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Challenge Magazine no.51
The Heart of Madness
Editorial 11-12/1998
On August 20, close to midnight, the elderly Rabbi Shlomoh Ra'anan was
stabbed to death in his mobile home on Tel Rumeida in the southern part of
Hebron. Seven of the most extreme settler families - including leaders of
Kach, an outlawed, racist group - live on the tel, site of the ancient city
of Hebron. Ra'anan had been there several years. He was on record as saying
he wanted to "settle in the most difficult place." The identity of his
killers is still unknown. Israel responded to the killing with a curfew on
all 18,000 Palestinians living in the Israeli-controlled territory of H1. It
also imposed a hermetic blockade on the Palestinian-controlled part of the
city, known as H2, where 150,000 live. The Israelis offered a unique
explanation for the curfew on H1: to protect the Palestinians from the wrath
of the 400 settlers living there. By enforcing the 11-day curfew, the
authorities gave the settlers a green light to go on a wrecking spree. Such
hooliganism is nothing new. With or without a Jewish victim, the Hebron
settlers have always prevailed, using their own code of rules and
privileges. They ignore the army and the police. If an officer doesn't do as
the settlers want, they label him a Nazi and refuse to have anything to do
with him. They are used to getting their way. We witnessed an egregious
example four years ago, after Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 Muslim
worshippers in the Ibrahimi mosque. Tentative and temporary measures were
taken against the settlers, but soon they were roaming free. Hebron's Arabs,
on the other hand, were shut up in their houses for a month.
During the most recent curfew, Israel erected twenty new checkpoints to
ensure that Palestinians kept off the streets. The settlers were the kings
of H1. It would occur to no one, of course, to put them under curfew "for
their protection". There were several Palestinian casualties during the
curfew. Two babies died in medical emergencies because soldiers would not
let their families cross over to the hospital in H2. On August 23, Kusai
Tamimi, aged three months, died of a fever and lung failure. In another
case, 24-year-old Fadua al Adam, who was in labor, arrived at the
checkpoint. Israeli soldiers refused to let her through. She gave birth in
her car and the baby died. Were these people "victims of overprotection"?
One Israeli pundit asked. "How would Israelis react if a Jewish settler lost
her baby at a Palestinian checkpoint?"
Amid these tragedies and several violent clashes, in which youngsters from
H2 stoned soldiers and settlers in H1, Israeli politicians made pilgrimages
to console the fanatics on Tel Rumeida. President Ezer Weizman, Defense
Minister Yitzhak Mordechai and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu all ducked
their heads into waves of verbal abuse from the settlers. At the same time
the Treasury promised ten million shekels to replace the seven mobile homes
with proper houses. Since 1984, when the national-unity government first
allowed settlers to live on Tel Rumeida, they have never been permitted to
build. The new decision is a major concession to these fanatics, whose
extremism is criticized even by the right-wing settlers' movement, Gush
Emunim.
The guiding concept at Oslo, after the bloody years of the intifada, was to
create a functional separation between Israelis and Palestinians. One might
think this impossible, given that 140,000 settlers (not counting those in
East Jerusalem) live amid a million West Bank Palestinians. Yet Oslo does
not provide for the evacuation of a single settlement. To ensure strict
separation, by-pass roads have been built, costing millions. They have given
rise to a delusion that two hostile worlds could exist side by side. In
Hebron this principle was violated. Here the government has tolerated a
small group of settlers in the midst of a large Arab population. Even the
massacre by Baruch Goldstein brought no change. The Hebron agreement, signed
in January, 1997, allowed Israel to keep the old city, which contains the
most hard-line, fanatical settlers of all. Here, then, is a constant and
inevitable flashpoint, ready to flare whenever one side or the other wants
to disturb the so-called peace process. The fact is, separation does not
keep the peace anywhere in the West Bank, where five settlers have been
killed since April. If the Palestinians refuse (and rightly!) to tolerate
the settlers in their midst, how can they agree to the Jewish fanatics of
Hebron, who have created their own little state within a territory within a
state? In Challenge 40 1996 ("Hebron: En Route to Catastrophe"), we warned:
"As soon as redeployment occurs, the facts on the ground will take over. The
agreement will leave a deep festering resentment on the Palestinian side.
And on the Jewish side in Hebron there are so many fanatics, released
murderers, demagogues, and inciters - so many apostles of Baruch Goldstein -
that the situation is bound to explode. The strange thing is, everybody
knows this. The two sides walk toward the day of redeployment pulled by a
force which they cannot evade - as if to a date with the executioner." The
Hebron agreement is the only step that Netanyahu has taken till now within
the framework of Oslo. Two years later, the outlook is bleak. It has finally
registered on the Palestinians that when the final status talks end, in May
1999, they will only have 40% of their land at the most. The pro-Oslo
circles in Israel are gloomy too. They prefer to blame Netanyahu rather than
face the fact that the deal was impossible from the start. No party has the
capability or the will, at this stage, to construct a peace that both sides
will want to keep. The Palestinians are paying the immediate price, but it
is the Israelis who will receive, in time, the final bill.
