My pilgrimage to Hebron, By Yossi Klein Halevi
No place in the land of Israel leaves a Jew - or at least this Jew - as ambivalent as Hebron. On the one hand, Hebron is my most cherished place of pilgrimage. More than the Western Wall, with its crowds and flags and marble plaza, the Machpela, or Tomb of the Patriarchs, conveys ancientness and intimacy. No nation possesses a comparable pantheon, where its millennia-old founders are buried. And no sane nation would walk away from here and sever its tangible connection to its origins. A people that surrenders its deepest roots risks returning to exile.
Yet Hebron, formally divided between Israeli and Palestinian authorities, is also this land's most tormented city. The Israeli-controlled area around the Machpela, with its three settler enclaves, has become a war zone, where soldiers patrol in full battle gear, fingers close to the trigger. The once-thriving Arab market is gone. The Arab pottery shops and vegetable stalls are shuttered and covered with ugly settler graffiti demanding revenge and proclaiming Hebron exclusively Jewish.
Without the presence of the settlers, and the massive military support required to defend them, it's doubtful whether a Jew would feel even relatively safe enough to come here at all. I feel grateful to the settlers for their courage and persistence in the face of relentless attacks, which accompanied the Jewish return to Hebron from its inception.
The Israeli-controlled enclave has become a Palestinian wasteland in the past few years because of Palestinian terrorism - like the shooting of a baby girl in the arms of her father. But if the responsibility begins with the Palestinians, it hardly ends there.
The settlers have long coveted the Arab-owned shops that once belonged to Jews - a dangerous precedent, given Palestinian property claims on Israel. Too, the absence of Arab life in the Israeli-controlled streets is a partial fulfillment of the transferist dreams of many Jews here. And the same military presence that makes it possible for me to pray in Hebron also enables abuses against the civilian population, like the alleged murder and humiliation spree for which a group of border policemen are now on trial.
Hebron evokes among its rival partisans a one-dimensional vision sustained by selective history. Settlers speak of the "Hebron massacre" but mean only the Muslim slaughter of Jews in 1929, not Dr. Baruch Goldstein's massacre of Muslims in the Machpela in 1994. And Palestinians I've spoken with deny that Jews have any right to pray at the Machpela, or even that Jews have lived here since biblical times.
A FEW years ago I visited the Christian Peacemaker Team (CPT) - a group of activists, most of them Mennonites, who were living in Hebron in solidarity with the Palestinians against "colonialist" Israel. The tragedy of Hebron, I argued, is hardly a simplistic story of oppressors and oppressed. For centuries, after all, Jews had lived here as dhimmis, second-class residents, forbidden to pray in the Machpela and humiliatingly confined to the seventh step leading into the building. Until the 1929 pogrom, Hebron's Jewish community existed almost uninterrupted for millennia. From the founding of Israel until the 1967 Six Day War, Jews were forbidden to enter Hebron altogether.
The good people of the CPT had never heard of those facts. Nor were they particularly interested: Their Hebron began in 1967. But that shouldn't be surprising. On the wall of their apartment was a map of the Middle East which didn't contain the name "Israel." Two weeks ago, I went with a friend from abroad on a pilgrimage to the Machpela. We got into a taxi in downtown Jerusalem and in less than an hour were in downtown Hebron.
The Machpela is arguably the most tightly guarded religious site in this land. To enter, you must pass through two electronic barriers. Dozens of alert soldiers are positioned outside and inside the building. These security measures are a legacy of Dr. Goldstein, who remains a hero to many Jews in Hebron and nearby Kiryat Arba.
Another legacy is the division of the Machpela into exclusively Muslim and Jewish sections. Until the Goldstein massacre, Jews and Muslims had equal access to all parts of the shrine. For me, one of the most moving memories of the pre-Goldstein era was seeing a Jewish woman with a kerchief tied behind her neck and an Arab woman with a kerchief tied beneath her chin standing together, oblivious to each other's presence, silently praying before the cenotaph of Mother Sarah. It was a reminder that the name "Machpela" - which implies doubling and which the rabbis say refers to the couples buried here - also hints at the fact that two religions revere this place and belong to it. Abraham, after all, was buried here jointly by his two sons, Isaac and Ishmael.
But those inadvertent glimpses of wholeness are now impossible. The room devoted to Abraham and Sarah, where Jews pray, is sealed off by a massive green door from the hall devoted to Isaac and Rebecca, where Muslims pray. That door marks the spot from where Goldstein fired round after round into rows of Muslims arched in prayer.
The division has created diminishment. Once, the Machpela conveyed both expanse and depth. Now, though, the Jewish section feels cramped, busy with massive bookcases and closets and memorials and even a display of Chabad pamphlets. Ancientness has been overwhelmed by an intrusive need to define and reclaim every available space. Nowhere does the pilgrim feel alone.
Oppressive signs warn against speaking during prayer; one notes that anyone speaking during the silent parts of the service will be "banished to hell forever." That is not some lunatic's hand-scrawled warning but a printed message hanging on the wall, presumably with the blessing of the religious authorities who control the shrine.
Still, there is nothing quite like praying in the Machpela. No Jewish prayer experience can compare with praying to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob while standing before the cenotaphs marking their graves in the cave below, reinforcing the centrality of peoplehood and place in Jewish spirituality. Nowhere else does one feel so immediately the concurrence of generations, the souls that are protecting Israel.
And so, a Jew returns from Hebron uplifted and despairing. We can't live without Hebron and we can't quite live with it either. Hebron is our deepest source, and our deepest dilemma. Our return to Hebron is legitimate, inevitable. But I cannot celebrate it. In Hebron I am both pilgrim and mourner, destroyer and renewer, unwilling conqueror and returning son. Nowhere in this land is our presence more justified, or more problematic. Nowhere are we more wrong and more right than here.
Like Hebron, like the Machpela, I am torn apart.
The writer is the Israel correspondent for The New Republic, and author of At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land.
jpost.com |
