Excerpted from:
The Ethnic Cleansing of Hebron. 2004
Introduction by Larry Towell
Israel is now building a separation wall that will cut through the city of Hebron and presumably link it to the larger partition wall which many fear will lead to the annexation of large sections of the West Bank. When the Oslo Peace accords were signed in 1993, approximately 500 settlers lived among Hebron’s 150,000 Arabs. The settlers (in five settlements) are protected today by up to 4000 Israeli soldiers. Hebron is home to some of the most ideologically extreme settlers and their violent movements. They enjoy the support of a considerable part of Israel’s current political and military establishment as well as “great latitude within the Israeli legal system.” 2) “The radical nature of much of Hebron’s settler population” 3), coupled with an army that systematically shields their violence and perpetrates its own, has resulted in the ethnic cleansing of the Old City of Hebron.
Rabbi Levinger, leader of Gush Emunium (Block of the Faithful) who began the first settlement here in 1968, shot and killed an unarmed Palestinian merchant in 1990 for which he was sentenced to 10 weeks in jail. In 1996, another Hebron settler “pistol whipped” to death eleven-year-old Hilmi Shusha, for which he received a sentence of six months “community service”, plus a fine. Brooklyn-born Baruch Goldstein from the nearby settlement of Kiryat Arba and a Kach Party member, machine-gunned 29 Muslims as they prayed in the Ibrahim Mosque in 1994. Yigal Amir, the zealot who assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, although not a settler himself, was inspired by Baruch Goldstein. (In 1982 a private organization in New York created the Hebron Fund to subsidize and strengthen the Jewish presence in Hebron and elsewhere in the Occupied Territories.)
Extremist groups that thrive in Hebron include the Jewish Defense League (JDL- on the US list of terrorist organizations). It’s founder, Rabbi Meir Kahane (also from Brooklyn) was jailed in the US in 1971 for conspiring to make bombs. After immigrating to Israel, Kahane later sat as a member of the Israeli Knesset. In 2001, JDL’s subsequent leader, Irv Rubin, was found guilty in California of illegal arms possession and plotting to blow up the office of US Congressman Darrell Issa R- Calif. plus a Los Angeles Mosque. The Kach party, one of the JDL’s branch organizations and the “Jewish underground” also thrive in Hebron.
“Happy Holidays Palestine”
Palestine Chronicle
“Bethlehem is dying from the indifference of the whole world. The fate of this city is to pay, and to pay again for those who sow death. Condemned to a massive punishment, we live like prisoners, and we eat thanks to humanitarian organizations. We are not a city of terrorists to merit this continual and brutal repression. With only a few days left before Christmas, here in Bethlehem we no longer know what it means to celebrate. From the tanks, today too, like yesterday and the day before, the soldiers cry out the orders of the Israeli army: ‘Curfew. It is prohibited to go out!’ Today we are still prisoners.”
Appeal by a group of Franciscan missionaries in Bethlehem – the Caritas Baby Hospital, Bethlehem
‘Soldiers’ gear up to defend Christmas
By Julia Duin
14 December 2005 THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The Rev. Jerry Falwell recently started a “Friend or Foe Christmas campaign,” offering the free services of 700 lawyers with the Liberty Counsel of Orlando, Fla., ready to file suit over any holiday infringements.
Earlier this month, the newly formed Jews Against Anti-Christian Defamation held a press conference calling on American Jews to defend Christians’ right to say “Merry Christmas” and to celebrate openly the birth of Jesus Christ.
“Christmas is disappearing,” Don Feder, the group’s president, says. “It’s disappearing from our culture at an alarming rate, disappearing from stores, disappearing from schools and disappearing from the public square.”
According to Don Feder, “Jews Against Anti-Christian Defamation was organized because we recognize that Christians are the last remaining obstacle to the moral deconstruction of America, because attacks on Christians are motivated by hatred for the values they espouse.”
And Israel confines them to open-air prisons because Israel is for Jews and America is for Christians? When the ethnic cleansing of Israel is complete and these Christian Zionists begin to proselytise in the name of the Second Coming, what will Feder support then?