No Compromise At Kiryat Arba

Israel's unyielding settlers

Robert Friedman

No Compromise At Kiryat Arba — Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 12 February 1980 — Sarasota Herald-Tribune · Sarasota, Florida · 12 February 1980

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Transcribed from the clipping

“On the parched hills of Hebron, on the West Bank of the Jordan River, Kiryat Arba’s stone-hewn apartment towers rise into the clear desert air. The fortress-like quality they create is appropriate: Kiryat Arba is ringed by barbed wire. Israeli soldiers man the checkpoints and prowl the yard at night.

Established in 1969 by a band of orthodox Jews under Rabbi Moshe Levinger, Kiryat Arba, population 1,500, is the largest of 40 fortified settlements that now dot the West Bank. The settlers journeyed there after the Israeli army occupied the West Bank following the Six-Day War in 1967.

They were seeking a messianic kingdom on land that was once part of ancient Israel, land that they claim was given to them by God and to which their return is divinely ordained… In recent months, a wave of violence, triggered by opposition to the Palestinian autonomy talks, has erupted in Kiryat Arba and spread down the slope into Arab Hebron and across the entire West Bank.

Forty women and children marched from Kiryat Arba to Hebron last April and occupied a building. They threatened to take over whole areas of Hebron, claiming, correctly, that some of it had been Jewish property before 1929. That year, the English, governing under the British Mandate, evacuated the Jews in an attempt to end violence between Jewish and Arab settlers.

Last June a goon squad from Kiryat Arba was arrested for riding around Nablus in a sound truck, exhorting the Arabs to flee. A similar gang broke into an Arab house in Hebron last July and beat up the residents. Then, in September, 70 Kiryat Arba residents tried to confiscate an Arab field.

Israeli troops sent to break up the occupation were met by a barrage of flaming tires and fire bombs… Eliakim Haetzni, a lawyer and key activist of the ‘Eretz Yisrael’ movement, insists that the violent incidents are isolated aberrations, and that relations between residents of Hebron and Kiryat Arba are excellent.

‘If the Palestinian Arabs hated us,’ Haetzni asked, ‘why would they come up the hill to build our synagogues, work in our factories and tend our gardens?

The Palestinians see us as neighbors, not as a threat.’… Rabbi Meir Kahane, former head of the Jewish Defense League in the United States and now head of Israel’s Kach Party, thinks that Haetzni’s good-neighbor policy is ‘crap.’ ‘You can’t buy Arab love with indoor toilets and good health care,’ he said.

‘Israeli Arabs and West Bank Arabs identify with the PLO. Moreover, they multiply like rabbits. At their rate of growth, they will take over the Knesset (Israel’s Parliament) in 25 years. I am not prepared to sacrifice Zionism to democracy. There is only one solution: The Arabs must leave Israel.’

When asked how he would implement such a policy if he were prime minister, Kahane, who is running for a Knesset seat in May, said, ‘I’d go to the Arabs and tell them to leave. I’d promise generous compensation.

If they refused, I’d force them out.’… ‘Arabs can live on the West Bank,’ said Gush leader Levinger, ‘but they will have no political rights.’

Mamoun el Sayyed, the editor of El Fajar, an Arab-language newspaper published in East Jerusalem, summed up the Arab attitude toward Kiryat Arba: ‘Haetzni reminds me of a liberal plantation owner in the American South prior to the Civil War,’ he said. ‘Rabbi Levinger is writing his own version of the Nuremberg laws.

Kahane is inclined toward deportation and genocide. Do I think Kiryat Arba is a cancer in the heart of my homeland? Of course, and so does every Arab in Palestine.’

Despite a recent Israeli Supreme Court order to evacuate a similarly controversial West Bank settlement near Nablus that had been illegally seized from Arab landowners, the Israeli Housing Ministry plans to settle an additional 50,000 Jews in Kiryat Arba by the mid-1980s. ‘We will never leave Kiryat Arba,’ one mother said as she cradled her infant close to her.

‘Not the Israeli High Court or the Arabs will ever move us. Like the Zealots who defended Masada against the Romans, we will resist, if necessary, to the bloody end.’”

Context added by this archive

A Palestinian editor answering three settler leaders in their own paper’s words, and using “genocide” of Kahane’s program in 1980. The reporter had spent five years in the Middle East and was living in Madison, Wisconsin.

Cite this clipping

"No Compromise At Kiryat Arba," Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 12 February 1980, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1980-004. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1980-004

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Who was allowed to say genocide