Hebron is off the beaten track for most pilgrims, though it’s only 25 miles southwest of Jerusalem and the burial place of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Abraham’s wife, Sarah.
For centuries, Hebron was a predominately Palestinian city with a small but distinguished Jewish community. Several notable commentaries on the Torah were written there. But the killing of 68 Jews in the 1929 Arab Revolt made Hebron an epicenter of Jewish-Muslim tensions ever since.
A plaque on the wall of the museum memorializing the dead and wounded lays part of the blame at the feet of the British police, who made little attempt to protect the Jews. Most of Palestine was under the British Mandate at the time.
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
Sign up to get Crisis articles delivered to your inbox daily
The remainder of the Jewish community left Hebron after the slaughter in 1929. They would not return en masse until the 1967 Six Day War, when Israel took possession of the West Bank from Jordan (Jordan had taken possession of the West Bank at the end of the British Mandate in 1946).
Jewish settlers returning to Hebron after the Six Day War first built homes at the edge of the city before forcibly reoccupying much of the Jewish property at the city center. When their resettlement was resisted by local Palestinians, the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) protected them — and still do today.
The decades following the Jewish resettlement witnessed sporadic but deadly acts of violence between the Jewish settlers and Hebron’s predominately Muslim community. For example, in 1994, a Jewish extremist, Baruch Goldstein, entered a mosque and killed 29 Muslims with a machine gun. The large memorial to Goldstein can be seen on the main road out of Hebron — it’s a place of pilgrimage by Jewish extremists. (Jewish women suffering from infertility sometimes lie prostrate over his grave in hopes of being made fertile.)
The worst violence, however, occurred during the Second Intifada of 2001-2002, when Muslim terrorists shot dozens of Jews from the hilltops surrounding the town. As a result, the main street in Hebron, housing the Palestinian market and shops, was cleared by Israeli troops, creating a buffer zone through the city to protect the Jewish community and its access to the Tomb of the Patriarchs.
One of the settlers, Noam Arron, the Deputy Spokesman for Beit Hadesseh, met our group to discuss the future of Hebron. He recalled the terror of the intifada, including a ten-month-old baby who was made one of its victims with a bullet shot through her head.
After relating the events leading to the division of the city, Arron surprised us by saying he hopes one day the barriers and check points will be removed, allowing Jews and Palestinians to live side by side as they once did. “No one wants to live this way,” he said.
Listen to Arron in his own words: [video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3xWmOXjV8M 635×355]