Hebron’s 50 Jewish Families Unsettle Mideast

Twenty-eight years have passed since a few Jewish families rented an Arab hotel in downtown Hebron, moved in their kosher refrigerators and cookware to celebrate Passover and then refused to leave.

Sarah Nachshon still smiles when she recalls how the religious families presented the Israeli government and the Arab world with a fait accompli in the predominantly Palestinian city.

“A big army officer came to us a few days after Passover and said: ‘This group is like a bone in the government’s throat. We cannot disgorge you, and we cannot swallow you,’ ” Nachshon said. “Well, today we are still a bone in their throat.”

At minimum, the settlers are a bone of contention that has choked the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations time and again. Today the two sides are still at loggerheads over how much protection is needed for the 50 Jewish families in downtown Hebron.

The settlers and their supporters in nearby Kiryat Arba are reviled as fundamentalists by many Israelis. A political commentator recently referred to them on national television as the “bottom of the barrel” of Israeli society, and an editorial in the centrist newspaper Maariv said negotiators need not take their point of view into account but instead must “satisfy the rational needs of normal people.”

Yet the settlers of Hebron hold center stage in the negotiations, much as they have held their ground over the last 28 years--through Zionist ideology, armed intransigence and religious zeal.

They view their struggle not as an end but as a beginning, an early battle in the greater war for Jerusalem and, ultimately, Israel itself.

“If we give up on Hebron, we give up on Jerusalem and then on Tel Aviv,” said Hebron resident Anat Cohen, a pregnant mother of eight sons.

Palestinians want eastern Jerusalem as the capital of an independent state encompassing the West Bank, which Israel captured from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War, and the Gaza Strip.

Peace accords aside, the settlers believe that the Palestinians mean to drive the Jews out of Israel.

“It’s written in the Bible,” Nachshon said, “that until the Messiah comes there will be a big war, and the war will be in Jerusalem.”

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The settlers feel certain that God and truth are on their side in the struggle to hold on to the city where the Jewish forefathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are buried. And they have convinced numerous Israeli governments that it would be political suicide to try to remove Jews from Hebron.

Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the historic Israeli-Palestinian peace accords, had little patience for West Bank settlers.

He considered moving them out of downtown Hebron after a doctor from Kiryat Arba, Baruch Goldstein, killed about 30 Muslims praying in what Palestinians call the Ibrahim mosque at the Cave of the Patriarchs in 1994.

But even Rabin decided he could not risk moving the armed settlers against their will.

The settlers view as racism any suggestion that their presence in Hebron may be a provocation.

To stand aside is to agree that Jews have no right to live in that holy city, they say, and any Israeli government that gives Palestinians control of Jewish land--Hebron or any other part of the West Bank--is an Uncle Tom.

“These are stupid Israeli authorities who still think like their fathers in Europe,” Nachshon said. “They want to be nice to the Gentiles. That is the way to survive in the Diaspora.”

In fact, it was Rabin’s interim peace agreement with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat that cemented the settlers’ presence in Hebron.

The accord, signed in September 1995, two months before Rabin was assassinated by a religious Jew, called for the withdrawal of Israeli troops from six West Bank cities, including Hebron, but it accepted a permanent Jewish community in the center of Hebron and included measures for its protection.

The troop pullback was delayed last March by then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres after a series of suicide bombings by Muslim fundamentalists killed more than 60 people in Israel.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who defeated Peres in national elections in May and is more sympathetic to the Hebron settlers’ cause than his predecessors were, deemed the security measures inadequate. He insisted on reopening negotiations on security after gun battles broke out last month between Palestinian police and Israeli soldiers.

The settlers’ view is that the roughly 100,000 Palestinians who live in Hebron--and trace their roots back more than 1,000 years--are foreign squatters in a place deeded to Jews in the Bible and returned to them by God in the 1967 war.

Rivka Zerbib, 43, a Jewish mother of 11 children, said she shuddered the first time she saw an armed Palestinian policeman in the West Bank. She felt “humiliation,” she said. “It’s not their place here.”

The Jewish land claim is based on Genesis, the first book of the Bible, where it says that Abraham bought the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron about 3,500 years ago to bury his wife, Sarah. Sarah is the mother of Jews, not Muslims, the settlers argue, and the Ibrahim mosque established there in the 7th century was an attempt to wipe out Jewish roots.

The original Jewish community in Hebron was destroyed in 1929, when Arabs rose up against Jewish immigration to Palestine. Hebron’s Arab residents launched a pogrom that left 67 Jews dead and 60 wounded. The remaining 600 Jews, many of whom had been hidden by Arab neighbors, fled.

Thirty-five families returned briefly two years later but were evacuated under British rule in the face of renewed Arab attacks. Hebron remained a wholly Arab city until Passover in 1968.

The “guests” at the Arab hotel grew in number and were moved to an uncomfortable Israeli military compound downtown, where the government apparently hoped they would grow tired and eventually leave.

The government, then headed by the Labor Party, finally agreed to build the settlement of Kiryat Arba on the edge of Hebron. The settlers moved but would not give up their claim to the city.

In 1975, Nachshon’s 6-month-old son, Abraham, died a crib death, and she was determined to bury him in the old Jewish cemetery in the middle of Hebron. Soldiers blocked her path as she tried to get into the city, and she faced off with them for hours with her dead baby until finally she was allowed through.

“Our father Abraham came to Hebron to bury his wife, Sarah, and I, Sarah, came to bury my son Abraham,” Nachshon said.

When the Likud Party government of Menachem Begin returned the Sinai village of Yamit to Egypt in 1982, settlers such as Nachshon believed that they saw the writing on the wall and decided to return downtown.

In the middle of the night, with Israeli soldiers blocking the front door, 15 settler women and 35 children--including Nachshon and eight of her offspring--crawled through a window of the abandoned Beit Hadassah hospital.

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The settlers believed that the government would not forcibly remove the women and children, and they were right. Soon the Israeli soldiers were bringing them water. Within two months, they let some women out to buy vegetables and their men inside to perform Sabbath rites.

The Jewish community downtown is now home to about 450 settlers.

Home means a crowded stone fortress guarded by Israeli soldiers who stand behind sandbag barricades and survey the Arab streets through the sights of their automatic rifles. The settlers’ children ride to school or swimming lessons in nearby Kiryat Arba on buses protected by metal grates and armored-car escorts. Their toddlers run in enclosed playgrounds beneath the roar of Israeli fighter jets on exercises.

The settlers pass through army posts and metal detectors to enter the Cave of the Patriarchs. Their prayers are punctuated by the Muslim call to prayer over loudspeakers from the town’s minarets.

None of this fazes the settlers. For them, family life on the front line is a necessary bulwark against Palestinian control of Hebron. It is a lesson they learned from history.

“The Crusaders came here as a group of monks, and they built castles and didn’t survive because they didn’t build a normal way of life,” said Noam Arnon, 42, who lives with his wife and seven children in Beit Hadassah. “We are building normal, lasting, continuous life with families. We are . . . a city.”

Their children are happy, said Arnon and others: Their lives are full of “truth” and “meaning,” close to their Jewish roots.

“They grow up with a feeling that they are doing something very important,” Arnon said.

They also grow up in a circle of hatred. The hostility between the two sides is palpable in the streets of Hebron, where angry graffiti in Hebrew and Arabic scar the walls, and Muslims and Jews bristle if they pass too close to one another. Each knows the shared history of stone throwing, stabbings and shootings.

Hamas, an Islamic fundamentalist group that opposes the peace accords because it believes that the pacts concede too much to the Jews, lurks somewhere in the shadows of the ancient city. The settlers ran their own terrorist underground out of Hebron and other West Bank enclaves in the early 1980s that planted bombs in the cars of Arab mayors and plotted to blow up the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem before its members were arrested.

Today, sinewy settlers in skullcaps and religious tassels still carry guns and say they are setting up a militia to “protect themselves” once Israeli troops pull out of most of Hebron.

Israeli and Palestinian officials are still arguing about the scope of the troop withdrawal from Hebron.

The interim peace accord calls for Israeli troops to remain on the ground around the settlers and the Cave of the Patriarchs. Netanyahu now wants to add buffer zones between soldiers and Palestinian police, control the high ground around the downtown settlements and maintain the right to pursue suspected terrorists into the Palestinian-controlled part of the city.

So far, the Palestinians have rejected the new demands.

Even if they are accepted, the settlers’ forecasts are apocalyptic.

They speak frequently and rather matter-of-factly of the possibility of another Jewish massacre in Hebron--this time their own. Arnon, a spokesman for Hebron’s Jewish community, warns that such a scenario could unfold very quickly after Palestinian police enter Hebron.

“Things can get worse from one minute to the next. Maybe the police won’t shoot us, but terrorists may try to shoot into our houses or at a bus. Then Jews will shoot back. Then big mobs of Palestinians will begin to riot and the Palestinian police will have to participate. . . . How can it be stopped?” he asked.