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Jewish Settlements and the Anniversary of the Hebron Massacre

Prof. Jerold S. Auerbach - 8/7/2009

This week, when a lead editorial in The New York Times (July 31) advocates freezing Jewish settlements, marks the publication of my Hebron Jews: Memory and Conflict in the Land of Israel. No Jews are as relentlessly vilified as the Jewish settlers of Hebron. Castigated as "zealots," "fanatics" and "fundamentalists," they are the militant Jewish settlers whom legions of critics is Israel, in the United States and throughout the world love to hate. It is seldom noticed that their most serious transgression, settlement in the heart of the biblical Land of Israel, defines Zionism: the return of Jews to their historic homeland.

Hebron Jews are fiercely determined to return to the spiritual and geographical sources of Jewish history. It was there, according to the biblical narrative, that Abraham purchased a burial cave for Sarah, the first Jewish land holding in their promised land. Ever since, Hebron has been deeply embedded in Jewish history. Centuries before Jerusalem became King David's city, home to the sacred Temples, Hebron already was a source of Jewish memory and a locus of Jewish piety. One of the four ancient holy cities, Hebron became King David's first capital, an important administrative center for King Hezekiah in his eighth-century war against the Assyrians, and a crucial battleground during the Maccabean and Bar Kokhba uprisings. There, at the beginning of the Common Era, King Herod built the massive stone enclosure around the burial tombs of the Jewish patriarchs and matriarchs that remains the oldest intact structure in the entire Land of Israel. Lives have lived in Hebron almost continuously ever since.

In 1929, exactly 80 years ago this month (August 23-24), the Hebron Jewish Community was suddenly attacked by scores of Arab rioters and brutally decimated. Sixty-seven Jews were murdered; the survivors were removed from Hebron by British soldiers. For the next forty years, Hebron was Judenrein. When the Israel Defense Forces arrived in Hebron near the end of the Six-Day War, Hebron was restored to Jewish control for the first time in 2,000 years. The following year, a group of religious Zionists came to Hebron to celebrate Passover and rebuild the destroyed community of 1929. They formed the ideological vanguard of the Jewish settlement community that has since embedded 300,000 Jews in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank).

Hebron Jews, now a community of seven hundred, embrace a synthesis of religion and nationalism that is anathema to most modern Jews. Their impassioned blend of Judaism and Zionism is commonly blamed for undermining Israeli democracy and jeopardizing Middle East peace, as President Obama recently claimed in his Cairo speech.

Hebron Jews may be the only Jews in the world whose critics can viciously malign them without incurring the taint of anti-Semitism. But their unyielding determination to live in Hebron, despite the hostility of Palestinian Arabs and the opposition of the Israeli government, reveals their enduring uniqueness as a community of Jewish memory. Readers of Hebron Jews will understand why.