The Philadelphia Inquirer · 17 July 1983
CP-1983-014
In Hebron, an Arab-Israeli cauldron bubbles
The strange details surrounding a Jewish seminary student's slaying by Arab assailants have raised basic questions about Israel's ability to govern the West Bank.
By Trudy Rubin / Christian Science Monitor Service
Transcribed from the clipping
HEBRON, West Bank — The death of young, bespectacled Israeli seminary student Aharon Gross at the hands of Arab assailants in the center of ancient Hebron and the Jewish rioting that followed it have raised basic questions about Israel's continued rule of the largely Palestinian-populated West Bank. • Can violence between the local Arabs and the Jewish settlers be avoided? • Will increased Jewish settlement in the heart of Arab cities such as Hebron inflame or calm such violence? • Can the West Bank's Israeli authorities, who dismissed Hebron's Arab mayor and council following Gross' murder, enforce the law impartially upon Jews and Arabs?
How committed are they to trying? The brutal and still-confusing circumstances of Gross' death July 7 highlight the tension between Jewish and Arab residents of the West Bank, which is felt most intensely inside Hebron. Yehudit Gross, Aharon's mother, said he was a studious 18-year-old who had emigrated with his parents from Staten Island, N.Y., in 1974.
He had chosen the Shovei Hebron Yeshiva seminary in Hebron not out of ideological devotion to Jewish settlement on the West Bank, but because he admired the rabbi who headed it.
Cite this clipping
"In Hebron, an Arab-Israeli cauldron bubbles," The Philadelphia Inquirer, 17 July 1983, p. 2-C. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1983-014. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1983-014
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Last updated 2 November 2026
This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1724 to 2023. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.
The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the news agency that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. A city here is where the newspaper was published, not where the story came from, and on most records it was taken from the masthead.
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