Preaching Peace, Jackson Sees Hebron Anger

A violent street uprising erupted Friday near the site of the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre when the Rev. Jesse Jackson, calling on the history of civil unrest in the United States, tried to lead a march into the mosque and landed in a hailstorm of flying rocks and tear gas.

Jackson, who took shelter in a bus as rubber bullets, stones, tear gas and concussion grenades exploded in the square around him, repeatedly tried to calm the thousands of young men pushing to join him in a march toward the mosque, sealed off by the Israeli army since a Jewish settler killed about 30 Palestinians there Feb. 25.

Jackson, perched atop the roof of a car, tried to get the young Arabs to mouth the words “Keep hope alive!” But the crowd, after a few futile attempts, broke into deafening shouts of “ Allahu Akbar! (God is great!)”

Taysir Tamimi--a cleric from the Islamic fundamentalist group Hamas who accompanied Jackson and who is prayer leader of the Hebron mosque--broke into a smile as the restive crowd lurched toward the soldiers and unleashed a hail of stones.

“The people are wonderful,” he said quietly.

When it was over, as many as 25 Palestinians were wounded--three of them were reportedly hurt by live bullets fired by the army as the rapidly growing mass of young men unleashed their fury from behind the shelter of Jackson’s bus.

The U.S. civil rights leader’s visit, on the eve of a 30th-anniversary conference on the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was intended to spread a message of peace and negotiation after the most violent month since Israel and the PLO embarked on the road toward Palestinian self-rule six months ago.

Instead, Jackson became surrounded in a melee as Israeli soldiers indicated that his entourage would be permitted to pray in the mosque but refused entrance to the thousands of people swarming through the streets behind him.

No Muslims have been permitted to enter the sacred site since the massacre, which Jackson proclaimed, like Calvary for Christians, “could be a turning point for the Palestinians.”

“There’s so much frustration, it just explodes and it just turns over,” Jackson said after the street uprising, which he said he was “used to” after his days in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

“We must be even more determined than ever to break the cycle of pain and fear,” he said. “The peace process must be escalated, not held back. For with 50% unemployed young men, the presence of troops is just built-in tension. As the troops come out and Palestinian self-rule takes over and unemployment ends, you’ll have a whole new environment.”

In Jerusalem, an emergency session of the Security Cabinet, called to consider the violence of the last three days, declared that the occupied territories will remain closed until at least Thursday, Israel’s Independence Day, effectively barring up to 70,000 Palestinians from reaching jobs in Israel.

Police said they were conducting sweeps throughout Israel to locate unlicensed Palestinian workers and return them to the territories.

“Every day several hundred residents of the territories, some of whom have been in Israel for months, are transferred to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank,” Police Minister Moshe Shahal said.

The government also said it will seek to increase the number of other foreign workers in Israel, replacing Palestinians in vital construction and agricultural labor fields.

“It was decided, in answer to the needs of the market . . . to allow the import of foreign workers in the necessary numbers,” said a statement issued by Oded Ben-Ami, spokesman for Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

The actions follow two attacks since Wednesday that have killed eight Israelis and wounded many others, one a suicide car bombing of a bus in northern Israel, the other by a Palestinian who opened fire near the port of Ashdod.

In Hebron, Palestinians hopeful that Jackson’s march would succeed in opening the sealed-off mosque instead were in for another day of frustration.

“We live with this kind of confrontation every day, but the visit itself is very effective. It’s very important to us to see people standing behind us who are not Palestinians,” local PLO activist Nasser Hourani said of the U.S. political leader’s visit. “When they shot tear gas, he just smelled it like the rest of us! It was very comforting.”

With Jackson was Hassan Abdul Rahman, the PLO’s Washington affairs director and a longtime PLO official in Tunis, Tunisia, who was making only his second visit to the occupied territories.

“This is the first time I witnessed the confrontation between the Israeli army and the Palestinian young people. But obviously, it’s a friction point,” Abdul Rahman said. “The violence today was a natural consequence of such a tense situation. Had the army allowed the people inside the mosque, had they not intervened with the movement of the people, there would have been no problem.”

Back on the bus, one of Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition staff members shrank in his seat.

“I think this is the most exciting day of my life,” he said, shaking his head. “Is it always like this?”

Earlier in the day, Jackson spoke to a crowd of young Arab Hebronites at a student union hall. There was restlessness and occasional chaos as Jackson urged peace.

“Some people think that Michael Jackson is talking,” one young Palestinian said apologetically.

The civil rights leader urged the Palestinians to remain engaged in the peace process and explained to them the biblical proverb of the lion that lies down with the lamb.

“Even as we talk, the Israeli occupation is on the way out of Gaza, on the way out of Jericho, the Palestinians are on their way in. These are the fruits of the tree of peace,” he said. “We must break the cycle of pain and fear. . . . If we accept an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life, we’ll all be ugly and dead.”

As Jackson moved on and the crowd walked out to the street, a young man, Awad, smiled.

“He was talking about the lion and the lamb,” he said. “But I kept wondering, which one is the lion? And which one is the lamb?”