Where Extremists Meet: Hebron 1981

...Evidence indicates that the incident was a minor playground altercation that was promptly forgotten by the children themselves...

...Recently, however, some Jews have appeared for prayers on Fridays between the Moslem services, and so far the military government has not acted to prevent them...

...Taking eight machine gun bullets in the back was Eli Hazeev, a psychopathic Vietnam War veteran and follower of Rabbi Meir Kahane's Kach movement (Kahane himself is barred from Hebron by the military governor...

...In September of last year, 10 suspects were rounded up in connection with the Beit Hadassah shooting...

...And even the local Arabs are impressed by his strength...

...A lot of Israelis," says Uri, one of Levinger's students, "have become soft and vague about their own Zionism, so they're really shaken up by the rabbi...

...It was decided that there would be no interference with the five daily Moslem prayer services in the main hall over the cave, but that Jews would be allowed to pray at other hours in the anterooms that contain cenotaphs marking the graves of the patriarchs and matriarchs...

...Abraham, and mosques, the most recent of the latter built by Saladin in 1187...

...In 1959, Jordan's King Hussein, who had been ruling Hebron with a sort of benign neglect since 1948, ordered the synagogue and its surrounding Jewish homes pulled down to make way for the enlargement of Hebron's central vegetable market...

...Never...

...We've even been tipped off, either by Arabs passing on the street or by telephone calls, before each demonstration or terrorist incident...

...There are two kinds of Arabs in Hebron— those who would prefer to see the Jews slain on the spot, and those who simply wish they would go away...

...The "tourists" were soon identified as Israelis—because they announced that they were settling permanently in the hotel...

...Yet it is hardly enough to satisfy Rabbi Levinger...

...They respect the Rav as the 'muktar' of Hebron's Jews...

...Abraham the sojourner, who in turn welcomed the strangers into his tents at Hebron...

...Syria would or would not withdraw its Sams, Israel would or would not strike...

...By the time the sun had risen over the casbah, four adults and 15 children had re-established a foothold in the old Jewish courtyard, and a dozen yeshiva students were quietly listening to a lecture in the synagogue given by a guest rabbi from Jerusalem...

...They remained condemned as illegal—but they remained...

...Attention was suddenly refocused on Beit Hadassah a year later, in May 1980, when terrorists ambushed a group returning to the clinic from Friday evening prayers at the Cave of the Patriarchs...

...They are self-appointed settlers who have taken upon themselves the task of repopulating Hebron's venerable Jewish quarter...

...Not so with Hebron...

...With virtually no industry, the city is chiefly a collection of glass-blowers, vegetable stalls, houses whose foundations often date back to the Pyzantine era, and mosques...

...Levinger is tall and thin to the point of apparent frailty...

...The call to prayer emanates from a dozen different points in the city and echoes and reechoes throughout the streets and alleys cutting across the canyon...

...The personality behind the drive to reestablish a Jewish presence in Hebron is Rabbi Moshe Levinger...

...Jerusalem is governed day to day by the spirit of Teddy Kollek, of tourism and of commerce...

...But engaged as he was in a tough reelection campaign, Begin was not about to make any controversial moves against the Jews of Hebron...

...Such signs beckoned the third phase of Levinger's crusade...

...And yeshiva students with cocked Uzis make a point of casually dawdling through the markets on their way to and from studies...

...On some levels it would seem that an uneasy sort of coexistence has been worked out between the Arabs and the Jews...

...But none of that matters: Levinger is undeniably charismatic, and has the courage to match his passionate convictions...

...So this May, shortly after Independence Day and following a memorial service marking the first anniversary of the Friday night terrorist attack, Levinger launched his fourth phase of settlement...

...Levinger's response to this was his announcement that he would increase the number of Jews at Beit Hadassah and that he would reopen the old yeshiva in the casbah...

...And incredibly trite as it sounds, Arab and Jewish children are actually playing together under the olive trees and gathering wood for a Lag B'Omer bonfire...

...The next day, if they're feeling the pressure from the terrorist elements, they refuse to serve us...

...Yehudit, a graduate of Brooklyn's Flatbush Yeshiva High School and now a volunteer mother's aid at Beit Hadassah, explains the situation this way: "It all depends on whom the Arabs fear most...

...But meanwhile, the confrontation in Hebron continued...

...The Moslems, of course, have protested...

...What good Jew would agree to such a thing...

...Indeed the army, which had been poised to remove the women and children, soon found itself supplying protection for Beit Hadassah, filling its rooftop water tanks each day, and providing other services...

...Al-Khalil is in fact the Arabic name for Hebron...

...Arab squatters occupied a yeshiva over there...

...The odds are the newsmen are right...

...His closest associates maintain that he is hated only by those who have never met him, and that people who take the trouble to visit him find their attitudes altered...

...In the last week of May 1981, and in an overnight move that brought ironic memories to Israelis of the old instant tower-and-stockade settlements of pre-state days, the Levingers and another family named Domb moved into two partially reconstructed flats adjoining the Avraham Avinu synagogue...

...The reservists posted on the nearby rooftops to guard Beit Hadassah chafed at their assignment...

...Thus Hebron today is the most dramatic example of two diametrically opposed and apparently irreconcilable national and religious apsirations coming into direct conflict...

...Hebron is enough of an Islamic monolith to tolerate a handful of quiescent Christians—its single Russian Orthodox monastery is manned by three monks...

...Oh, yes, of course, the old Jewish hospital...

...But the Jews have been here all that time, too, except for brief periods of expulsion...

...He is a frequent contributor to MOMENT...

...The message is clear: Allah is great, Mohammed is his prophet, and Hebron is a fortress for his faithful...

...That kind of posture symbolizes the rabbi's attitude—Jewish settlement in Hebron come hell or high water...

...Miriam Levinger shrugs this all off...

...What is this place with all the flags...

...But Kiryat Arba already houses about 2,500 Jews, and its 600-plus beautifully landscaped apartments are equal to those in the best of the new neighborhoods of Jerusalem...

...On their way to and from prayers at the Cave of the Patriarchs each week, Levinger and his Kiryat Arba neighbors could not take their eyes from the remnants of the old Jewish community that had once flourished in the heart'of Hebron...

...Miriam Levinger tiow announced she and her companions were making Beit Hadassah their home...

...We simply want to return to the houses and synagogues and other property that we were temporarily forced to abandon...

...I'll tell you very frankly," said Salim, who runs a grocery store a few meters away from Beit Hadassah...

...it would either erupt or burn itself out...

...In April, the principal of the Cordova Moslem girls' school near Beit Hadassah called a press conference to charge that Jewish kids had assaulted her pupils...

...When Hebron was surrendered without a shot in the Six-Day War, Israeli troops hoisted the Star of David above the building, but then-Defense Minister Moshe Dayan promptly ordered it taken down...

...Then came the Friday night ambush, to be followed within hours by the deportation of Hebron Mayor Fahd Kawasmeh, Halhoul Mayor Mohammed Milhem, and Hebron religious leader Kadi Rajab Tamimi...

...It is also common to come.away somewhat awed by the intensity of Levinger's commitment and dedication...

...The army drags me down here from Kiryat Shemona," one told me, "where Katyushas are falling on my neighborhood, to guard these fanatics from Kiryat Arba...

...In March 1979, two Arab teenagers were shot dead by troops during a violent demonstration in the neighboring village of Halhoul...

...Meanwhile, Arab youths and Israeli leftists both demonstrated against the casbah courtyard settlers...

...Actually, we plan to have 50 Jewish families here all told, just as soon.as the flats are all renovated...

...Immediately after Passover in 1979, Levinger's indomitable wife Miriam led several dozen women and children down the hill from Kiryat Arba and into the old Hadassah clinic on the main street in the center of Hebron...

...But this is without usurping any Arab's rights or property...

...One day, if they're feeling more intimidated by the army, they welcome us into their shops...

...Hebron, city of fanatics, resting place of Abraham the Friend, remains the most tense watch-spring in the time bomb of conflicting Jewish and Arab destinies...

...Herod built vast walls around the cave and covered it over with red paving stones...

...Jewish resettlement in Hebron so far has taken place in four stages, the latest just this past May...

...Levinger himself had been arrested several times for attempting to hold prayer services at the Cave of the Patriachs, or the Machpela, during scheduled periods of Moslem worship...

...Expelled from Hebron in the Middle Ages as Christianity and Islam clashed over control of the Holy Land, Jews returned in 1400 C.E...

...In his first dramatic move, Levinger led a group of supposed Swiss tourists in early 1#68 into Hebron's Park Hotel, which interestingly enough was owned by one of the area's most prominent families, the Kawasmeh clan...

...years later, he had himself and his family entombed there for all eternity...

...No other town in all of the Land of Israel remains so firmly in Arab hands today as does Hebron...

...Like lemmings, they kept coming back after each successive conqueror swept over the Land of Israel...

...How then can we tolerate the idea of Jews being barred from living in the sacred city of their forefathers...

...Or come withdrawal or autonomy...

...in addition, more families from Kiryat Arba were pressing Levinger to help them move into the heart of Hebron...

...This house had a groove in the doorway signifying that a mezuzzah had been gouged from the frame...

...Their efforts have resulted in violence and murder in recent years, and have aroused fears of "worstpossible scenarios" for the future...

...We'll be the autonomous ones...

...his suit hangs limply on his ramrod shoulders and meatless frame like the garments on a scarecrow...

...Suspicion, fear, tension and terror do not rule the streets in Jerusalem...

...It was obvious that the 10 or 12 per room situation at the old clinic could not go on for long...

...Says the Bronx-born firebrand who is reputed to conceal a pistol on her person at all times: "There's no stopping the Jewish return to Hebron...

...Abraham, from whom both Jews and Moslems claim descent, and who in Islam is known as Ibrahim al-Khalil—Abraham the Friend, meaning the one befriended by God...

...Those convictions boil down to this oft-repeated Levinger litany: "If Jews were barred from living in Paris or Los Angeles or Buenos Aires there would be an international outcry...

...A few Arabs customarily choose that particular spot to clear their throats noisily and to spit as they trudge on their way to work each morning...

...Here was the altar from a synagogue...

...That marked the second stage of settlement...

...For all this, the interior of the edifice over the cave—partly Herodian, partly Byzantine, partly mosque, partly synagogue—generally remains a sweet refuge of decorum and dignity compared to the bustling world of markets and terrorists and military governors and politics...

...since then and at various times it has been the site of Jewish prayer houses, Christian churches dedicated to St...

...Along with former Russian physicist Ben Zion Tabger, Levinger had laid the groundwork for his next move with the loving reconstruction of the 400-year-old Avraham Avinu synagogue in the so-called "Jewish courtyard" of Hebron's casbah...

...The synagogue had been a center of worship and study for centuries, until the Jews were forced to flee in the 1920s and 1930s...

...Very difficult, those very aggressive Jews...

...One old-timer says he clearly remembers when hundreds of Jews filled the commercial center of Hebron...

...Are they really reopening it...

...Jews worshipping here...

...Indeed, visitors to Hebron often feel as if they have been suddenly plucked out of Israeli-administered Judea and set down in some fanatical corner of Revolutionary Iran...

...What was left of the synagogue was used as a goat pen...

...Indeed, the children have been among the most notorious elements of Levinger's settlers (the Levingers themselves have 11 offspring...

...After the 1967 Six-Day War, Levinger was one of the founders of Gush Emunim, the movement dedicated to establishing a permanent Jewish presence throughout the West Bank...

...They're religious people themselves, and they can comprehend him—maybe better than secular Israelis can...

...They'd rather have us out...

...Now there are Jews again in Hebron—and they are anything but quiescent...

...The entire country, Jews and Arabs, was in an uproar at the move...

...We choose to live by the Torah—and the Arabs are going to have to live with us...

...Hebron is the interface where the extremists meet...

...For all its Jewish historicity, no other area in Israel or in the West Bank has such a palpable Moslem character...

...To do so is to defy the Torah and the Covenant of Abraham...

...it was a situation too volatile to smoulder on much longer...

...Under the British Mandate a concession was made allowing Jews up to the seventh step of the outer stairway...

...sit in their cars and smoke, certain that something dramatic is going to happen...

...Jews ruling here...

...But that doesn't mean they're really reconciled to having us here...

...We'll institute self-rule, not the Arabs...

...It was subsequently learned that one of the buildings belonged to an Arab who had rescued Jews during the 1929 riots...

...But if the government does leave, we'll still stay...

...Outside, simmering Moslem youths await any opportunity—a soccer match victory or a procession of wedding cars—to start a street demonstration for Falastin, Watan, Huriya (Palestine, Fatherland, Freedom...

...Hebron, in short, is the heart of the heart of the conflict...

...Look," she continues, shifting an infant from one hip to another, "there have been non-Jewish people in Hebron for thousands of years, as far back as when Abraham purchased his burial cave here from the Hittites for 400 silver shekels...

...The group was forcibly evicted by the military authorities...

...Five times each day, but most markedly at night, the unsullied air of Hebron vibrates with the cry of the muezzins...

...No Jews were to enter the place at all on the Moslem sabbath, which is Friday...

...Their fathers are burdened with work, study and guard duty, and their mothers are busy with preparing the large communal meals and coping with the laundry...

...Official reaction was immediate from both Arabs and Jews...

...He is balding, full-bearded and somewhat crazy-eyed...

...But nothing yet—not the Israel Defence Forces nor the Palestine Liberation Organization—has dissuaded these Jews from their determination to drive a wedge into this citadel of Moslem intransigence and fundamentalism...

...And will continue...

...It all started with Abraham, the first Jew and the first to settle in the Land of Israel...

...The 1980 ambush was the culmination of numerous incidents of escalating tension between the Arabs and Jews of Hebron...

...That signaled the government's ambivalence and nervousness about the burial place of the first Jew...

...He was eventually compensated with $100,000 for his building...

...Deputy Premier Yigal Yadin of the defunct Democratic Movement for Change convened a special cabinet committee meeting where he challenged the legality of the Beit Hadassah occupation, but he got nowhere...

...Another elderly Arab, this one a splendidly dressed Bedouin sheikh with a pistol proudly and prominently thrust into his belt, comes into Hebron on business from his settlement near Arad and stops in front of Beit Hadassah, staring in open curiosity...

...Okay, we accept that...

...Prime Minister Menahem Begin personally condemned the action as "illegal and politically unwise...

...Thirty days later, three other West Bank mayors were the targets of car-bomb attack's...

...Yet even now, this May, as a soldier climbs to his guard post on a rooftop above the hill, he helps an Arab women carry a cooking-gas balloon and receives a glass of mint tea as a reward...

...Immediately after the attack, army engineers bulldozed the buildings to the' ground...

...All we're doing by restoring these wrecked Jewish buildings is injuring Arab pride— and we're simply not going to allow our Jewish destiny to be determined by Arab sensibilities...

...one Jew, a cheesemaker, clung to Hebron until the eve of the first Arab-Israeli war...

...Everybody, it seems, was unhappy with the situation—except the squatters themselves...

...All throughout the centuries of the Disapora, Hebron was revered as one of Judaism's four holy cities (along with Jerusalem, Safad and Tiberias)—and during the first 19 years of Israeli independence, Hebron was the only one of those holy cities totally in Arab hands...

...The women's husbands were eventually allowed overnight visits, and then they, along with yeshiva students, became permanent residents...

...Among the six dead in the attack was one young man who apparently had been especially marked for death...

...Exasperated Israeli troops watch it all from rooftops, and newsmen from Europe and the U.S...

...Built in 1909, Beit Hadassah had been a combination medical facility and religious study center that prior to the 1948 war had been one of the most important Jewish properties in Hebron...

...from Venice (incidentally bringing with them the art of glass-blowing, which they had brought to Italy from Acre and Tyre) and continued to thrive in Hebron until modern times...

...The city arouses passions, divides communities and sows confusion unlike any other geographical point on the map of the conflict...

...Jews clung to Hebron after the division of Lev Bearfield is a writer who lives in Israel...

...In Hebron the pervasive spirit is that of Meir Kahane and the Ayatollah Khomeini...

...It's a case of fanatics locking horns with fanatics...

...Prime Minister Begin called the move an affront and an illegal act...

...But the Jews—and especially these new-style Jews—are something else again...

...Syria rattled missiles, Israel threatened a pre-emptive attack, the Palestinians and the Christians braced for a new round of battle, the Saudis and the Libyans parried and feinted, and Philip Habib did his shuffle...

...They remained there until 1970, when the government—and remember, we are referring to a Labor government—acceded to Levinger's demands and agreed to build permanent housing for him and his followers at a site to be called Kiryat Arba, also overlooking Hebron...

...Jews living here...

...God forbid Israel should ever withdraw from this portion of its God-given land," he says...

...But several exchange a few words of greeting in awkward Hebrew with the young students with their Talmuds and their Kalatchnikovs...

...Some Arabs will even stop to chat...

...These are the sites of the buildings from which the terrorists opened fire on the Beit Hadassah worshippers last year...

...Abraham...

...also more common there than in East Jerusalem or Nablus or Ramallah...

...Each stage was spearheaded by Levinger...

...But they have an idea now of what terrorism costs them...

...Acting Hebron Mayor Mustafa Nabi Natshe threatened a municipal strike (later cancelled) and fired off a cable to UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, informing him of this latest violation of Palestinian rights and Moslem dignity...

...Today Kiryat Arba— the name is a biblical alternate for Hebron—is a flourishing suburb...

...no trace has been found of the perpetrators of the car bombings...

...A few young women today do appear on the streets in slacks, but far more Hebron women wear all-concealing ankle-length coats...

...The Arabs are frantically throwing up houses around the area to contain it...

...They wish he would go away—but they understand why he won't...

...Autonomy for the West Bank...

...says a member of the city council who showed me around the area near Abraham's burial place...

...Even the question of Jerusalem pales by comparison: Israelis are united on the unity of their capital, and coexistence with Jerusalem's Arabs is a fact...

...We always lived peacefully with the Jews...

...Kiryat Arba is an impressive fact—and a monument to the drive and determination of one man...

...Then, in January 1980, yeshiva student-soldier Jehoshua Saloma was murdered, shot in the head as he was shopping in Hebron's casbah market...

...And after all, we don't wish to replace any of the current residents of Hebron...

...Young Jewish girls recite psalms at the cenotaph of Sarah, while in the main chamber Moslem scholars sit tailor-seat on rugs and expound points of the Koran...

...Yes, he also remembers the massacre of 1929 in which 67 Jews died, but he says, echoing a popular refrain, "It was the British, who always hated the Jews, who instigated the whole thing...

...Hazeev had been convicted the year before (sentence suspended) of conveying the Kahane philosophy by breaking into homes of Hebron Arabs and beating up their residents, telling them they were occupying Jewish property and had better leave...

...Levinger welcomes visitors to his settlement projects in Hebron, and they do often the kingdom, after the return from exile in Babylon, after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans...

...Should we willingly give in to expulsion again because of politics or sensibilities...

...And continues...

...Anyway, the Rav is one of the few Jews here who can walk around the streets without a rifle on his shoulder...

...The kids flee their cramped quarters at every opportunity, scampering across the rooftops, schnorring sweets from the soldiers billeted next door, scooting along the alleyways, swirling under the feet of the constant stream of tourists and journalists who call at Beit Hadassah...

...Two families from Kiryat Arba immediately took our place at Beit Hadassah, and 40 more are ready to move next to us here in the Jewish courtyard...

...But the fact is that the Beit Hadassah children are an unruly lot...

...Yes, I can accept that...

...There seems to be some truth in this...

...But in the first of many ambivalent moves by the Israeli government, the would-be settlers were accommodated in the old British Taggart fort that overlooks the city...

...Aside from the cars, in fact, there are few signs that Hebron has even acknowledged the twentieth century...

...some yeshiva students and their families stayed on until the Arab riots of 1936, when they were evacuated by the British...

...The air is cool and mellow, the atmosphere quiet and sober...

...Despite hostile opposition from Moslem Hebron and in the face of condemnation by the Israeli government and public, Jews have been moving back into the city of Abraham...

...He gestures across the street where two huge cavities are cut into the hillside...

...But all during their enforced absence," says Tabger, "Jews continued to pay the rates and rents on their properties into an escrow fund...

...But he apparently thought it still more unwise to remove the squatters...

...Arab squatters took over what remained of the Jewish houses...

...The Mach-pela cave is said to contain the remains of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob and Leah (and according to legend, Adam and Eve as well...

...Hebron, as we often tend to forget, long predates Jerusalem as the first Jewish city...

...Meanwhile, the army beefed up its security forces and established a permanent base in a former Jewish building adjoining the old clinic...

...Born in Jerusalem, Levinger is an alumnus of that city's Zionist Mer-caz Harav Yeshiva and the army's Nahal (Fighting Pioneer Youth) Corps...

...This city of over 70,000 has not a single cinema, and you can't even buy a beer, much less hard liquor, in any of its hotels or restaurants...

...But while attention was centered north of Israel's Galilee panhandle, events in a quiet market town 35 kilometers south of Jerusalem made the problems in Lebanon, dangerous as they were, seem mild and transitory...

...Abraham, the first Jew, settled in Hebron when he first came to the Land of Israel...

...Most of the passers-by on the busy thoroughfare in front of Beit Hadassah seem to take no notice of the single building bedecked with Israeli flags...

...one of the dead, 16-year-old Rab'a al-Shalada, subsequently became something of a Palestinian martyr and the subject of paintings and posters reproduced throughout the West Bank...

...One sees no women in Hebron working in shops or driving cars...

...Dave, like Eli Hazeev a Vietnam War veteran who works as a hired guard at Beit Hadassah, says the Arabs are getting accustomed to the Jewish presence in Hebron...

...During the 400 years of Ottoman rule, Jews were forbidden entrance to the Machpela...

...Reviled in the Israeli press as a dangerous provocateur and a messianic maniac, Levinger has nevertheless inspired a significant number of followers...

...This shop still had Hebrew lettering on its walls...

...The problem of Hebron begins with the very beginnings of the Jews and the Arabs...

...By comparison, they were...

...they are also building a magnificent mosque financed by the Persian Gulf oil states...

...The minarets stand out among the modest stone houses tucked into the slopes of the wadi enfolding the town...

...his face may be described most generously as homely...

...King David reigned from Hebron for seven years before moving his capital to Jerusalem...

...I remember the doctor well...

...Almost weekly Hebron's Arabs have complained that the Jewish children taunt them, throw stones, and otherwise make their lives miserable...

...They do in Hebron...

...And of course the Arabs were displeased...

...Hebron is in many ways the knottiest single problem in the entire Middle East tangle...

...The military governor of Hebron issued them weapons for self-protection...

...The black veil is come away acknowledging the logic underpinning his faith...

...Abraham's burial place is about a quarter-mile south of the Jewish courtyard in the casbah...

...The old Jewish community in Hebron was effectively brought to an end in 1929 in a pogrom instigated by the fanatical Mufti of Jerusalem...

...By April of this year, Beit Hadassah was housing about 25 adults and 50 children, with families of 10 sharing single rooms...

...We won't wait for anyone else to make decisions—just as we didn't wait for the government to start settlement here...