One of the abiding memories of my pre-aliyah trips to Israel is the first time I went to the Cave of Machpela in Hebron. Buried there are the three patriarchs and four matriarchs of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths, and as such the site is of enormous spiritual importance. I travelled there during the relative lull between the first and second intifadas, and the journey from Jerusalem was a far simpler exercise than the average tourist would face today.
As I prayed at one of the tombs with my father I glanced through a metal grille over to the other side of the chamber, where Palestinian worshippers were praying with equal fervour. So near, yet so far - a shared ancient history, indeed, yet a recent past that had divided the two sides almost irreconcilably, to the point that they could not even pray together in peace.
And what a difference an intifada makes. The infamous security wall, the equally notorious maze of checkpoints, the tortuous inquisitions as you try to get from A to B, have all but destroyed the once-burgeoning tourism industry in the West Bank, as well as slammed the brakes on any interaction between the natives on either side of the divide. Hebron, as the more moderate Israelis and Palestinians love to reminisce, used to be one of several meeting points between the two peoples. Israelis on weekend trips would throng the bustling markets over the Green Line, buying up Palestinian goods and interacting with their neighbours in a way that seems almost incomprehensible to today’s battle-hardened generation.
Kipling’s famous phrase - “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet” - sounds apt for a region oft described as the fault line between the Arab world and the west, yet it doesn’t quite tell the whole story. More at Comment is Free…
Maarten Hijmans | 21-Apr-07 at 8:46 pm | Permalink
Yes, Jews and Moslems pray divided at this site. The fact that they are so near to each other only stresses the division. On purpose, I would say.
Maybe it helps a bit to understand why this is so, if we dig a bit into recent history. One should know that until the early 80ties the building over the graves of Abraham and his female relatives was a mosque. The Mosque of Ibrahim to be precise, that iis an ancient one, it has been there since the 12th century. Jews were allowed to enter it, but had their own space for worship: tombs in the basement which were accessible through a seperate door.
In the early 80ties of last century however, the followers of rabbi Levinger, the founder of settlement Kiryat Arba, claimed a corner INSIDE the mosque in order to have a synagogue there. Also they claimed the right to walk - with their shoes on - through the mosque to this synagogue. Lateron - if I am not mistaken, only after Baruch Goldstein from Kiryat Arba in 1994 killed 29 moslem worshippers inside the Ibrahim mosque -they Kiryat Arba diehards got their own entrance to their synagogue-inside-the mosque, for which a hole was made in the centuries old wall of the building.
I trust that it is not too difficult to imagine how all this contributed to the peacefull coexistence of Moslems and Jews in Hebron and a peaceful atmosphere in teh mosque itself. Particularly if we see this in the light of all the numerous other efforts the Gush Emunim and Kach people undertook - and are still undertaking - in this respect at other spots in and around Hebron.
Avram | 23-Apr-07 at 9:25 am | Permalink
does recent history include 1929?