Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 16, 1994 TAG: 9403170028
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHARLES A. KENNEDY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Consider two headlines: ``Palestinians massacred in Hebron'' and ``Zionist terrorist shoots worshipers at Holy Place.'' Both describe the same event and both are true. The first is the descriptive account of the tragedy, the second is the ugly truth that the Israelis have been trying to explain to themselves and their friends abroad.
The Hebron massacre was described in official statements in Jerusalem as the work of a single, deranged settler. This is political damage-control, meant to absolve the national ideology with a legal plea of temporary insanity. How else can reasonable people explain the actions of an American doctor educated at one of the best medical schools in the world?
When we arrived in Israel four days after the massacre, we were told that Israel is a land of paradoxes, where agricultural science has made the desert bloom and modern telecommunications has allowed computer software companies to blossom. Traditional Middle East culture was acknowledged by referring to the gentle Bedouin of the southern desert and their gracious hospitality toward strangers. But the greatest paradox of this description of the country was the absence of any mention of the Palestinians. They are a nonpeople in this paradoxical land.
Technically, most of the Palestinians do not live in Israel, but in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza. These regions are under military rather than civilian law, which deprives the Palestinian population of legal recourse of the Israeli courts.
Christians coming from Bethlehem to Jerusalem for work are stopped at military checkpoints and, since Hebron, have been routinely refused passage. In Hebron, the Palestinians have been under strict curfew, only allowed out for two hours at a time, while the handful of Jewish settlers are sustained with food convoys under military escort. A Palestinian woman went into labor at 11 a.m. and was allowed to have an ambulance come at 4:30 p.m. to pick her up.
The political situation in the Occupied Territories is tragic enough, but the religious overtones have compounded the agony.
The settler chose the Jewish feast of Purim to slaughter the Muslims, a gruesome echo of Esther 9:5: ``So the Jews put their enemies to the sword, with great slaughter and destruction; they worked their will on those who hated them.''
This time the victims were not Persian pagans, but Muslims who see themselves as sons of the same Abraham venerated by the Jews and who worship the same Creator God who is gracious and merciful to his creation.
For the Muslims it was the month of Ramadan, commemorating God's revelation of the Koran to the Prophet Mohammed. What a paradox in this land of paradoxes that at the Tomb of Abraham a descendant of the younger son of Abraham should slaughter his half-brothers.
Thirty and more years ago, I was a graduate student in Jerusalem, then a divided city with the scar of a no-man's land running between Israeli West Jerusalem and the Jordanian-controlled Old City in Arab East Jerusalem.
The 1967 War changed that for the worse. The Occupied Territories have continued to be an undigestible lump for Israel. The annexation of East Jerusalem and the declaration of Jerusalem as the capital of the state have not been accepted by the community of nations whose embassies are in Tel Aviv, not Jerusalem. The armed Jewish settlers commute from their subsidized housing in the territories to jobs in Israel.
It is frightening to realize that their Uzis, assault rifles and pistols have one purpose, to shoot Palestinians. The military looks the other way when shootings and drive-by assassinations occur. Settlers in the ``Wild West Bank'' know the rules are like those of the American Wild West: Shooting Indians is no crime.
The final paradox is that a massacre in Hebron is avenged on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. Orthodox Jewish students from a school not unlike one that produced the gunman at Hebron suffer a violent death at the hands of an Arab gunman. That should tell us something about the interrelatedness of our world today. Bitter race relations in Brooklyn between Jews and African-Americans have been exported by the Jewish settlers to the West Bank and Gaza.
In the intense soul-searching among Israelis after the massacre, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres had the courage to say, ``A murderer is a murderer, whether Jewish or non-Jewish.'' Fair enough, but the Palestinians remain targets in their own homes to both military and settler weaponry. Who will protect them from this double jeopardy?
Small wonder they call for an international force that can stem the tide of violence engulfing their lives. And if the community of nations will not intervene, there are those who are ready to appeal to divine retribution.
On the armistice line south of Jerusalem 30 years ago, I sat on a bench at the Mar Elias Monastery and looked back at the Holy City. The bench was a memorial to Holman Hunt, the artist who painted ``The Light of the World,'' a famous picture of Jesus standing at a garden door with a lamp in his hand. Inscribed on the bench - in English across the back, Arabic on one arm and Hebrew on the other arm - was Jesus' summation of the Law from Matthew 22:37-39: Love God and your neighbor.
Today, that bench sits askew on a piece of ground, surrounded by a decrepit wire fence, beside the modern highway. The bench and its message are victims of the hate that has been allowed to reduce people to targets instead of neighbors.
Charles A. Kennedy, professor of religion at Virginia Tech, recently returned from a trip to Israel and the West Bank.
by CNB