Saturday, September 28, 2002

A Holiday in Hebron, Just for Jews, but Death Attends
It has been a particularly strange week in this particularly strange place: a week of dances and curfews, of celebratory palm fronds and blasting rifles, of rage and death on both sides of this torn city's stark Israeli-Palestinian divide.

As they have for almost 3,000 years, Jews around the world this week celebrated the annual holiday of Sukkot, marking the autumn harvest and recalling the fragility and transience of life in the wilderness after the exodus from Egypt.

Here, where a hard-nosed band of a few hundred Jewish settlers has rooted itself in a city of 150,000 Palestinians, the holiday has become a time to celebrate, and perhaps multiply, homes they consider permanent.

From Israel and overseas, thousands of Jews made the pilgrimage this week to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, revered by Jews and Muslims as the burial place of Abraham. This year, the Israeli government threw in an added attraction: it permitted tourists to stroll past the armored vehicles, sandbags and barbed wire that guard the settlers and into Hebron's casbah, in the company of watchful paratroopers and the seeming tranquillity afforded by a total curfew on the Palestinians.

…Corky Spicka, 65, a light fixture salesman from Loveland, Colo. His wife, Sharon, 56, said she first visited Hebron two years ago. "It totally changed my life," said Mrs. Spicka, a Christian. She called the settlers "the heroes of the land."

"It's a fulfillment of biblical prophecy," she said. "God has called us to join in and help." The Jewish presence here, other members of the group explained, would speed the return of the Messiah.

The price of this faith has, as usual, been high. At dusk on Monday, bullets rained down from the heights above the celebrators. Shlomo Shapira, 48, a visitor from Jerusalem, was killed, and his three sons were wounded, one of them, a 9-year-old named Shuki, seriously.

This morning, while the curfew was lifted, Israeli soldiers fired two tear-gas grenades to disperse what the army described as a stone-throwing mob. Alia Uridat, 44, was carrying her 14-month-old granddaughter, Gharam Manna, through the market as she escorted a friend to a doctor's appointment. She felt something hit her head, she said, and then she saw the smoke.

Strangers helped her into a taxi, then into an ambulance, and then into the hospital. She could still feel the baby moving as they reached the hospital, she said, but Gharam died there. The army said that it wanted to investigate the death, but Palestinian officials refused to cooperate.

To some Israelis, the week's tourism into Hebron's casbah was a cruel, needless provocation. "There is no need that they would celebrate there," said Yossi Sarid, the opposition leader in Parliament. "It's a shame that for a few thousand Jewish people to celebrate in Hebron, they impose a siege over 150,000 Palestinians, and then they arrange tours for Jewish people as if it's a zoo. It's not a zoo. Monkeys are not living there. People are living there."

The Israeli Army this week also enabled busloads of Jewish worshipers to visit Joseph's tomb in Nablus, which is under curfew as part of the present Israeli military operation in the West Bank.

From his shuttered window here, Akhram Qafiesheh, 29, has watched the celebrators on the street below. "You are jailed in here, watching them," he said.

"It is a very difficult life," he said, unknowingly echoing Mr. Gol. "They want to force us to move from here." He said one of his neighbors recently evacuated his apartment; Israeli children were playing on that apartment's balcony today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/28/international/middleeast/28HEBR.html

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