Go to Hebron. Observe how several hundreds of ultra-national Israeli settlers, a minority in a Palestinian town of 160,000 - have turned the lives of its Palestinians residents into a living hell.
Go to Hebron. Look at how a small Jewish minority rules over an oppressed Arab majority and you will see why Israel needs a two-state solution in order to survive in the future as a democratic Jewish state.
Go to Hebron. You will see how the Jewish settlers and Israel's military government have aggressively turned what used to be the center of town - the business and trade center of the southern part of the West Bank - into a Jewish dominated enclave. Palestinians are not allowed to walk - let alone drive - through the long main street of downtown Hebron. They are subject to constant daily harassment by the settlers and the army.
If you want to see what the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians will turn into if we don't start reversing the escalating status-quo of Israeli occupation in the West Bank, go to Hebron.
If you care about the future of Israel, if your political thinking is governed by a sense of what is feasible, what is right and what is moral, if Jewish values mean something to you, go to Hebron.
Talk to the settlers. Hear from them what their vision is. Talk to the Palestinians. Ask them about their daily lives. Ask them about the resentment, the hatred the despair and the sentiment of vengeance that the status quo is brewing in their hearts and minds. Talk to the soldiers, the red-beret paratroopers - Israel's best fighters - who are stuck in this depressing place, their fighting skills reduced to checking shopping bags of old Palestinian women and trying to block teenage settlers from vandalizing Palestinian shops or hurling rocks at Hebron's Arabs.
If I were Benjamin Netanyahu, I would go to Hebron before I go to Washington to meet with President Obama, before devising the "fresh approach" to Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking that he referred to at the AIPAC conference. I believe that Netanyahu - even someone as cynical as Bibi - would feel ashamed, as an Israeli and a Jew. I was, when I visited Hebron today with a group of Peace Now and Americans for Peace Now activists.
And as he examines majority-minority relations in Hebron, I recommend that Netanyahu will read this passage, published by Yedioth Ahronoth's B. Michael in the newspaper's Friday edition:
"On the eve of Independence Day, the Central Bureau of Statistics cited the number of residents of Israel at 7.4 million. There was also a piece of heartwarming news for the holiday: the decisive Jewish majority has been retained. Jews account for 75.5% of the population. Only 24.5% are non-Jews. A regrettable error found its way into those numbers. The origin of that error lies in the strange lifestyle of the Green Line. That line, which supposedly died long ago, leaps out of its grave (or perhaps it is forcibly exhumed) every time either statistic expedience or public relations purposes require this. Following are the real numbers: according to the Central Bureau of Statistics and the CIA, the Israeli government controls 11.43 million human beings. Among them, 5.6 million are Jews, 5.83 million are non-Jews (2.46 million Palestinians in the West Bank, 1.55 million Palestinians in Gaza, 1.5 million Palestinian citizens of Israel and 0.32 million 'other non-Jews'). The precise figures are as follows: in the realm of the Israeli empire, 49% are Jews and 51% are non-Jews. We can now begin to be referred to as 'minorities.'"
Mr. Prime Minister, on your way to Washington, go to Hebron. Because the creeping Hebronization of Israel is cancerous. You know that. And you know it's not too late to reverse it.
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I was in Hebron yesterday. The souk is almost completely closed, and bits of wire fence and netting cover the open alleyways to catch the bricks and stones the Israeli occupiers drop down on shop owners and customers. My driver had to leave his Palestinian ID with the guard before he could go on in the mosque. A nineteen-year-old Palestinian boy was kiled there the other day. When will the inhumanity, the insanity, stop? I don't believe the Israeli government wants peace, and I doubt Obama will be much help.
The vast majority of Hevron is off limits to Jews. Your report is misleading. Only a small percentage of the towns Arabs live in the Israeli controlled part of the city. Of course, Jews have lived there, more-or-less continuously for thousands of years, until they were run out by the Arab massacre in 1929. We are not going to leave Hevron this time in order for "progressive" Israeli to relieve their guilty conciences for living on formerly Arab land like Sheikh Munis (Tel Aviv University-home of many "progressive" professors) or the Givat Ram campus of the Hebrew University (another hotbead of "progressivism" sitting on the land that belonged to the Arab village of Sheikh Bader).
Most if not all of the Jews living in Hebron are in no way the original community of Jews who had lived there for hundreds of years in peace with the other residents of the city. Every day that the settlers remain in Hebron is another day full of experiences that will polarize two peoples even further, no matter how small a fraction of each society remains in that city.
Y. Ben David --
There is no reason for 300 Jews to live in the center of 200,000 Palestinians if it's going to take 1,500 Israeli soldiers to protect them. Their living there endangers soldiers lives, while entrapping the Palestinians who live nearby under squelching security impositions.
If the settlers in Hebron weren't continually filling YouTube with embarassing videos of shameful violence, your case might be stronger. But it's a waste of soldiers' lives to protect Jews who have no intention of peaceably coexisting with their neighbors.
Pull 'em out. If they want to move back, they can get the permission of the Palestinian city council.
Actually according to your figures, Jews and Arabs are at parity with 49% each and "others" at one percent. Although if you want to put it in terms of who serves in the IDF, than serving Jews are definitely a minority.
What is surprising is the quick demographic rise of Israeli's Arab community. A few years ago it was 1/7th of the population, then 1/6th, and recent figures had all put it at 1/5th with 20%. If your latest figures are correct, it is now at 1/4th.
Abe-
Of course you are right. The last Jews were forced out of Hevron in 1936. Most of those Jew have probably passed on , so any Jew under the age of 73 in Hevron today can not be one of the previous generation of Hevronite Jews. SO WHAT?
YBD,
It is not primarily hyprocrisy that accounts for the attitude of the professors in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem but realism. The historians and political scientists among them know that Israel carried out ethnic cleansing in 1948 in response to Arab aggression and intransigence. This was accepted in the West for two reasons. First, it came only three-four years after Europeans carried out a similar policy against German minorities in Central and Eastern Europe under similar circumstances. Second, all of democratic Europe felt guilt over its attitude towards the Holocaust. Two generations later neither of those conditions apply and so to create a situation where Israel is faced with a choice between apartheid (hafrada in Hebrew) or Arab removal (transfer in Hebrew) is very foolish as both will cause great harm to Israel not just in Europe but in Washington as well.