Michael Totten Takes You To Hebron

The myriads of observers, pundits, politicians, dreamers, visionaries and true believers who all know for a certainty that dividing Jerusalem is the key to peace in the Middle East need urgently to visit Hebron.”

Historian Yaacov Lozowick quoted by Michael Totten

---

Michael Totten has written another of his signature in-depth pieces--this time about  his visit to Hebron.

His tour guide was Eve Harow, who does not live in Hebron:

Sometimes I feel like I’m living inside a horror film. One of the most insulting things you can say is that I’m against peace because I’m a settler. I live here. I have seven children and three grandchildren, and if there isn’t peace then I’m the big loser. It’s the little people who pay the price. It’s the little people who go to war, and it’s the little people who get buried.”

Much of Totten's post recounts his interview with David Wilder, spokesman for the Jewish community in Hebron.

When Totten asks if the reason for living in Hebron is to maintain access to the "Tomb of the Patriarchs", Wilder responds:

“That’s certainly a primary reason,” David said. “Hebron is the first Jewish city in Israel. This is where Abraham came 3700 years ago. He lived here. All the patriarchs and matriarchs lived here. King David started the Kingdom of Israel here before he went up to exceptions, Jews have always been living here. The last time there were no back in 1100 when the Crusaders threw all the Jews out and replaced them with Christians. The Christians have since been replaced with Arabs. But otherwise there were always Jews here. This community is part of a chain that goes all the way back to the beginning of Judaism.”

...“We share control of the building with Palestinians,” David said, “but they tell us straight up that if they can throw us out of here that they won’t let us back in the tomb of our patriarchs. They say it’s a mosque and that only Muslims should pray there even though it was built by King Herod, who was a Jew. If we don’t stay here, none of us will even be able to visit.”

Totten writes that Jews and Arabs get along differently in different areas in Israel:



Jews and Arabs famously get along well in the Israeli city of Haifa. They live in the same neighborhoods, on the same streets, and in the same apartment buildings. They eat at the same restaurants, attend the same schools, work for the same companies, and drink beer in the same pubs. They can get along. Haifa is proof.

Iraelis and Palestinians don’t mix much in Jerusalem, but they get along reasonably well for the most part in the places where they do overlap, such as are civil if less warm than between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs in Haifa.

In Hebron, though, they’re like anti-matter and matter.

Wilder explains that Hebron was not always like that:

“When we came back in 1967,” he said,“we had reasonable relations between business relationships, personal relationships. We could walk around the city unarmed and there were no problems. Things weren’t all lovey- dovey, but people got along. Things started to change in a bad way during the first Intifada in the late 1980s. The PLO began rounding up Arabs who were seen talking to Jews and accusing them of being collaborators, so pretty soon  the Arabs stopped talking to us.”

And that is how things stand now.

 Read Michael Totten's entire post. 

Blogged from my Android