Hebron

views updated

HEBRON

Ancient Canaanite city of Judea, now part of the West Bank, where Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions situate the burial place of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebekah, and Leah. The site is known to Jews as the Cave (or Tomb) of the Patriarchs (Mearath ha-Makhpela, in Hebrew) and to Muslims as the Sanctuary of Abraham the Friend (al-Haram al-Ibrahimi al-Khalil, in Arabic) or the Ibrahim Mosque. The Arabic name for the city is al-Khalil; the Hebrew is Hevron; both mean "friend," a reference to Abraham, who in sacred Muslim literature is known as "the Friend of God" or "the Friend of the Merciful" (al-Khalil al-Rahman). For Jews, Hebron—which in the Bible was called Qiryat Arba (City of the Four) before the time of Abraham—is one of the four holy cities of Eretz Yisrael, along with Jerusalem, Safed, and Tiberias. According to Biblical tradition, on the death of King Saul, toward 1010 b.c.e., David was proclaimed King of Israel in Hebron, which became his first capital. The original structure enclosing the cave was built by King Herod the Great (r. 37–4 b.c.e.). The Byzantine rulers made it into a church, and when the Muslims conquered Hebron in 636 c.e. they rebuilt it as a mosque. In 1100 Crusaders took over the city and expelled the Jews. They destroyed the mosque and the Synagogue of the Caves, building in their place a church dedicated to Saint Abraham. In 1187, after the victory of Saladin over the Crusaders, the mosque was reconstructed. In 1267, a Mamluk sultan, Baybars I, declared that Jews would no longer be allowed to visit the tomb of Abraham. This interdiction stayed in effect until June 1967.

A Jewish community remained in Hebron and in 1516 the area came under the rule of the Ottomans, who welcomed to their empire many of the Jews who had been expelled from Spain in 1492. In the sixteenth century many Sephardic Jewish families settled in Hebron and the city became a center of Jewish learning. For three centuries, except for the sacking of the city by the Egyptians in 1834, the pace of life in Hebron was slow, and Palestine as a whole was something of a backwater.

Once Zionist settlement began in the 1880s, and especially after World War I, relations between the Jewish and Arab communities became increasingly tense. On 24 August 1929, following the riots over the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Arabs massacred sixty-seven Jews in Hebron, destroying their synagogue and schools. (The city had only one British policeman.) The remaining Jews, many of whom had been protected by their Arab neighbors, fled. Two years later, thirty-five Jewish families returned, but on 23 April 1936, after months of rising tension and the beginning of a Palestinian general strike (called in reaction to the discovery of Zionist arms shipments into the country), British authorities decided to evacuate them. After the departure of the British and the 1948 War, Jordan inherited control of the West Bank, but as a result of the 1967 War, Israel occupied the area.

A messianic interpretation of the conquest of Palestinian territory among ultra-Orthodox Jews encouraged the development of Jewish settlement, and in 1968 the first extremist settlers, under the leadership of Rabbi Moshe Levinger, moved into the center of Hebron, registering at a hotel and declaring themselves a new Jewish community. The Israeli government removed them to a disused army camp outside the city, which in 1972 they were allowed to convert to a permanent settlement, Qiryat Arba, where in 1974 the Gush Emunim movement was born. These armed extremists demanded the right to live anywhere they chose in "Greater Israel."

In 1979 Gush Emunim started a permanent settlement in the ancient Jewish quarter in the heart of the city and refused to leave. They engaged in a standoff with the government and the next year, after
six yeshiva students returning from the Tomb of the Patriarchs were killed by Palestinians, the settlement was officially recognized. Since that time the presence of these 400 armed settlers, their deliberately provocative behavior, and their desire, of which they make no secret, to expel the Arabs (an estimated population of 137,000 in 2003)—as well as the Israel Defense Force's (IDF) frequent disruption of the city—have led to violent reactions on the part of the Palestinians, followed by severe Israeli reprisals. Toward the end of 1979, a group of settlers from Qiryat Arba and other settlements formed a clandestine militia, which in June 1980 carried out bomb attacks on three West Bank Palestinian mayors. In 1983 this splinter group killed four students of the Islamic College of Hebron. On 25 February 1994, during the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, which had started in Madrid in 1991, an American Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein, from Qiryat Arba, killed twenty-nine Palestinians worshipping at the Ibrahim Mosque and wounded sixty others before he was beaten to death while reloading his rifle. An official commission found that he had acted alone and condemned his action; his grave has become a shrine for the Jewish settler movement.

In May 1994 the United Nations deployed an unarmed observer unit called the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH) to try to calm the situation, but its mandate was allowed to run out that August. On 28 September 1995 Israelis and Palestinians signed the second Oslo Accords, dealing with the extension of Palestinian autonomy to the West Bank and providing for the partial withdrawal of Israeli troops from the city of Hebron. The accord led to a wave of violent protests, organized by Israeli settlers and ultra-Orthodox Israelis, followed on 4 November 1995 by the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish extremist. Israeli-Palestinian negotiations were suspended. In May 1996 a new TIPH was constituted and deployed; it was reorganized by treaty in 1997. In June 1996 the new Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, declared his lack of confidence in the Oslo Accords. A group of ultranationalist rabbis launched an appeal to Israeli soldiers to disobey any order to withdraw from Hebron. On 15 January 1997, after many months of negotiation, an accord on the city of Hebron was finally signed between the Israelis and Palestinians, providing for the withdrawal of the IDF from four-fifths of the city, with the Jewish inhabitants remaining under the authority of Israel. This accord included a "protocol on the redeployment of the Israeli army in Hebron," a memorandum on the commitments of both parties to future negotiations, and a letter of guarantee by the U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher. In the course of the preliminary discussions leading to this accord, the Israeli prime minister insisted that the notion of reciprocity be the basis of future commitments. On 18 January the Israeli army began its withdrawal from Hebron, and the next day Yasir Arafat proclaimed the liberation of the city. Two days later, hundreds of Jewish settlers demonstrated against the retreat of the IDF.

Obstructions of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and the development of the al-Aqsa Intifada in September 2000 resulted in the non-application of the Hebron accords and in many deadly confrontations between the Jewish and Palestinian communities. In March 2002, two TIPH observers were killed by Palestinians, and TIPH discontinued patrols in the Jewish quarter because of confrontations with settlers. In November 2002, twelve Israeli soldiers were killed in an attack by Palestine Islamic Jihad, and in August 2003 a suicide bombing killed twenty-three. In 2004, 400 to 600 Jews lived in more than twenty settlements in Hebron, and about 6,000 lived outside the city in Qiryat Arba. The Palestinian population was approximately 16,500 in 1922, 80,000 in 1990, and 137,000 in the city and surrounding villages in 2003.