Profaning a Holy City
Opinion
By Haim Watzman
Hebron this month resembled nothing so much as Jerusalem in the summer of 70 C.E. Then, as now, Jewish extremists battled the duly constituted leadership of the people, taking the law into their own hands and throwing morality to the wind. When Jewish hatred desecrated Jerusalem that fateful summer 1,938 years ago, the Jewish people lost their Temple and were exiled from their capital for centuries.
As a religious Jew, the violence in Hebron pains me deeply. Hebron’s center is the Cave of Machpelah, the tomb of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob and Leah. King David ruled there for seven years before moving his capital to Jerusalem. Hebron is one of the four holy cities in the Land of Israel where Jews maintained a presence for centuries before the dawn of Zionism. And, in modern times, it saw the martyrdom of 67 Jews, who were murdered in 1929 by rampaging Muslims incited by false rumors that the Jews intended to defile the Muslim holy sites on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.
I last visited the Cave of Machpelah in the spring of 1987, when I was a reserve soldier in an infantry unit deployed to keep order in Hebron. Our work in Hebron consisted of protecting four enclaves of Jewish settlement in the otherwise Muslim city. This was before the outbreak of the first Intifada later that year, so the city was quiet and the Arabs mostly docile.
Most of the Jews we encountered there, however, treated the Arabs rudely; if we soldiers protested, they responded to us with condescension. They didn’t hesitate to tell us that they considered us traitors to the great truth they represented. As far as they were concerned, the Jewish state was merely an instrument for accomplishing their messianic agenda of expelling the Arabs and re-creating a theocratic Jewish kingdom. Whatever the state, its citizens and its soldiers did that delayed or frustrated that goal was, in their view, illegitimate and criminal.
I visited the Tomb of the Patriarchs in the company of a fellow soldier, newly religious and a student at the yeshiva located adjacent to our base in the center of the city. Other soldiers from our battalion stood guard at the gates and inside.
The shrine was divided into sections for Muslim and Jewish worshippers. I knew that Muslim clerics had, for many long years before Israel conquered Hebron in 1967, forbidden Jews to enter the cave’s inner sanctum. Thereafter, a regime of ostensible co-existence had been established by the army, which served as a buffer between two groups made up largely of people who were looking for an opportunity to expel the other from the holy site, which they wanted exclusively for themselves.
The tension in the air was so thick it overwhelmed the awe I felt at treading in this holy precinct. I found myself muttering my prayers without spirit, in trepidation.
Seven years later, Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish doctor from the adjacent Jewish town of Kiryat Arba, donned his reserve officer’s uniform, took his semi-automatic IDF rifle and walked into the Muslim sanctuary. He sprayed the worshippers there with bullets, killing at least 29 and wounding dozens of others. This act of sacrilege left me unable to even think of praying again at the Tomb of the Patriarchs. Instead of bringing the Jewish people closer to this historic site, he had made it a site of national shame.
The actions of the young delinquents who attacked Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians earlier this month were not murderous like Goldstein. But they acted in the same spirit.
Leaders of the West Bank settler community sought to disassociate themselves from what they called a small coterie of wayward kids. Yet these hooligans are the products of a national-religious educational system that has, in all too many schools and seminaries, taught that all means are justified to achieve the goal of Greater Israel, and that the law of the land should be accorded no respect wherever it runs counter to the precepts of the Jewish religion as the settlers understand it.
The settlers in Hebron, and the teenage riffraff who joined them to defend the disputed house that was the epicenter of the recent confrontations, say they are asserting the Jewish people’s claim to its second-holiest city. The opposite is true. Each act of wanton destruction committed against Palestinians, each stone thrown at an Israeli soldier or policeman, is a blow against Jewish rights in Hebron.
In the year 70, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai realized that God had abandoned his holy city when it was overrun by profane and murderous Jews. He abandoned it, too. I will not pray in Hebron as long as it remains a symbol of violence, lawlessness and intolerance.
Haim Watzman is the author of “A Crack in the Earth: A Journey Up Israel’s Rift Valley” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) and “Company C: An American’s Life as a Citizen-Soldier in Israel” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005). He blogs at southjerusalem.com.
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There are some extremesist also among the Jews and they should be condemned. Mr Haim Waitzman reaction was right as he reacted as he did. However the main fact is that the Jews which live in Hebron are called "settlers" by many Western media which are ignorant of Jewish history and religious tradition or consider it less important than other religious ones. Jews have the right, in my opinion , to live in Hebron . I would like that media mention ALL the incidents and violence, also that coming from Arab side.
It was Ed Koch of all people who put it bluntly 20 years ago. "I believe that a Jew should be allowed to live in Hebron, just as a Jew should have a right to live anywhere else he wants to." It is only in the Middle East that Jews cannot live where they wish. We cannot control the rules in Yemen or Syria or Dubai, but the fact that a Jew cannot live anywhere in Israel is a disgrace. Stone throwing was not invented by youths in the Peace House. The same folks that decry minor instances against Palestinians have nnot a word to say about the rain of Katyushas all over Southern Israel. There disengenous voices do nothing toward promoting any lasting peace.
David, Would you describe desecrating graves and burning houses as "minor" if it was carried out against Jews? Even if it is true that Israel is sometimes not treated fairly, it is sad that is used as an excuse for hooliganism of the worst kind.
My congratulations to Haim Watzman on writing an honest, accurate, and principled piece on the goings on in Hebron. The pogrom carried out by the Jews there was shameful and an embarrassment to me as a Jew. I wish more religious Jews had the moral strength and conviction that he displays in coming out and condemning the brutal violence and lawlessness of the extremists of Hebron. Their behavior is a disgrace to the Jewish people and a threat to the state of Israel.
Haim Watzman is a long-time opponent of Jewish settlement in areas under Israel's control that are part of the Jewish people's historic and religious homeland but not under its formal soverignty, i.e., Judea and Samaria. Fine. But, in writing, "I will not pray in Hebron as long as it remains a symbol of violence, lawlessness and intolerance" he has created a philosophical problem. Now, while I agree that the damage done by the riffraff was quite negative, and I wrote about it - not in the Forward but at Arutz 7, -might I suggest that Watzman has gone out on a limb: for if violence limits prayer, he'd find very few places in which to do so. And Hebron's Arab violence should also, then, count for quite a few negative points in the political accounting.
If Haim is truly serious about not praying in a city that is profaned by Jews, he should leave al Quds as well. Al Quds is holy to Islam and Christianity, yet since 1967, Israel has set up a Jewish crude version of Disneyland. I recommend that Mr Watzman worship in Las Vegas
Oh yes. A very fair and balanced article. Which conveniently forgets all the Arab murders in Chevron between 1929 and the present. Baruch Goldstein did not arise in a vacuum.
great article. i spent shabbat in hebron 2 months ago. after the euphoria of kabbalat shabbat in the machpela i experienced a rapid comedown experiencing how the settlers live in their fortified, ethnically-cleansed ghetto. I felt physically sick for several days afterwards - hebron is simply the lowest point that the jewish people have reached for a long, long time. jews have a very strong connection to this place, unfortunately, a few racist extremists are breaking that link.