclaves has been closed to Arab traffic by Israeli military.
___The ancient Hebron marketplace that served as a pedestrian link between the Jewish enclaves and the Cave of the Patriarchs has been emptied of its merchants and Arab residents, who have fled to outlying sections of the city. Recently, alongside the walled Avraham Avinu Synagogue residential compound, another open-air Arab fruit and vegetable market has been closed and transformed into Jewish housing.
___On the other side of the city, a few hundred meters to the east of the Cave of the Patriarchs, lies the narrow valley linking Hebron and Kiryat Arba--where the Nov. 15 ambush unfolded. Here, the most extensive new building project of the Hebron community is unfolding--an effort to physically link the modern Jewish suburb of Kiryat Arba with old Hebron and the Cave of the Patriarchs.
___What was only a few days ago olive terraces is a field of dust, a new settlement outpost, where a few dozen Jews now camp in tents and freight boxcars. From an Arab house nearby, soldiers keep guard and Palestinian neighbors look uneasily onto the scene.
___Whole classes of teenage Israeli girls and boys have relocated their studies to this area, to bolster the new Jewish presence. Some of them help to unload a tractor-trailer that has just brought them school desks and chairs to use for their makeshift classrooms.
___Two 18-year-old boys, Shaul and Yitzhak, sit in the shade of one of the boxcars studying a religious text on the laws of Passover.
___"We are planning to build a new neighborhood here," declares Tzvi Katzover, mayor of Kiryat Arba, to the visiting Christian Coalition delegation, promising them that dozens of new apartments will soon rise on this dusty plot of a few acres of land.
___"The terrorists wanted to bring death. We want to bring life. Wherever there is land, there must be houses. Wherever there are Jews, there will be soldiers, Wherever there will be soldiers, there will be security. ... Go back to the U.S. and tell your Congress not to put pressure on us. Whatever we do here, or don't do here, is a result of American pressure."
___

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