|
|
November 22, 2002/Kislev 17 5763, Vol. 55, No. 13
A prayer for Hebron
JONATHAN FRIENDLY
Jewish Renaissance Media
To most American Jews, Hebron is just another flashpoint for confrontation. We mostly don't remember that the city was David's capital before he moved north to Jerusalem and that it holds the Cave of the Machpela, where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are traditionally thought to be buried.
In 20th-century American memory, it resonates as much for Baruch Goldstein's heinous 1994 assault that killed 29 Muslims and wounded 150 others praying in a mosque as it does for the 1929 Arab massacre of 67 Jews.
Remembering its importance is easier after another tragedy - in this case last week's Shabbat eve ambush that killed 12 militiamen and soldiers who were trying to protect a contingent of worshippers returning to the town of Qiryat Arba after praying at the Tomb of the Patriarchs. The incident has provoked some predictable reactions, including cries of exultation by Palestinian militants and promises of retaliation by Israeli leaders.
It should also provoke serious soul-searching about what we want to have happen on the West Bank in coming years. If a relative handful of Jews - 7,000 in Qiryat Arba and 450 adjacent to the Cave itself - are an intolerable threat to the city's 150,000 Arabs, what chance is there that Israel's 5 million Jews will ever be accepted by 250 million Arab neighbors?
For openers, American Jews must understand that the Israeli presence in Hebron is not negotiable. As we have seen to our sorrow, backing away from the right to worship at our religious sites, including the Temple Mount, simply encourages Muslim efforts to erase the Jewish record at them. Israel's right to exist is not just based on military strength and world guilt for the Holocaust. It reflects 4,000 years of history in the land.
That does not give Israel any right to inflame the situation, however. Any notion of using this incident to justify an expansion of the Jewish presence within the city by expropriating Palestinian land would be a needless provocation.
Americans should continue to support a status quo in the West Bank: neither expansion of legal settlements nor abandonment of them. They should affirm Israel's responsibility to take down illegal settlements and its absolute right to defend the legal ones.
Once other regional issues are addressed - particularly the destruction of Saddam Hussein's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction - and a new order for the Mideast emerges, it will be time to return to a process that lowers Palestinian-Israeli tensions and paves the way for longer-term stability.
In the meantime, we need to understand that in exercising the right to pray peacefully at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a handful of Jews are in fact protecting our past and our future.
Friendly is national editor of Jewish Renaissance Media. Contact him at friendly@umich.edu.
|
