Inquirer Finds New Weapon to Aim at Hebron's Jews
by Michael Goldblatt
Now that international pressure has succeeded in bringing about an Israeli
withdrawal from 80% of Hebron, the Philadelphia Inquirer seems to be looking
for ways to pressure Israel to expel the Hebron Jewish community from the
remaining 20% of the city. And Inquirer correspondent Alan Sipress has
already fired the first shot.
In a front-page story in the March 3 Inquirer, Sipress announced that a
number of descendants of the 1920s Hebron Jewish community have been critical
of today's Hebron Jews. In Sipress's simplistic analysis, the "good"
relatives of the 1920s community are pitted against the "bad" Jews who reside
in Hebron today. The "good" Jews want peace with the Arabs, the "bad" Jews
don't.
Sipress paints a rosy portrait of Muslims and Jews living harmoniously in
Hebron for countless generations until the 1920s. He makes no mention of the
fact that the Jews were living as second-class citizens under Muslim rule,
and were the victims of continuous religious discrimination. For example, the
Muslims prevented Jews from entering the Cave of the Patriarchs, burial site
of Abraham Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca and Leah, a site which the Muslims
regard as a mosque. Jews were not permitted to ascend higher than the
seventh step on the staircase leading to the cave. The phrase "not beyond
the seventh step" was ingrained in the consciousness of the Hebron Jewish
community, a painful daily reminder of their miserable status under Muslim
rule.
What changed in the 1920s? Here's how Alan Sipress tells it: "As the
competing nationalisms of Jews and Arabs gained steam in the 1920s, relations
between the groups soured...In 1929, an Arab mob massacred Jewish neighbors
and ransacked their homes." From Sipress's wording, an Inquirer reader could
be misled into concluding that both sides were equally guilty for the
deteriorating relations that led to the massacre.
Sipress makes no mention of the Hebron Arabs preventing Jews from rebuilding
their community in the 1930s and 1940s. Nor does he mention that Jordan,
which occupied Hebron from 1948-1967, imposed an apartheid-style policy of
banning Jews from living in Hebron or even visiting the Cave of the
Patriarchs. Instead, Sipress's history of Hebron suddenly fast-forwards from
1929 to the 1970s, when "militants" (an adjective Sipress uses only when
describing Jews, not Arabs) suddenly began to "take over" some of the
formerly Jewish homes in the Hebron's old Jewish quarter. Sipress implies
that the current Hebron residents stole homes that might rightfully belong to
the descendants of the 1929 community.
One telephone call to the spokesman for the Hebron Jewish community would
have cleared up the property ownership issue. Too bad Sipress didn't make
that call. He would have discovered that the homes in which today's Hebron
Jews live fall into three categories. Some are the property of the Israeli
government, which leases them to the Jewish residents. Some are located in
two buildings called Beit Romano and Beit Schneerson, which are the property
of the Lubavitch movement, and have been leased by Lubavitch to the Jewish
residents. The other homes, located in what is known as the Avraham Avinu
neighborhood, were the property of the Sefardic Association of Hebron, whose
last president, attorney Avraham Franco, transferred ownership to the
Association for the Renewal of the Hebron Jewish Community, the body that
governs the Hebron Jewish community today.
Although Sipress repeatedly quotes descendants of the 1920s Jews who
oppose today's Hebron community, a careful reading of his 32-paragraph
feature reveals that he quotes the same three people again and again. That
is no doubt because, in fact, there are only a handful of such individuals
and they represent no significant portion of Israeli public opinion. Sipress
claims that his three anti-Hebron descendants have "drawn attention in
Israeal, creating unexpected opposition against the settlers." But Sipress
offers no evidence that they have created any opposition. And the main
reason they have garnered attention is because their views on Hebron coincide
with the views of some journalists.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Sipress's article is his failure to
interview any descendants of the 1920s Hebron community who support today's
Hebron Jews. Sipress admits, in passing, that "some Hebron descendants
sympathize with the settlers," yet he does not quote any of them. That's
surprising, because they are not very hard to find. Indeed, as soon as the
anti-Hebron descendants made their first public statement, the descendants
who support today's Hebron community immediately issued a counter-statement.
One of the descendants, Ms. Sara Cohen, actually resides in Philadelphia,
but nobody from the Inquirer bothered to interview her. Nobody invited her
to submit a full-length response to Sipress. Her views were restricted to a
brief letter to the editor almost two weeks after Sipress's article appeared,
long after the damage (to Hebron Jewry's good name) was done.
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