First of all: The bloody incident at last Friday evening (Nov. 15) in Hebron, during which 12 Israelis and three Palestinians got killed and 14 wounded was not, I repeat was not a "massacre of innocent Jewish worshippers on her way home from Friday Night prayers at the Patriarch Cave in Hebron, perpetrated by Palestinian terrorists", as the Israeli government and foreign ministry's spokespersons claimed...Those who returned from their prayer to the nearby Kiryat-Arba settlement had all been back home and at the Sabbat evening dinner tables, when that incident occurred.
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Untitled Document
Embattled Hebron Heralds Dangerous Developments
by Hans Lebrecht, Kibbutz Beit-Oren, November 18, 2002
First of all: The bloody incident at last Friday evening (Nov. 15) in Hebron,
during which 12 Israelis and three Palestinians got killed and 14 wounded was
not, I repeat was not a "massacre of innocent Jewish worshippers on her
way home from Friday Night prayers at the Patriarch Cave in Hebron, perpetrated
by Palestinian terrorists", as the Israeli government and foreign ministry's
spokespersons claimed in their handouts to the foreign media, and repeated again
and again by them for at least one whole day. Those who returned from their
prayer to the nearby Kiryat-Arba settlement had all been back home and at the
Sabbat evening dinner tables, when that incident occurred.
In fact, the 12 Israelis killed had been not civilian Jewish worshippers, as
told by those handouts and at first broadcast all over the world, but all officers
and men of the Israeli army and border police. They fell during a two hour combat,
after having been ambushed by a small group of Palestinian militants of the
Islamic Jihad at a bend of the less than two mile road from Hebron to Kiryat-Arba.
The three attacking Palestinians were killed too. Among the Israeli victims
was the commander of the Hebron Brigade, Colonel Dror Weinberg, the most high-ranking
officer killed since the outbreak of the current Intifada 22 months ago, as
well as five sergeants and corporals and six privates. The Islamic Jihad maintained
that the ambush was in retaliation for the extra-juridical assassination execution
of one of their leading members, Eyad Sawalha, five days earlier, of whom the
Israeli security services claimed that he was responsible for a murderous attack
on Kibbutz Meretz, in which two women, two small kids and the security official
of the Kibbutz, had been killed.
The whole affair points to a further sharp escalation of the sanguinary mutual
retaliation-for-retaliation-for-retaliation and revenge acts. This catastrophic
escalation should be seen against the background of the current right-wing Sharon-Mofaz-Netanyahu
transition triumvirate cabinet and the pre-election experienced rightist upsurge
in Israel's political spectrum.
Hebron city in the southern part of the occupied West Bank has a Palestinian
population of 150,000. About 450 all-Jewish ultra-messianic fundamentalists
have occupied some houses and compounds in an Israeli occupied part of the city
(20 percent), in which hitherto are residing also some 20,000 Palestinians.
This arrangement was signed 1998 between Netanyahu and Arafat as an interim
arrangement within the framework of the 1993 Oslo Declaration of Principles.
Now, FM Netanyahu and his PM Sharon have declared, that the whole Oslo agreement
and the interim arrangements accordingly are null and void. Only a few weeks
ago, the Israeli occupation army left most of the 80 percent of the town, officially
administered by the Palestinian authorities, but re-conquered during the summer
of this year. Now, as reprisal for the Friday evening incident, the army has
returned with tanks, armored troop carriers and heavy bulldozers into the Palestinian
city, to continue its work of destruction and violence of human rights.
Background to Hebron outrage
The establishment of the Jewish presence in Hebron has its own history. In
Hebron, or in Arabic El-Khalil, the "Cave of the Patriarchs" is
situated, the site that according to the Jewish as well the Arab-Islamic mythology
(a saga told in the bible), the common biblical Patriarch Abraham, alias Ibrahim,
and his wife Sarah are said to have been buried. At this cave, a Mosque, as
well as a Synagogue are held as holy sites for believers of both religions.
Until 1929, Arab Palestinians and Jews had been living side be side in this
town. But then, an instigated crowd of Islam fundamentalists perpetrated a bloody
pogrom among the Jewish residents, killing 49 of the 700 Hebron Jews, and wounding
dozens more. Most of the Jewish community had been saved by their Arab neighbors,
and left the town successively. On the Passah spring holiday of 1968, after
El-Khalil-Hebron had been occupied by Israel in June of the previous year, a
small group of Ultras, led by their Rabbi Levinger, seized a hotel and proclaimed
the "Town of the Patriarchs" to be settled again by Jews, while
the indigenous Palestinian "foreigners" should leave. The then
Israeli (Labor) government declared the Levinger "settlers'" acclamation
to be illegal, but then gave in to the right-wing and clerical opposition, and
allowed these provocative elements to establish their headquarters in the former
Hadassah hospital compound near the Patriarch Cave. Moreover, the then Labor
government, as a compromise with the "messianic-fundamentalist settler"
gang allowed them to set up the Kiryat-Arba settlement on confiscated Palestinian
land at the outskirts of Hebron. Utilizing the compromising Labor government,
the well-armed Levinger gang seized ever more houses and stalls from Palestinian
neighbors, claiming their houses had allegedly been before 1929 "Jewish
houses". In this way the present-day most provocative fundamentalist
Jewish "settlement" in the city was established. Kiryat-Arba developed
into a locality of about 5,000 inhabitants, among which the majority belong
to the racist (U.S. Jewish initiated and supported) Kahane gang jand other ultra-right
political scene. The place became ill-famed by the 1995 massacre, when one of
its residents, an Israeli army Captain, Baruch Goldstein, clad in his uniform,
emptied several magazines of his submachine gun at the backs of praying Palestinians
inside the Patriarch Mosque, killing 29 of the worshippers and wounding several
dozens more, before he himself was killed by a Moslem guard. His "Martyr's
Grave" at a special plaza in Kiryat-Arba became a site for pilgrimage
for the ultra-fundamentalist elements from the U.S. and Israeli colonialist
Kahane gangs.
Now, in the wake of last Friday's bloody event, a group of Kiryat-Arba settlers,
most of them belonging to the Kahane Hay gang, have set up an "outpost"
tent encampment at the site of the incident. They demand that all the Palestinian
houses along that road should be eliminated and the road to be broadened and
become a fortified "security promenade", connecting Kiryat-Arba
with the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. PM Sharon was quick to visit the
gang and promising them, he would comply with their demands and sponsor a speedy
execution of them. The first houses along that road had been already destroyed.
According to this newest outraged designs of the Sharon cabinet and occupation
army command, from the hitherto 20,000 Palestinian residents of the Israeli
occupied area only about 4,000 might be allowed to remain. The others would
be expelled either into the Palestinian administrated parts of the city, added
to the 150.000 Palestinians residing there, or to be "transferred"
somewhere else.
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