What must Israel do to advance the cause of peace in the Middle East? If you don't know the State Department answer, you're really not listening, because they've been repeating it, over and over, forever: "End settlement activity." It's a standard plank in every peace plan — Oslo, Mitchell, Four Powers Roadmap, whatever. Secretary Powell is pushing Israel to do it now, and why not? From a distance it looks like a modest, reasonable demand: a small, first step on that ever-receding road to peace.

I wanted to see what "ending settlement activity" looked like up close, on the bloody ground, in places like Hebron and Kiryat Arba — where the people say no to it, and are petitioning their government for permission to expand their "settlements." So I went back to Hebron to look around, and to ask: Why now?[...]

[...]Is the Left right? Are these people "fanatics?" If you equate being a believer with being a fanatic, you can put aside the fact that most wear ordinary clothes and work at ordinary jobs, and call them all fanatics. Many so-called "settlements" are home to secular as well as religious Jews; Hebron is not. Only believers live here, because the don't-know-much-about-history crowd calls this "Arab land" and insists that Jews have no future here. That's the wisdom of the moment, but 3,800 years of history say otherwise. Abraham, the first Jew, bought this land and its cave from Ephron the Hittite then, and Jews have prayed here ever since, with only a few interruptions. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are buried here, beside their wives. David was crowned king here. He made it his first capital, and when the Romans razed Israel's second capital and drove the Jews from Jerusalem in 70 A.D., Hebron's Jews were still praying at Abraham's tomb. Life got harsher when Byzantine Greeks conquered their land in the 4th century, but a remnant hung on, and when the armies of the Prophet Mohammed conquered it in the 7th century, life improved. Jews didn't regain their sovereignty, but they retained the right to live and worship here in peace, mostly. Crusaders drove the Jews and Arabs out in the 12th century, but Mamluks expelled the Crusaders in the 13th, and the Jews returned.

Life was more precarious under Muslim rule the second time around — the old Arab respect for Jews as "People of the Book" had faded away. Still, they hung on, and when Ottoman Turks conquered the land in the 16th century, life improved again. It remained tolerable, mostly, until the Turks lost this land to the British in 1917. Still, Hebron's Jews managed to live peacefully with their Arab neighbors until a sudden massacre in 1929 decimated the community. They regrouped, came back in 1931, and held on until 1936 when, in response to renewed Arab attacks, the British forced them out. Jordan ruled next: No Jews allowed. When Israel defeated Jordan and the other attacking Arab armies in 1967, the Jews came back again, and here they remain — still practicing their religion in the place where it was born, as their forebears did through all the centuries before them. Call it fanaticism, if you like. I call it faith.[...]