The Sabbath Ambush
Wieseltier, Leon
ES IfON WIESEUIER Almost at once it was whispered, even in Israel, that the Sabbath massacre was different. Hebron, it was said, was not like Munich, or Lod Airport, or the nursery at Misgav Am....
...The Jews, they contend, have a historical right to be in Hebron, and they are correct...
...The PLO no longer shocks, and in any event, it is said, the PLO has "only one card to play...
...It has been one of the major triumphs of the Begin government to have returned the conflict to the question of rights, to have obsessed the Jewish community with first principles...
...In April it tried in Zurich...
...The partition plan forced Zionists to choose between the land and the state, and the choice they made remains proof of the essential humaneness of the Zionist vision...
...it need rather be defended...
...There is no real debate, as there has been in the Zionist movement since its inception, about means and ends...
...Obviously what it did was wrong, the apologists will intone...
...What the PLO lacks, of course, is Israel's trust...
...The Gush draws handsomely upon a new militance among the traditional Jews of North America, upon a fund of febrile religious sentiment that has been growing among Orthodox Jews since 1967 and that the rise in 1977 of the Likud, Begin's conservative coalition, finally unleashed...
...but the Palestinians, 30 years later, would not even hear of Camp David, which was— as Begin saw a little too late—the beginning of the way to a Palestinian state...
...It is deemed inhumane to lose patience with Palestinian suffering, to be hardened against the many injuries of Palestinian life...
...The absence of the pragmatic impulse from the political behavior of the Palestinians is partly a consequence of their advanced ideological inflammation...
...The death of these settlers was calculated to bring down the strong arm of the Israeli army upon the West Bank, which would then recoil even more from the autonomy proposal...
...The PLO also needs to kill...
...And in the ambush in Hebron better still...
...That is still the case...
...Terror has not been their last resort, it has been their first...
...In Brooklyn I wasn't afraid of the shvartzes...
...But the assassins never were pulled from Israel, and surely never replaced there with Palestinians who wished to talk...
...they animate the Orthodox of Brooklyn and Montreal, and inspire young men who will not leave the academies of Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn for those of Bnei Brak near Tel Aviv, but will jump at the chance to study Talmud in the garrison of Kiryat Arba in Hebron...
...There are other ways to determine their own future, but the Palestinians have not yet mastered them, or even tried...
...And then, of course, they lose, which proves only that they were right...
...There is another problem about rights: they are not the Jews' alone...
...The leaders of these nations stand ready to do away with United Nations Resolution 242, to which the PLO is tired of having to answer...
...Arafat linked the ambush in Hebron to the demise of the Security Council resolution for a Palestinian state...
...The Zionist leadership accepted the UN plan of 1947, which awarded them no more than limited sovereignty over the smaller share of Palestine...
...Nor can there be any compromise on a right...
...But they suffer the weakness for fanatics, and if it does not lead them to outright support for the annexationist polity, it certainly stops them from opposing it...
...The consequences of such a corruption cannot be escaped...
...But the Zionists also were Jews, their people suffered at least as much, the world was at least as deaf, and yet they rescued their remnant and created their hard little state...
...The State Department's interpretation of the legal history of the West Bank is galling, but legalists (like Eugene Rostow) who fortify the settlement policy with their corrections do not do Israel a service...
...It is folly to believe that the Palestinians will do Jordan's sweet bidding and be still...
...Only Israel can return the territories...
...Of course the Jewish state had its spiritual emoluments as well, but these had nothing to do with its borders, except for small souls...
...the politics of transcendence cannot be without martyrs...
...These people are intent upon a "Greater Israel...
...The Jewish vigilantes who are out to spoil any solution make it easier to understand Ben-Gurion's decision in July 1948 to fire on the Altalena, a ship carrying weapons to Begin's private army...
...They say all of Palestine is the land of Israel," Mayor Kawasmeh observed after the Sabbath ambush, "and every Palestinian who hears Prime Minister Begin say that says the opposite—that it's all Palestinian land...
...The Israelis are told that it is up to them, that one concession, and then another, can end the conflict, but it sometimes is hard to believe that anything the Israelis do will matter very much...
...These twisted Jewish ideals, moreover, are not confined to the community in Israel...
...Kiryat Arba does not exist to defend Tel Aviv...
...A government charged with the safety of its citizens can do no less...
...Mayor Kawasmeh was delighted...
...they are playing into the hands of the PLO...
...The sacralization of the state represents not only a decadent form of nationalism, but also a decadent form of religion...
...And even Labor is not yet willing to divide Palestine with the Palestinians...
...Security is the job of the Israeli army and its backup...
...It set out to save Jewish bodies, and that required only a state...
...General Sharon abides by that map, as does Prime Minister Begin, though it is not the map he unrolls for President Carter...
...The return of the Sinai was a great act of statesmanship, but it was really no compromise at all, because the Jews assert no right to the Sinai...
...They chose the state because the needs of the Jews were more pressing that their rights...
...The Likud's maximalist ambitions have thus come to seem perfectly natural, no less than the Jewish people's just desserts...
...A typical Palestinian "moderate," and a bad professor: you cannot understand the Jews and yet not understand Zionism...
...and the power it offered was over only the Jews' fate and nobody else's, which was its moral attraction...
...but for many nations and many intellectuals this is not obvious at all...
...and then came Begin, whom they could recognize, who shared their symbols and wore their hat and rememberedthe Nazis...
...surely she never rode the subway alone at night or strolled serenely down Flatbush Avenue...
...And, to a certain extent, quite rightly: the tragic incident is another illustration of the delusional character of Begin's policy...
...He wants their land, this shabby hustler with the woven yarmulke...
...Its thesis was that Israelis who think they have a right to live in Hebron, or anywhere else in the West Bank, deserve to die...
...A simple slaughter, caused not by General Sharon's policies or Rabbi Kahane's taunts or President Sadat's good sense, but by simple lust for enemy blood...
...But if it is annexed, Israel will not be greater...
...That may be, but in Hebron these Arabs were wholly guilty...
...They sulk, and they shoot...
...Rights exist only for the whole thing...
...The new policy, then, amounts to communiqu?s in Vienna and bombs in Jerusalem...
...It is immoral to rule over another people...
...They are pioneers, they maintain, just like in old times...
...It is time for an honest reckoning, time to call all these moist Jewish moods by their true names...
...The settlement in Hebron imports Brooklyn's idealism, but it imports Brooklyn's ugliness as well...
...Tel Aviv exists to protect Kiryat Arba...
...And it is working, at least in France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Spain, Austria, England...
...Kawasmeh welcomed the Israeli right to Hebron because it is the same as the Palestinian right to Haifa...
...they are jeopardizing the case for keeping Jerusalem...
...There is something about the event that does recall Algeria—the savagery in the casbah, the terrible fear that the malevolence no longer can be reversed, the just cause put forward by killers...
...The logic of rights is what Begin and Arafat, Gush Emunim and the Palestine National Guidance Committee, have in common...
...The settlers in Hebron, and their formidable sponsors in government, justify themselves by their rights...
...There was indeed no room for such men in the Labor Zionist movement...
...Support for the socialist, secular, technocratic state of Israel had forced these Jews to bury many of their deepest Jewish aspirations...
...The Palestinians, it is said ironically, are the new Jews...
...Israel is broke and despised, and the birth rates are not on its side...
...And when the settlements are no more, the world will see how little will have changed...
...They have a higher agenda: they want what God promised, and God promised more than a Histadrut...
...This religious excitement is the tool of purely political interests...
...No Palestinian spokesman can bring himself to say about the Jews what many Jews now say about the Palestinians: that they have a national identity, legitimate rights, a genuine movement of national liberation...
...The settlements are sapping Israel's morale...
...the Israelis have made them that...
...But no terrorist ever had to kill...
...In fact the PLO has a full house: Soviet weapons, Saudi money, the deep sympathy of the third world, the deepening sympathy of Europe, the eagerness of the State Department to press for a Palestinian state (if only the hotheads in Hebron would let Harold Saunders get on with his work), the good wishes of the oil companies and the multinationals, the blessing of Allah...
...Gush Emunim, the West Bank settlers' movement, is only the most disgraceful symptom of that crisis...
...It has been morally simplified ("radicalized"), and enslaved to a single national right...
...These people who answer only to a higher authority can ruin everything...
...The enthusiasts of Kiryat Arba, the Jewish outpost near Hebron, are a political problem for the Palestinians, and Palestinians do not meet political problems with political solutions...
...There is no such thing as a settlement that enhances security (except maybe the security of other settlements...
...The PLO is now "heavily invested" in a new line of diplomacy: it is carrying its case to Europe, to the United Nations, to world opinion...
...This has been Begin's premise always: that the right to Tel Aviv and Haifa is the right to Hebron and Nablus, and so it is...
...It is true that for a while the PLO had pulled its assassins from Europe, and it was not foolish enough to post them to the United States...
...But there is nothing new about it...
...Labor gladly will return most of the West Bank, but only to Jordanians...
...The settlements, it is always said, are the problem...
...They could not have raised themselves from their wretchedness if they had been consecrated to the murder of Arab civilians...
...Begin, General Sharon, Rabbi Levinger (leader of the Hebron fanatics): these are the only Zionists the Palestinians will allow...
...But as the Jews were firing on the Altalena, the Arabs were firing on the Jews...
...Preachments about Jewish rights are a paltry excuse for all this damage...
...The settlements, in any event, may soon be stopped—sooner, surely, than the terrorism...
...It was not...
...This thinking is best exemplified by another American Jew on the scene, Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League, for whom the Palestinians of the West Bank are no different from the Emorites and Jebusites of ancient Canaan...
...They are sure that millions of Jews in the West are on their slow way to Israel, and that a million Palestinians can be persuaded to acquiesce in domination...
...The legitimacy of the Jewish return to Hebron has nothing whatever to do with its political wisdom...
...Edward Said writes affectingly of the Jews: they are "the most morally complex of all opponents" and "I can understand the intertwined terror and the exaltation out of which Zionism has been nourished...
...There is much the Palestinians could learn from the Zionists, but the Palestinians would rather wallow in their Jewishness...
...Most vexing about rights, however, are their concrete implications...
...Many of these admirers are in fact remote from the Gush's easy dreams, from the religious fervor, from the fantasies of empire...
...in an election year the US can't do the dirty work itself...
...Israelis are to study only Arafat, who is the "moderate," who will "settle for" the West Bank and Gaza...
...The grim experience of the Jews in Europe taught that they required a place where Jews always would be the majority, a democracy in which their enemies never could prevail—in short, a society where Jews had power...
...And the Hebron massacre had a "thesis," as Arafat would say...
...There are no parties or factions seeking to instruct the Palestinian masses in a different style of political action...
...And meanwhile the Israelis are supposed to discriminate among their adversaries...
...A few days after the massacre, Arafat likened the West Bank to Algeria...
...Violence is the Palestinian way...
...The moral question in Hebron was tougher, the evil less distinct...
...Arafat in Kuwait quickly sought the glory...
...The fateful settlements policy was Labor's, even if it originated in a sincere conception of Israel's security requirements...
...Their state need not be built, that has been done...
...Israeli reprisals long have figured prominently in the strategy of Beirut...
...The problem is not the Palestinian ignorance of Jewish history, but the Palestinian belief that, strictly speaking, there is no Jewish history, or at least no national history of the Jews...
...Their contempt for Zionism and its achievements is great...
...God will be their reward and the soil will be his servants...
...it had been portable for centuries, and it could have remained that way...
...Their enemies, and their enemies' friends, want a solution, but they have only one solution in mind, and nobody is measuring it against Israel's security needs...
...The murders in Hebron must awaken the Jews to the consequences of their convictions...
...The Palestinians and their friends would wish the West to understand, as Edward Said says, "the larger Palestinian story from which all these things came" and "the terror in Palestinian men and women who were driven to do such things...
...The Gush objects that a man cannot live only for security, that his soul cannot soar upon a passport or a post office...
...They are not to concern themselves with radicals like Habash or Jiryil...
...These free nations then will accept their payment in crude...
...they are content to let Arabs become a majority in the Galilee...
...Palestinian consciousness is in a state of white heat...
...the yeshivah boys died because of an American veto...
...The bankruptcy of their security argument has been exposed by Israeli generals and justices of the Supreme Court...
...The West Bank was seized by Israel because Israel was attacked, and its tenure there, though lamentable, will have to continue until a Palestinian partner appears who can be trusted not to attack Israel again...
...Israel is torn by dissent from the policy of permanent occupation, and the experts rule that reaction finally has triumphed...
...And so the revulsion of the Israeli public in the aftermath of the Palestinian terror is not too high a price to pay for the rush in Palestinian pride...
...Judaism did not require a state...
...But in Brooklyn the rebbitzin most certainly was afraid of the shvartzes...
...The West Bank is being settled, in short, because the settlers and their sponsors want it to be annexed...
...The terrorist chooses to kill, not because he is a reasonable man at his rope's end, but because he is an unreasonable man who belongs at the end of a rope...
...they are alienating Israel's allies...
...Hussein may fear a Palestinian state as much as the Israelis, but he is far less able to prevent it...
...It has been their primary mode of national expression (along with some poems), Leon Wieseltier is a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard...
...The settlers in Hebron gloat that they have not come there to make Israel any safer...
...The victims may be blamed for much, but not for their own deaths...
...They do not kindle anymore to Tel Aviv or Haifa...
...The truth is that the lady could not live without shvartzes...
...These Jews hate Arabs...
...The "commando attack" in Hebron's dark alleys, he announced, inaugurates "a new phase" in the struggle against Israel...
...Rebbitzin Levinger, the rabbi's wife, who commands the squatters at the old Hadassah building where the massacre took place, put it precisely: "Why should I be afraid of Arabs...
...But they are a nation represented by terrorists, and no Palestinian leaders have yet emerged who would stop throwing bombs at facts of life and instead get what they can...
...But this is not the similarity Arafat had in mind...
...There are only zealots, and some good men saddened by the consequences of this zeal but unwilling to do anything about it...
...and then Said proceeds to denounce Zionism as colonialism...
...Israel demands security because without security there is no life, but it is the Gush that confuses Israel with life, that enshrines the state...
...It falls beyond even the wide net of Begin's ideology...
...I understand as profoundly as I can the fear felt by most Jews that Israel's security is a genuine protection against future genocidal attempts on the Jewish people...
...At Misgav Am it did better...
...The integrity of the land was a principal axiom of Labor Zionism as well...
...It will no longer be Israel...
...They are not satisfied that the outcome of the autonomy talks is in doubt, that their boycott of Camp David may have succeeded in saving the West Bank (if not Gaza) from the treaty's provisions, that Begin's days in power are numbered, that Arafat is received in Europe's capitals as a head of state, that this summer the Europeans will recognize the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and perhaps even call for a Palestinian state...
...it was part of a Palestinian plan...
...The present Palestinian national movement is lamed by all kinds of bloody internal divisions, but on the matter of Israel there is extraordinary unity...
...The Gush always has been quite candid: it is willing to pay the price...
...Those prominent Labor figures who went over to the Greater Israel movement after 1967 defected on just this issue...
...This rabbi dishonors even Jewish militarism, but the cameras love him...
...The clich?s of lower-middle-class racism are irradiated in her mind by the light of Torah, but they are there all the same...
...Israel's failure to live with the Palestinians will cost it more than its failure to live with the foreign policy establishment of the United States...
...This article is excerpted with permission from The New Republic © The New Republic...
...Jews who are for keeping the West Bank must know that they are also for more death...
...It is happening again, maddened Jews now cry, the Arabs are butchering the yeshivah boys again...
...The greatness of the Labor party lies in its having overcome the argument from rights—that is, in having accepted the partition of Palestine...
...The Palestinians are Palestinians...
...But rights are the beginning, and not the end, of analysis...
...It is hard not to espy in this admiration, especially among certain Jewish intellectuals, a conventional bourgeois fascination with simplicity, irrationality, violence...
...the argument from rights is premised upon the indivisibility of the territory...
...And so it must be repeated that the Jews in Israel are not pieds noirs, that there is no France from which they came and no France to which they can return...
...But these Palestinian leaders, and the leaders in the West who fail to tell the PLO that unless it renounces terror and recognizes the Jewish state it will forfeit their support, are making a big mistake...
...Labor leaders even like to think that Palestinians are Jordanians...
...That a policy has a basis in right, furthermore, does not mean that it has a basis in morality...
...But no longer, their friends maintain...
...Dovish" Jews quarrel with "hawkish" Jews, but there are no "dovish" Palestinians, except when it is time to talk to reporters...
...As well argue (as many Jews do) that the Palestinians are a people, that they have borne too much and should bear no more, and so should make do with Jordan...
...Security" is the magic word that justifies anything...
...The Jews, they continue, also have a legal right to be there, and they may not be wrong...
...Historical rights are exactly what the Palestinians have been talking about all along...
...And Jews who are not for more death must know that they are also for not keeping the West Bank...
...It is said sadly about this massacre, as about the others, that it was "senseless...
...He demands that the Israeli government expel them to the other bank of the Jordan...
...The "provocative" presence of the settlers does not explain the crime...
...It is not enough for Jews to persuade other Jews that the Palestinians are not just a military problem, that they are truly a political problem, when the Palestinians continue to behave like a military problem...
...it was an agreement not really to recognize the other's rights (that would have been too much to ask, and maybe still is) but to suspend one's own...
...But the moment the occupation becomes permanent, the moment an Israeli government announces its intention to enforce a claim to sovereignty, the Jewish state will have become something it never was, and that is a colonial power...
...Begin's Israel is theirs in a way that Rabin's never was...
...In Hebron these Jews were not wholly innocent...
...There is no middle way...
...The Palestinians did not have to ambush the students in Hebron...
...The leading strategist of the Gush is no believer, but he has a map, a secular scheme to dot the occupied territory with so many settlements, so many "facts," that the government finally will be unable to relinquish it...
...There is the logic of rights and the logic of partition...
...The PLO continues without compunction to order the slaughter of Israelis, and the experts discern "moderate trends...
...And the State Department is delighted by the steadfastness, at last, of the Atlantic alliance...
...Some of them say it is for reasons of security, though their religious pawns deny it...
...they care nothing for the army they demoralize or the economy they help to cripple or the laws they love to flout...
...But the settlements are only part of the problem, and they are hollow things—makeshift encampments with a few babies and a few rifles, enough only to insult the Palestinians...
...In Israel the Peace Now movement is struggling against the settlers, but in the Palestinian world nobody is struggling against the terrorists...
...In the event of war, the army will be forced to divert substantial forces to evacuate the settlers and their flags from their helpless bivouacs in the hills...
...The deal will have to be struck, sooner to later, with the people themselves...
...Five died, 16 were wounded, and later a sixth died...
...But the PLO will be called to no account...
...They wish to improve a victory into an empire...
...If she dares defy her new neighbors in Hebron it is not because she has courage, or because the Lord watches more closely over his original neighborhoods, but because she has the protection of an army, and she knows it...
...When pressed, the "Greater Israel" people fall back upon ideology, which is the real origin of their program...
...They are in Hebron as of right...
...They can now prosecute the interests of holiness—they can attempt to extend the sway on the legal system of the state, and to settle "Judea and Samaria," with the friendly help of the government...
...They are genuinely devoted to Israel, they sincerely fear for it, but they go along with settlements that drain its resources and doom it to war and embarrass its reason for being...
...They believe that the West Bank is the birthright of the Jewish people, its manifest destiny...
...The settlers err, and imperil the prospects for any peace, in their belief that rights are a warrant for action...
...That is correct, but Zionism was not devised to furnish life with meaning...
...It must have concluded, however, that it does not need this...
...A week before the massacre he went to Ramallah, another town in the West Bank, to invite the inhabitants to leave, and incited a riot...
...and nothing any Israelis do or say, no amount of dissent from the present government's inflammatory designs, will stay the Palestinians' hand...
...It was unmistakably a Palestinian deed...
...Article 20 of the Palestinian National Covenant denies that the Jews are anything more than a religion...
...What is obvious, rather, is that Zionism is colonialism...
...And the world view fashioned by the Palestinian intellectual, this demon-ological analysis of Zionism, is the emotional justification for the Palestinian terrorist...
...The occupation of the territories in the Six Day War tested Labor's determination to settle for a "ministate" (which, after all, was what partition held out for the Jews), and Labor did not exactly stand the test...
...All this, however, is not enough for the Palestinians...
...These Jews must be made to see that they are being used, that their silence is a kind of endorsement...
...but these are new times, and they are not pioneers, they are adventurers...
...Partition brilliantly broke open the costly closed circle of rights...
...Inc., 1980...
...the Palestinian leadership welcomes such an improving influence upon the political will of its miserable people...
...But the Hebron massacre of 1980 is not the Hebron massacre of 1929, because the Jews now have what they wanted then...
...The terrorist can coolly kill the Zionist, he can smash a child's head against a rock and riddle a young seminarist with bullets, because he does not believe that the Zionist is a human being...
...The Palestinians are what they insist they are—that is, a nation—and they are not a nation of terrorists...
...Zionism is in crisis when Tel Aviv is not enough...
...Their passions were ridiculous, their program was indefensible, but they had gone only to pray where they had a fine right to pray, to sing their twilight psalms at the tombs of their forefathers, where Moslems pray with the same kind of hoary filial piety, and they returned from their prayers to a hail of bullets and a fall of grenades...
...And that ideology is not only Begin's...
...the way they have made their claim, since the 1920s...
...This was shown dramatically in March, when Begin's divided cabinet decided to establish a yeshivah and a "school for historical study" in the heart of Hebron, and justified this decision with a wholesome appeal to historical rights...
...Many Jews admire the settlers for this: they have purpose, they put their lives on the line, they are pure (as their wistful admirers presumably are not...
...Partition offered power, which was its pragmatic attraction...
...Palestinians, on the other hand, have human rights...
...It was plain murder...
...But the Jewish ecstatics on the West Bank want to keep on building...
...a bomb placed aboard an El-Al Boeing 707 was to have destroyed the plane in the skies above Lugano, but it was detected...
...Israelis have been slain in Hebron, but it is Israel that will be called to the bar...
...The experts are reasonable people who believe that there are only reasonable people—that people kill only if they must, nobody can want to be a terrorist, terrorism is only proof that all other ways were blocked...
...Kahane, the Levingers, the Israelis who settle "Judaism's second holiest city" (a concept that is one of the Six Day War's many contributions to Jewish theology), the American Jews who settle there because not enough Israelis can be found to do so—they could not have come so far, and done so much damage in the field, on their own steam...
Vol. 5 • June 1980 • No. 6
