Hebron: a West Bank magnet for trouble - World

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 18, 2002 by Margot Patterson

Second in a two-part series:

Part I (NCR, Oct. 11) looked at the growing alliance between fundamentalist Jews in Israel and fundamentalist Christians in this country. This installment looks at how Jewish settlers known for extremism are affecting life in the West Bank city of Hebron.

It's a beautiful drive from Jerusalem to the West Bank city of Hebron. Low stone walls wind through rocky hillsides. The scenery is pastoral; the biblical heartland looks almost uncannily just as you might imagine it would. On this particular day in March there are no shepherds about, but the service taxi I'm in, a minivan with 11 people squeezed into it, passes a man riding a mule. We also pass three Muslim women hitchhiking. Wearing long raincoats and headscarves, they stick out their thumbs in a gesture recognizable the world over.

The taxi stops at two Israeli checkpoints where the men in the van pile out and at gunpoint lift up their shirts to show Israeli soldiers they're not carrying explosives. The main road to Hebron is blocked, but the van is sturdy enough to drive over a mound of dirt heaped on a smaller exit road, and within minutes the taxi pulls into Hebron's busy downtown.

Hebron is a magnet for trouble on the West Bank. A Palestinian city of about 123,000, Hebron is home to some of the most extreme members of the Israeli settler movement. In 1968, a little less than a year after the Six Day War gave Israel control of the West Bank, 60 Orthodox Jews, disciples of the Messianist Rabbi Tzvi Yehudah Kook, took rooms in a Hebron hotel for the Passover holiday and refused to leave. Eventually, the Israeli government moved them to a military outpost, which in time became Kiryat Arba, a Jewish town on the edge of Hebron. Then in 1979 under cover of night a group of 15 women and 45 children from Kiryat Arba entered the Hadassah Clinic in Hebron itself. Despite entreaties by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, they refused to leave. Today about 500 settlers, protected by about 1,200 Israeli soldiers, live surrounded by a sea of Palestinians.

I was curious to visit Hebron. An English journalist in Jerusalem had ranted about the settlers in Hebron. She said they threw garbage at the local people, ripped off young Muslim women's headscarves, turned over the fruit and vegetable carts of Palestinian vendors, and broke into Palestinian shops. "You have to go there to believe it," she told me.

Another chance conversation with a member of the Christian Peacemaker Team working in Hebron turned up other information just as startling. A project of the Mennonite church, the Church of the Brethren, Friends United Meeting and other Christian denominations, the team places trained peacemakers in situations of conflict to defuse tension. Since 1995 the team has operated in Hebron. The Hebron settlers frequently paint graffiti such as "Death to Arabs" and Star of David emblems on Palestinian shop windows, I was told. Among many of the settlers, "Nazi" is a casual term of abuse.

"Anyone who doesn't agree with them is a Nazi," said Mary Lawrence, an Episcopal minister and Christian Peacemaker Team volunteer in Hebron who described being spit upon and called a Nazi as she escorted Palestinian children to school. Settlers who mistreat Palestinians do so with relative impunity, Lawrence said, with the Israeli police given little authority to stop them. "The settlers have friends higher up who shelter them often against complaints," said Lawrence, who reported that the Israeli police are often sued by settlers if the police intervene to uphold the law.

"The settlers not only harass the Palestinians around them but they harass the police and the soldiers who are sent to protect them," said Lewis Roth, president of Americans for Peace Now, an American Zionist organization that partners with the Israeli peace movement Peace Now. "Hebron has attracted some of the most reactionary elements of the settlement movement. You have lots of people who are followers of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane and the outlawed Kach movement," Roth said, referring to the founder of the Jewish Defense League in New York who moved to Israel in 1971 and founded a political party in Israel called Kach. Later outlawed as racist, the party advocated expelling all Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories and making sexual relations between Jews and Arabs illegal.

Like the settlement of Netzarim in Gaza, where 200 fundamentalist settlers live surrounded by 200,000 impoverished Palestinians, the settlements in Hebron vividly illustrate just how problematic--and provocative--some settlements can be and how troublesome.

"They're flashpoints, thorns in the eyes of the Arabs, which is their purpose in the eyes of the fundamentalists," said Ian Lustick, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied the settlement movement.

Redirected anger

"A lot of settlers feel a deep pain and anger over the abandonment of Jews during the Holocaust. A lot of the anger that should have normally been directed at the Germans or Nazis has been redirected toward the Palestinians," said Haim Dov Beliak, a California rabbi who studied at an Israeli yeshiva headed by Rabbi Kook that was at the ideological center of the settler movement in the 1970s.