Tomb Fuels Bitter Feelings in West Bank

Thousands of years after the biblical patriarch Abraham purchased a family burial ground in this ancient Canaanite town, the Cave of Machpelah--or Cave of the Patriarchs, as it is often called--is probably the world’s most bitterly disputed cemetery and the religious soul of the modern-day Israeli-Arab battle for control of Hebron.

The Jewish claims on the cemetery, and the Jewish homes and synagogues clustered near the site, have made the Israeli decision on whether to withdraw partially from Hebron a loaded political and religious issue for newly elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

If Abraham were alive today, he might be shocked and dismayed at the violent Jewish-Muslim political debate over the graveyard, which he purchased from the pagan, Canaanite residents of Hebron in what the Bible describes as a model of peaceful exchange between peoples of different faiths:

“And Abraham bowed himself down before the people of the land . . . saying . . . ‘I pray thee, I will give thee the price of the field; take it of me, and I will bury my dead there,’ ” according to Genesis 23:12-16. “. . . Ephron answered Abraham, saying to him, ‘My lord, hearken to me: A piece of land worth 400 shekels of silver, what is that between me and thee? Bury therefore thy dead.’ ”

Tradition says Sarah and Abraham are buried on the site (“Machpelah” is an obscure Hebrew word for “pairs”). The couple’s son, Isaac, and his wife, Rebecca, are also believed to be buried there, along with their grandson, Jacob, and one of his wives, Leah. The cemetery was the first land acquisition by the nomadic Hebrew tribes in the land God had promised to Abraham’s descendants.

As a result, Hebron is regarded as the second most important city to Jews after Jerusalem. Jewish communities have lived in the shadow of the Cave and pious Jews have made pilgrimages to the site in an almost continuous chain extending back to biblical times.

But Muslim Arabs also see themselves as heirs to Abraham’s legacy. They trace their lineage to Abraham’s first son, Ishmael, who was born of Sarah’s Egyptian servant Hagar. As latter-day descendants of Ishmael, Muslims also claim the Machpelah burial ground, which they call Abraham’s Mosque or Abraham’s Holy Site.

Both the Bible and Islamic traditions suggest that Abraham’s first link to Hebron was not only the result of divine direction, but also part of a broader process that took place in early nomadic civilization.

“In human history, one of the most basic features of the transition from nomadic to sedentary life was the identification of a burial place,” says Ze’ev Yavin, an Israeli archeologist who has explored the Machpelah site.

“The Cave of Machpelah was part of the settlement process of the nomadic Hebrew tribes.”

Islamic tradition, on the other hand, continued to place a slightly greater stress on Abraham’s Bedouin-style wanderings.

As a shepherd who roamed the Negev Desert region around Beersheva, Abraham probably traveled north to the Hebron highlands regularly in the summertime to find relief from the heat. There he camped as a “respected guest” of the local Canaanite rulers, returning south in the winter, says Yunis Amr, a Palestinian professor of ancient Semitic languages who wrote a book on Abraham’s Mosque.

After Sarah died and was buried in Hebron, Abraham’s connection naturally deepened and he “began to come to the town from time to time to visit the holy grave.” Still, “Abraham came as a guest, not with a gun,” adds Amr, referring to the weapons of present-day Jewish settlers.

“And the field of Ephron, which was in Machpelah, which was before Mamre, the field and the cave which was in it, and all the trees that were in the field . . . were made over to Abraham for a possession,” says Genesis 23:17.

Today, this once-pastoral field sits in the heart of Arab Hebron. And the reputed Cave of Machpelah has been covered for centuries by a massive stone-faced structure, probably built in the 1st century by the Roman-appointed King Herod.

Inside the walls, a rectangular basilica has been used over the centuries by Jews, Christians and Muslims as a place of pilgrimage and prayer, and renovated by a succession of Byzantine Christian and Muslim rulers.

The archeological findings, together with historical descriptions of the site, make it “clear there was a tradition of Jewish pilgrimage to it from a very early era,” says Yavin.

The Islamic conquest of Hebron in 638 AD, however, was the catalyst for the gradual Islamic sanctification of the site and the surrounding city.

In Arabic, Hebron came to be known as Al Khalil, meaning “friend of God”--a biblically based nickname for Abraham. Islamic religious writers began to describe the town as a way station on the prophet Muhammad’s mystical night journey to Jerusalem, the place where Muslim tradition reports that he ascended to heaven.

Hebron, meanwhile, became an important stop for Muslim pilgrims making the hajj, or pilgrimage, to the Islamic holy city of Mecca, located in modern-day Saudi Arabia, and gradually evolved into a center of serious Islamic study and mystical Sufi practice. Out of that pious population emerged the more militant groups of Islamic fundamentalists, who have opposed the Jewish settlement drive in the town during the past 30 years.

Jews lived in the city almost continuously for centuries until 1929, when Arab nationalists rallied against the rapidly increasing Jewish immigration to Palestine and murdered 67 Hebron Jews. The remainder of the 700-strong Jewish community was evacuated from the city.

The Jewish presence was revived when Israel conquered the West Bank in 1967. Then religious nationalist Jewish settlers renovated and resettled former Jewish community properties. They were met with stiff resistance, however, by the local Arabs, who resented the new settlers’ aggressive political ideology.

Tensions peaked in February 1994 when a prominent Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein, massacred more than 30 Arab Muslim worshipers as they prostrated themselves for dawn prayers inside Abraham’s Mosque. Since the massacre, the various courtyards and sanctuaries on the site have been strictly partitioned between Muslims and Jews--a partition bitterly resented by both sides.

On a deeper level, differing attitudes toward worship in the Cave of Machpelah remain at the crux of a seemingly irreconcilable conflict between Hebron’s 25,000 Muslims and the 5,000 Jewish settlers who live in the ancient town and in the new suburb of Kiryat Arba.

Leaders of Hebron’s Jewish settler community assert that the site should be open for worship to peoples of all faiths.

But Arabs claim that over the last two decades, Jews have gradually expanded public worship--encroaching on Muslim ceremonies and rituals. And today, even the most liberal Muslims claim that rights to worship in the site should belong exclusively to them, and that Jews should be allowed to visit, but not to pray publicly in what Islam regards exclusively as a mosque.

Most Jews reject such claims of exclusivity. Many are also disturbed by the gradual expansion of Jewish public worship activities in the cave to regular synagogue services and even religious celebrations, a practice they say runs against Jewish tradition.

“Judaism,” says Orthodox Rabbi Ze’ev Gotthold, “honors the body as the seat of the soul,” but forbids the use of a graveyard as a synagogue out of respect for the dead who cannot join in the public worship.

Gotthold, who has studied Jewish attitudes on holy places, says that “the ancient pilgrims used to go to the Cave of Machpelah for meditation”--and modern-day worship by Jews and Muslims should be similarly limited.

“The current dispute is man-centered rather than God-centered,” he said. “It’s an example of God serving man, rather than man serving God.”