Tuesday, August 11, 2009
This is just a quick link to follow -- an "aside." These are links to interesting things that, for one reason or another, I didn't place into a full posting. Click the link to visit the full article. Go to the blog index for a regular listing of posts.
The Hebron Massacre: 80 years on, the scars still show - 'On his freckled forehead, one can still see the scar from the knife wound Shlomo Slonim sustained 80 years ago, when an Arab stabbed him as he huddled in his mother's arms in their Hebron home...Slonim recounted the details of that fateful day, when he was only a year old. He has no memory of the events, of course, but he has heard the story so many times that he told it as if he were recalling his own experiences. It was Shabbat morning when an Arab mob armed with knives filled the streets and burst into Jewish homes, Slonim said...After bursting in, the Arabs killed 24 people with knives and machetes. Among them were Slonim's father, his mother, Hannah, 24, and her parents who were visiting for Shabbat. They also fatally wounded his older brother, who was only four. He succumbed to his wounds several days later in Jerusalem and was buried there...[Important.]
Glad they're going to have a public commemoration of the anniversary. Nappy didn't know there were any survivors of that massacre, and of course Slonim doesn't remember how he was rescued afterward.
It would be great if someone would make a documentary about the millenia-old Jewish community in Hebron. Nappy's no torah scholar but was once told that in rabbinic literature, Hebron is one of the four holy cities, so-called because of the continuous Jewish presence since before the destruction of the Temple and later of Jerusalem some 70 years later, after the Bar Kochba rebellion. Which is when, in order to erase the Jewish connection to the place, Hadrian built a city on Jerusalem's ruins and called it Aelia Capitolina and renamed the country Palestine after the Jews' ancient, extinct former nemesis in Gaza, the Philistines.
What are the odds the ceremony will be covered by the NYT, WaPo, LA Times, NPR, Reuters, BBC and the rest of the media who want to tell a story of Jews' dispossessing the poor, helpless Palestinians of their patrimony, theirs since time immemorial. The story of Jews returning to Hebron just doesn't fit into the narrative of crazy settlers oppressing those they now call Palestinians. Never mind that in Hebron, the market area is on the site of the destroyed Jewish neighborhood.
NHH: Thanks for setting the record straight.
It goes against the popular narrative, but the truth is that Hebron has been an important Jewish city since Biblical times. (King David made Hebron his capital, for example, and ruled there for years before moving to Jerusalem.)
Hebron has had a continuous Jewish presence since Biblical times, right up to 1929, when Arab pogroms drove the Jews out. Having made the town Judenrein, the Arab inhabitants called it "Nablus" and pretended it had always been an Arab town. To this day, many Arab houses in Hebron still show the doorpost scar where a mezuzah used to be... proving that it used to be a Jewish house.
When Jews tried to reestablish a presence in Hebron, post-1967, they did not insist on their rights to land that had been taken from them; they bought land, set up a community there (Kiryat Arba), and have put up with a firestorm of criticism for their very presence ever since.
In a just world, it would be the Arabs, not the Jews, who would be seen as the usurpers in Hebron.
This is yet another example where Jews and Israelis have lost command of the accepted narrative... and, when trying to have a reasonable discussion of the facts, must first convince their listeners that black is not white, up is not down, and right is not left.
respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline