Dismay as Israeli settlers take over Hebron home
The dispute over a West Bank house highlights internal struggles among Palestinians and Israelis.
from the April 13, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
The religious tug of Hebron
It's been nearly 40 years since Israel wrested control of the West Bank from Jordan, taking with it Hebron, one of the ancient territory's most treasured and troublesome locales.
Almost immediately after the 1967 conflict, Jewish religious nationalists were keen to return to Hebron, where there had long been a Jewish community until an anti-Zionist riot in 1929 that killed 67 Jews and pushed the rest to flee. Post-Six Day War settlers began hunkering down in Hebron in 1968, against the Israeli army's orders.
Both Jews and Muslims revere the city's Tomb of the Patriarchs, where Abraham, Sarah, and other Biblical ancestors are believed to be buried, according to the book of Genesis.
After 29 Muslim worshipers were gunned down at the site by New York-born Jewish extremist Baruch Goldstein in 1994, Israeli authorities decided to separate Muslim and Jewish access to the site. Three years later, after much deliberation over the viability of the Oslo Accords' framework for the town, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators agreed to divide it into H1 (under full Palestinian control) and H2 (an area that would encompass the Jewish settlements and remain under Israeli control).
However, since the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada in September 2000 and the subsequent reoccupation of the Israeli army of many areas of the West Bank from which they had previously withdrawn, Palestinians say, the distinction isn't so relevant.
The house in question sits in H2, the area meant to be under Israeli control, and would make a strategic territorial link between the Hebron settlers and Kiryat Arba, a settlement across the hill.
In the meantime, however, H2 has 40,000 Palestinians in it and about 500 Jewish settlers. The numbers of Palestinians were once far greater, as many have migrated away from the tension and occasional lockdowns.
Human rights groups says Palestinian freedom of movement has been severely restricted. There are routine complaints of harassment at the hands of settlers, some of which has recently been captured on film and broadcast on Israeli television, turning many Israeli moderates against the settlers. Most Palestinians here can get to their homes or businesses only on foot because no Palestinian cars are allowed on the roads.
"Sure, we hope they'll be kicked out, but then people everywhere will just forget the situation of this area and what we're living through," says Marwan Jaber, who owns a convenience store across the street from the settlers' new digs.
"We know that if they stay here, the first thing they'll want to do is to build a road between here and Kiryat Arba, and that will mean cutting through our neighborhood, maybe confiscating our land. It's like expending a Christian extremist in America to live next to Osama bin Laden," he says.
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