I wonder how the Palis would like it if Israeli citizens targeted their families. All this to obtain something akin to the peace accords Arafat could have signed two years ago. What a needless waste. The FRN Sign Bank is Open
Posted on 03/07/2003 11:54:33 AM PST by anotherview
Mar. 7, 2003
Three Israelis killed in infiltration of W. Bank community
By THE JERUSALEM POST INETRNET STAFF
Two Palestinian terrorists infiltrated into the West Bank Jewish community of Kiryat Arba at around 8:30 p.m. Friday evening, entered a house there and shot and killed at least three Israelis and wounded eight.
The terrorists, disguised as Jewish yeshiva students, infiltrated into Kiryat Arba through a gate in the south of the settlement that connects the settlement with the nearby town of Hebron, and entered a seminary building there. It appeared the gunmen entered a seminary and opened fire on students, the army and rescue officials said. It was unclear who killed the gunmen, but there is a heavy military presence in the area and many of the Jewish settlers are armed.
The identity of the victims was as yet unknown.
A spokesman for Magen David Adom said there were eight wounded and all have already been evacuated to hospital care. Two of the wounded settlers on were in very serious condition. The six other wounded, in light to moderate condition, have already been evacuated to Jerusalem's Hadassah Ein Karm Hospital.
The Jewish settlement, Kiryat Arba, is near the West Bank city of Hebron. It is considered a hardline settlement and has often been the target of Palestinian attacks.
Palestinians view Jewish settlers as legitimate targets in their struggle for independence and often target settlers and their towns.
The attack comes days after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's new hardline government was sworn in, promising stepped up strikes against Palestinian militants and settlement development.
On Jan. 23, three Israelis were killed when gunmen opened fire on their car near Hebron and near the settlement.
(With The Associated Press)
I wonder how the Palis would like it if Israeli citizens targeted their families. All this to obtain something akin to the peace accords Arafat could have signed two years ago. What a needless waste. The FRN Sign Bank is Open
The Hebron Massacre of 1929
by Shira Schoenberg
For some time, the 800 Jews in Hebron lived in peace with their tens of thousands of Arab neighbors. But on the night of August 23, 1929, the tension simmering within this cauldron of nationalities bubbled over, and for 3 days, Hebron turned into a city of terror and murder. By the time the massacres ended, 67 Jews lay dead and the survivors were relocated to Jerusalem, leaving Hebron barren of Jews for the first time in hundreds of years.
The summer of 1929 was one of unrest in Palestine. Jewish-Arab tensions were spurred on by the agitation of the mufti in Jerusalem. Just one day prior to the start of the Hebron massacre, three Jews and three Arabs were killed in Jerusalem when fighting broke out after a Muslim prayer service on the Temple Mount. Arabs spread false rumors throughout their communities, saying that Jews were carrying out "wholesale killings of Arabs." Meanwhile, Jewish immigrants were arriving in Palestine in increasing numbers, further exacerbating the Jewish-Arab conflict.
Hebron had, until this time, been outwardly peaceful, although tension hid below the surface. The Sephardi Jewish community in Hebron had lived quietly with its Arab neighbors for centuries. The Sephardi Jews (Jews who were originally from Spain, North Africa and Arab countries) spoke Arabic and had a cultural connection to their Arab neighbors. In the mid-1800s, Ashkenazi (native European) Jews started moving to Hebron and, in 1925, the Slobodka Yeshiva, officially the Yeshiva of Hevron, Knesset Yisrael-Slobodka, was opened. Yeshiva students lived separately from the Sephardi community, and from the Arab population. Due to this isolation, the Arabs viewed them with suspicion and hatred, and identified them as Zionist immigrants. Despite the general suspicion, however, one yeshiva student, Dov Cohen, still recalled being on "very good" terms with the Arab neighbors. He remembered yeshiva boys taking long walks late at night on the outskirts of the city, and not feeling afraid, even though only one British policeman guarded the entire city.
On Friday, August 23, 1929, that tranquility was lost. Arab youths started throwing rocks at the yeshiva students. That afternoon, one student, Shmuel Rosenholtz, went to the yeshiva alone. Arab rioters later broke in and killed him, and that was only the beginning.
Friday night, Rabbi Ya’acov Slonim’s son invited any fearful Jews to stay in his house. The rabbi was highly regarded in the community, and he had a gun. Many Jews took him up on this offer, and many Jews were eventually murdered there.
As early as 8:00 a.m. on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, Arabs began to gather en masse. They came in mobs, armed with clubs, knives and axes. While the women and children threw stones, the men ransacked Jewish houses and destroyed Jewish property. With only a single police officer in Hebron, the Arabs entered Jewish courtyards with no opposition.
Rabbi Slonim, who had tried to shelter the Jewish population, was approached by the rioters and offered a deal. If all the Ashkenazi yeshiva students were given over to the Arabs, the rioters would spare the lives of the Sephardi community. Rabbi Slonim refused to turn over the students and was killed on the spot. In the end, 12 Sephardi Jews and 55 Ashkenazi Jews were murdered.
A few Arabs did try to help the Jews. Nineteen Arab families saved dozens, maybe even hundreds of Jews. Zmira Mani wrote about an Arab named Abu Id Zaitoun who brought his brother and son to rescue her and her family. The Arab family protected the Manis with their swords, hid them in a cellar along with other Jews who they had saved, and found a policeman to escort them safely to the police station at Beit Romano.
The police station turned into a shelter for the Jews that morning of August 24. It also became a synagogue as the Orthodox Jews gathered there and said their morning prayers. As they finished praying, they began to hear noises outside the building. Thousands of Arabs descended from Har Hebron, shouting "Kill the Jews!" in Arabic. They even tried to break down the doors of the station.
The Jews were besieged in Beit Romano for three days. Each night, ten men were allowed to leave to attend a funeral in Hebron’s ancient Jewish cemetery for the murdered Jews of the day.
When the massacre finally ended, the surviving Jews were forced to leave their home city and resettled in Jerusalem. Some Jewish families tried to move back to Hebron, but were removed by the British authorities in 1936 at the start of the Arab revolt. In 1948, the War of Independence granted Israel statehood, but further cut the Jews off from Hebron, a city that was captured by King Abdullah's Arab Legion and ultimately annexed to Jordan.
When Jews finally gained control of the city in 1967, a small number of massacre survivors again tried to reclaim their old houses. Then defense minister Moshe Dayan supposedly told the survivors that if they returned, they would be arrested, and that they should be patient while the government worked out a solution to get their houses back. Years later, settlers moved to parts of Hebron without the permission of the government, but for those massacre survivors still seeking their original homes, that solution never came.
It has never been about "occupation" or "settlers". It has been about Arab hatred of Jews.
From The Jerusalem Post:
Fears of 'Another 1929'
By HERB KEINON
(November 15) Tarpat. It is a word repeated over and over like a steady drum beat by settlers in Hebron and Kiryat Arba when asked about redeployment, or about why they live where they live.
Tarpat. It is not a word, but a Hebrew year: 5689. The Gregorian equivalent is 1929 - the year of the Arab riots in Mandatory Palestine, the year of the massacre of the Jewish community in Hebron.
Tarpat. It colors everything for the Jews of Hebron, even 67 years later.
"If the IDF leaves the hills in Hebron, what you will have is tarpat," Noam Arnon, the head of the settlement in Hebron, warned Likud MK Gideon Ezra when the Knesset member visited the city last month. "The Arabs will once again come down and slaughter the Jews. It will be tarpat."
"This is Jewish property that belonged to Jews slaughtered in tarpat," said Kiryat Arba Local Council head Zvi Katzover following an attempt by Jews to make a claim on stores near the casbah. During this attempt to reclaim Jewish property, the Hebron settlement - referring to the massacre - issued a statement that quoted from Kings 1:21: "Did you kill and also take possession?"
"A massacre could transpire here within an hour," Hebron rabbi Moshe Levinger told members of the National Religious Party's central committee recently. "We saw what happened in tarpat." Tarpat.
THE JEWS in Hebron - who live under veritable siege in harsh physical conditions - have submerged their present to lay claim to a distant past; to regain the glories of the city that was King David's capital, to be close to the tombs of the patriarchs and matriarchs buried there. But it is not only antiquity that motivates them. More often than not, Hebron's Jews say they moved there fueled by a desire not to give Hebron's Arabs a prize for the massacre of 1929.
For the Jews living in Hebron today, 1929 is as real as yesterday, and to move back into Hebron is to redeem those who were massacred. To pull out now is in their minds equivalent to saying the victims of 1929 died for nothing.
In one of the numerous demonstrations held in the city last month, a group of women held pictures of children killed or wounded in the 1929 massacre, when 67 Jews were killed, and more than 50 injured. One of those pictures was of a frightened-looking curly-haired boy with a deep gash on his forehead.
That boy, Shlomo Slonim, is today 68 and lives with his wife in Ra'anana. If the Jews of Hebron have the massacre etched into their minds, Slonim has it pounded into his mind, heart and body. His immediate family was killed in the massacre. In addition, he still carries the forehead scar caused by a blow taken to the head during the riots.
Slonim is the son of Eliezer Dan Slonim, one of the Jewish notables in Hebron. In addition to losing his father, Slonim also lost his mother, brother and maternal grandparents. A fifth-generation Hebronite, Slonim was one year old when the massacre took place.
"Ever since I can remember, I knew what happened," said Slonim, who was raised by a grandfather who survived the massacre, and then - when the grandfather died seven years later - by an aunt.
His grandfather did not talk much about the events, "but I smelled something different. I knew my grandfather was not my father. I knew about what happened."
Switching to the third person, Slonim said: "For an infant to be in a house where a massacre is taking place, to hear the screams, it penetrates his brain. And then everything is gone, everybody is gone. This is not simple."
Twenty-three people were killed in the Slonim home, where some 70 people had sought refuge. Many of the city's Jews thought the Slonim home would be a safe haven, since Eliezer Dan, a banker, was a member of the municipality and well known by the town's Arabs.
The 1929 riots began on August 23, about a week after a right-wing Jewish youth group conducted a march to the Western Wall, which for months had been the focus of dispute between Jews and Arabs. After the march, writes Howard Sacher in his A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, "Moslem agitators traveled through the country, exhorting the peasantry to 'protect al-Aksa against Jewish attacks.'"
The violence started in Jerusalem's Old City, and quickly spread to Hebron, where the Jews were slaughtered. Slonim spoke of these events in his dining room in Ra'anana. On the wall in front of him were black-and-white pictures of the family he never knew. There are separate pictures of his father, mother Hana, and four--year-old brother Aharon.
"These are my parents," he said, pointing to the photos. "For me they have remained forever young."
THE SETTLEMENT in Hebron, unlike the first settlement in Gush Etzion, was not started by descendants of those killed there. Whereas Kfar Etzion was set up soon after the Six Day War by descendants of those who fell there in 1948, the settlement in Hebron was spearheaded in 1968 by Rabbi Moshe Levinger.
"They understood that a place in Eretz Yisrael where Jews lived, and were massacred, is where Jews should return," Slonim said approvingly of Levinger. "I agreed with that wholeheartedly. For personal reasons I could not join them. My conscience bothers me about this," he said.
"I would have liked to come back, to continue the family tradition of living there. But I had small children, and was manager of a bank here. It was too late."
Hebron's Arnon said he does not know of any survivors of the massacre who went back to live in the city. During the conversation, Slonim pulled out pictures of himself bandaged in head and hand and held by his aunt. He also constantly took out books on Hebron that mention his family. Learning aids, it seems; an attempt to hold on to any physical manifestation of the family he never knew.
"Truth be told," he continued, "I could not live in Hebron now, I could not live surrounded by so many Arabs."
Slonim has kept up his connection with the city over the years by yearly visits to the ancient Jewish cemetery where his parents are buried, and by monthly visits to the Machpela Cave. He has perpetuated the memory of his parents and brother by naming three of his four children after them. His son, Eliezer Dan, is an Egged bus driver, who once a month drives a group of worshipers from Ra'anana to the Machpela Cave.
LIKE THE Jews living in Hebron, Slonim is adamantly opposed to redeployment in Hebron.
"The Oslo agreements are a disaster," he said, launching into a tirade. "Giving parts of Eretz Yisrael to the Arabs goes against all the values I was raised on. On a personal level, it gives me the feeling that the victims of the massacre died in vain. My family worked so Hebron would be a Jewish city. What we are doing by giving the city to them is giving them a prize for their violence."
That the Jewish enclave will remain in Israeli hands is for Slonim but little consolation - both because he feels the Arabs will choke off any development there, and for fear that the Arabs could once more come down from the hills and attack.
"The IDF will also be in danger," he said. "They won't shoot into a mob. Look what happened at Joseph's Tomb."
If that's the case, if both the Jews and the IDF will be in danger in Hebron, would it not be better to move the Jews to Kiryat Arba?
"No," said Slonim. "First of all, Jews should be there, in property owned by Jews. Secondly, if Jews are not in Hebron, no one will visit the Machpela Cave. And finally, if you withdraw because of violence, you are only encouraging more violence. By living there, Jews are fulfilling the legacy of tarpat."
Wouldn't it be better to forget about 1929, and move forward?
"We have to remember, and learn from it," he said. "One of the lessons to take from tarpat is that it is forbidden to trust the Arabs. My family trusted them. Look at the results."
In newspaper articles and history books, Hebron is as often followed by the word "massacre" as it is by the word "patriarchs," or the names "Herod" and "King David." There is the 1929 massacre, and there is the massacre in 1994, when Baruch Goldstein killed 29 Moslems in the Machpela Cave.
Slonim bristles at any comparison. "There is no comparison between the two events," he said. "In 1929, masses of Arabs took part. They killed people whom they knew, who were their friends. People who did them no harm.
"Goldstein acted alone, and after he treated victims of Arab terrorism. That is what drove him to his act. What the Arabs did was a pogrom. They killed, they raped, they looted. They burned holy books. There is simply no comparison."
So successfull was this construct that few Palestinians chose to participate in violence against the State of Israel upon their release.
"Recent memory" appeared to temper the Palestinians resolve.
One slight problem. Israeli snatch squads and hit teams, who take out Palestinian militants on the West Bank, go in disguise. Specifically, they get themselves up as Palestinian militants, with Arab identities and wearing kaffirs etc. I suppose that is ungallant, but in real terms, it would be rather surprising if they appeared in their uniforms.
This isn't the first time that the Arabs in Hebron tried this trick. There was a famous case back 1980 (or 1981?) A group of Palestinian militants dressed themselves up as settlers, and stabbed a man to death in the middle of Hebron marketplace. They were in full view of the IDF, who didn't move because they thought it was settlers getting an Arab. The marketplace emptied, with Arabs fleeing in fright, the assailants walked back towards the settlement, and the young man lay bleeding on the ground. This continued for about 1/2 an hour. Then Miriam Levinger, the wife of Rabbi Levinger (leader of the settlement) appeared. She is a qualified nurse, and always travelled with a first aid box. She asked if anyone was hurt and the soldiers on duty told her it was an Arab. She turned back, and gave no assistance. Finally a nervous Palestinian man edged up. He also had heard a false rumour, that his son had been stabbed in the market. He realised that the wounded man was not his son, but put him in the back seat of his car and drove him to hospital, where the Palestinian doctors announced him as DOA.
The then the trouble started, because the US consul was making phone calls. The dead man was an American Jewish tourist. The Israeli settlers were furious that the Palestinians had scammed them like that. Miriam Levinger put out an apology, saying that she would have given first aid if she knew who he was. On one final note, the Palestinian man who took the dying man to hospital was arrested and roughed up by IDF troops. He was accused of being responsible for the whole thing.
Wars end when one side recognizes it's defeat. That's the only way the the Oslo War will be ended.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.