The New York Times · 17 December 1996

CP-1996-028

Netanyahu’s Hebron Dilemma

By Geoffrey Wheatcroft

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Transcribed from the clipping

LONDON Weeks of wrangling about whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel will — or should — agree to a partial withdrawal of Israeli troops from Hebron have been intensified by his decision to increase economic aid to the Jewish settlements and by the murder of a Jewish woman and her child near Ramallah, another West Bank city.

Amid all this, a fascinating statement by one of Israel’s spiritual leaders has gone virtually unnoticed. Speaking in Hebron recently, Rabbi Eliahu Bakshi-Doron, the Sephardic Chief Rabbi, said it was preferable for several hundred Jews to remain in the city, with its shades of the patriarchs.

“However,” he said, “if it is impossible to insure their security there, it is forbidden for them to remain.” He continued: “Pikuah Nefesh” — the preservation of life — “supersedes everything, including the mitzvah of settling the land.”

His surprising words were just as surprisingly endorsed by Rabbi Moshe Gafni of the ultra-Orthodox Degel Hatorah Party, who said there was no religious reason why settlers should stay in Hebron: “In an area where there is a small group of Jews, they should be evacuated for their own safety.”

Rabbi Gafni was attacked by the leader of his own party, Rabbi Avraham Ravitz, who called his colleague “irresponsible.” Rabbi Ravitz said, “Sometimes, you think something that you shouldn’t say out loud.”

This rabbinical dispute casts an unusual light on the divisions in Israel, which have become more bitter than ever since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. A poll in late November showed 42 percent worrying about “civil war” in Israel. Unlike many Jewish settlers, those in Hebron are almost all religious fundamentalists.

Some openly venerate the memory of Baruch Goldstein, who killed 29 worshipers in a mosque in 1994, and some don’t conceal their admiration for Rabin’s assassin. This marks a longstanding rift. Zionism was originally a secular movement, and most Israelis are not observant Jews.

Many resent the disproportionate influence religious groups exert and, in particular, the huge effort and expense that goes into guarding the fewer than 500 settlers living amid 200,000 hostile Palestinians in Hebron.

How this transcription was made

Transcribed from the slide scan by a reader working off magnified crops, not by optical character recognition. The date and the newspaper are both printed on the page, in a complete running head reading “THE NEW YORK TIMES OP-ED TUESDAY, DECEMBER 17, 1996”. 17 December 1996 was a Tuesday. Nothing about this record rests on the slide label. The piece is a signed Op-Ed article datelined London, not a news report.

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