Elyakim Haetzni

Editor’s Note: Hebron is the burial place of the patriarchs and the first capital of the Davidic Kingdom.

Member of the Knesset for Meretz Zahava Galon asked why Jewish trespassers have not been expelled from the Arab wholesale market in Hebron. The deputy defense minister answered that the present sensitive situation in Hebron does not permit it, for the moment.

To those who are upset at the fact that Arabs have been displaced from their property, I say:

The market was part of the Avraham Avinu [Our Father Abraham] Quarter until the 1929 pogrom. I took a blood sample from this event, in the form of a memorandum presented to the British high commissioner by Hebron’s community. The Rabbis Meir Kastel, 68 years old, and Tzvi Drabkin, 70 years old, and five young men were robbed, castrated, tortured and murdered; the baker, Noah Immerman was roasted alive in an oven; Rabbi Yaâkov Orlanski HaCohen was found praying—they took his brain from his skull and crushed his wife’s intestines; the pharmacist Ben-Tzion Gershon, lame, unable to move, who served in Hebron for 40 years, kindly assisting many Arabs, was killed, his nose and fingers cut off while his daughter was raped, then murdered with awful torture. The teacher Dubkinov and Yitzhak Abushdid were strangled with a rope; six synagogues, including 64 Torah scrolls, many of them ancient, from the Spanish exile, were stolen and desecrated.

In response, the remainder of the community was expelled "for their own safety," and the murderers inherited from them. After the Jordanian occupation, King Hussein built a vegetable market on part of the quarter and rented it to the Hebron municipality which then rented it to wholesalers. When Israel liberated Hebron, it was discovered that the Jewish property, including the market, was still registered in the name of its Jewish owners. It was transferred to the Custodian for Enemy Property (Israel). But the Israeli military government did not return the property to its owners, continuing to rent it to Arabs.

The Jews who returned to the old Jewish quarter were forced to pass through the crowded wholesale market, leading to many incidents. In any case, as the city grew, the area was no longer appropriate for a market and the wholesalers turned to the mayor to find a more suitable site. However, he refused, in order to prevent Jewish return to the area.

In the meantime, Hebron Arabs went back to murdering Jews. Yeshiva student Aharon Gross was stabbed to death opposite the wholesale market. Other murders, including the Baruch Goldstein carnage [of Arabs], forced the government to close the market. The Israeli custodian did not renew the lease with the city and the wholesalers found another location, much more appropriate. Two intifadas left scars, and most terribly, the murder of infant Shalhevet Pass, next to the wall of the wholesale market.

This is the key to much friction between Hebron’s Jews and the Israeli government, which has been afraid to “openly and rightfully” claim, as Herzl said, that which was stolen from them, fearing what the world and the left would say. So it was that Hebron’s Jewish community, which just as any other living, healthy organism expects to grow and develop, was left to act for itself, by itself.

So it was that the ruins of the Avraham Avinu synagogue (originally built by Spanish exiles) were renovated only after demonstrations; so it was that the ancient Jewish cemetery was restored to the community only after scandals; so too did Jews return to pray at the Maarat HaMachpela only after sit-down strikes; so too was the return to Beit Hadassah achieved only after women stole into the basement, followed by a terror gang’s murder of six men who had come on Sabbath eve to say Kiddush for the besieged women.

After Arab rights to the empty wholesale market expired, families who had waited much too long due to government refusal to allow new construction, transformed the buildings into livable apartments. During a Supreme Court hearing, initiated by the Hebron municipality, the State argued that the Hebron municipality had no rights to the site and that the only title-holder was the Israeli Custodian for Abandoned Property, which issued an eviction order against the Jewish residents of the market! The order was appealed to a committee which, by majority vote, upheld the decision to expel the Jews. One of the judges accepted the settlers’ claims and another recommended that the custodian rent the property to its present inhabitants. A request was forwarded, but is still pending. Where is the logic and justice in this?

Two questions remain: To the Arabs: When you transformed the Jewish Quarter with blood and fire into an Arab market, there wasn’t a conqueror, refugees, or a Jewish state. So, why did you do this?

And to Knesset member Galon: Thousands of eviction orders against Arabs in Yesha and Israel have been issued and not implemented. Why does only the wholesale market keep you awake at night?

Elyakim Haetzni is an attorney living in Kiryat Arba. This appeared in Yediot Achronot on October 16, 2004