84 Freda
40—BUSINESS CARDS
RESIDENTIAL/COMMERCIAL
tIMMIEWISH NEWS
By VICTOR BIENSTOCK
PAINTING
-
CALL
4.7,
-,
Hebron Massacre Should Not Halt Jewish Settlement
be detailed with the most
There is a process of minute exactness and yet
choosing among facts to the narrative, taken as a
whole, may be unmeaning
support an argument or to
make a point which, at one or untrue."
Joseph C. Harsch, the
time or another, all but the
Extra Discard To Settler Citizens
most scrupulous of writers distinguished journalist
Free Estimates
have shamelessly em- and columnist for the
Christian Science
BURDA BROS. CO .
ployed.
358-3615 CALL NOW!
This "selective history" Monitor, recently pro-
process is being used effec- vided an example of this
APPLE PAINTING &
tively against Israel today abuse of history. Harsch
WALLPAPERING
by many writers, sometimes is highly critical of the
Quality work at affordable prices.
Begin government's West
deliberately, but more often
Experienced. References.
I suspect out of a hurried Bank settlement policy.
newsman's ready ac- His paper devotes a con-
Call 547-4564
ceptance of a cliche as an siderable number of its
544-431,5, after 6 PM
columns to the subject,
historical fact that is, in it-
I repair small appliances, self, technically correct, but including a recent two-
electronic equipment, taken out of context is false part series by correspon-
dent Trudy Rubin stres-
typewriters and antenna and misleading. -
sing
the expropriation of
Francis Parkinson, the
work.
Arab property for the
great
American
historian
of
Call Dennis
a century ago, may have "suburbanization" of the
478-3048
had something like this in West Bank.
Harsch was already a
mind when he wrote:
KENT THE HANDYMAN
working
newspaperman be-
"Faithfulness to the truth of
CALL 542-3325
history involves far more fore the 1929 massacre of
than a research, however the Jews in Hebron and the
patient and scrupulous, into name itself might have con-
DAY OR EVE.-FREE ESTIMATES
special facts. Such facts may jured up for him the mem-
ory of those big banner
All small home repairs.
headlines with which virtu-
Painting, plumbing, elec- 40—BUSINESS CARDS
ally every newspaper
trical, window repairs, etc.
heralded the tragedy.
Had he remembered
GUTTER CLEANING
those headlines, he could
T.V. & V.C.R. REPAIR
FROM $25
never have made the state-
ment that: "Then there is
VICTOR
LOUIS
the fact of knocking down
Reasonable rates—
Arab houses in a city (Heb-
477-2039
Fast service.
ron) which was totally Arab
AGS MOVERS
from 1929 to 1967."
Days, Eves., Weekends
Quality work. Household moves
Yes. Harsch was 'correct
John . . . offices, pianos and in describing Hebron as "to-
967-0754
tally Arab" in population
appliances. Local and statewide
from massacre to liberation
packing.
FEINBERG CARPET SERVICE
but he was entirely wrong
Free Estimates.
in implying that totality
Repairs, Sales &
757-3429
makes Jewish resettlement
Installation
there today improper and
Everyone needs
immoral. To say otherwise
398-3149
a Mr. Fix-It.
is to say that force and vio-
Guaranteed low prices.
lence determines what is
Call
right and what is wrong.
DAN THE HANDYMAN
The Jewish people
585-3581
have had an association
TOM'S SERVICE CO.
Hebron that
GUTTERS AND DOWNSPOUTS! with
stretches
back over
New installation or repair
SEZ!!! ..
thousands of years. Ab-
Flashing repairs
raham and Sarah repu-
Free Estimates
tedly are buried there in
"An optimist is a hus-
the Cave of Machpelah.
MORREY
King David ruled from
band who try's to tell
968-3949
Eves. 968-4472
there
for seven years in
his wife the drapes are
biblical times. Religious
HEATING
good for 1 more
Jews everywhere vener-
Installation & Service
year"!!
ate Hebron as the City of
A.R.S. SERVICE, CO., INC.
Patriarchs and regard it
as one of the four sacred
356-3191
Jewish cities.
Alan R. Sukenic,
HOW'S YOUR
Licensed Contractor
For centuries, including
HEAT???
the first decades of this cen-
tury, Hebron's yeshivas
were famed throughout the
EXPERIENCED
world and attracted schol-
QUALITY WORK
REFERENCES
NO HUMIDITY??
Kitchen cabinets. Repair- ars from every quarter of
ing - Staining - Refinish- the globe. The religious
Jewish community at the
ing. , 569-2407
turn of the century was
more than 1,400 souls — a
NO FLUE DAMPERS
51—MISCELLANEOUS
tenth of the entire popula-
tion.
MAJ JONG set. Ivory. Complete.
Hebron "a place sacred to
$300 or best offer. 547-4145. .
the Jews," says the New
WANTED — Record or tape
FURNACE
$3995
Columbia Encyclopedia,
The Bar-Mitzva Boy." 532-
TUNE-UP
"has usually had a substan-
0445.
tial Jewish population al-
53—ENTERTAINMENT
though, following the Arab
riots of 1929, most Jews left
VERSATILE sophisticated party
and did not return until
music. Call 893-9667.
after the Israeli occupation
following the 1967 Arab-
CARICATURES BY
Israeli War." But some did
JULIUS
Southfield
return after the riots and
Livonia
For Parties
remained until the 1936
riots again forced them out.
or Business
358-1816
522-6528
Hebron, in Joe Harsch's
293-1723
reckoning, became totally
Painting & Remodeling
Experienced Craftsman
Basements, Kitchens, Bathrooms
Stores, Offices
30% OFF LABOR
,.7.4641044414
Arab on a Sabbath late in
August 1929 when Arab
mobs, inflamed by fiery
sermons in their mosques
and instigated by the in-
famous Grand Mufti of
Jerusalem, slaughtered 67
Jewish men, women and
children and burned down
the synagogues. The sur-
vivors fled.
Possibly some of them
and the descendants of
the slaughtered Hebro-
nites were on hand when
this ancient seat of
Jewish learning came
under Israeli control in
1967. A brutal - massacre
cannot erase what has
been written in history
nor does the fact that the
Jews were driven out de-
prive them of their claim
to home and shrine.
Vincent Sheean, a gifted
writer who in his time es-
poused many lost causes,
was in Palestine at the time
of the 1929 riots, on assign-
ment from the New York
Zionist periodical, The New
Palestine, then edited by
the late Meyer Weisgal.
After some weeks there,
Sheean adopted the Arab
cause and renounced his
New Palestine assignment.
After the rioting broke out,
he was accredited to an
American feature service
and filed dispatches which
many complained reflected
the views of the Mufti.
But five years later, in his
engrossing autobiographi-
cal "Personal History,"
Sheean wrote of the Hebron
massacre in these words:
"The horrors of Friday
in Jerusalem were fol-
lowed by something
much worse, the ghastly
outbreak at Hebron,
where 64 Jews of the old-
fashioned Jewish com-
munity were slaughtered
and 54 of them wounded.
Hebron was one of the
four holy cities of
Judaism and had had a
small, constant Jewish
population since
medieval days:
"These were not Zionists
at all; a more innocent and
harmless group of people
could not have been found in
Palestine; many of them
were Oriental Jews, and all
were religious. They had
had nothing to do with_the
Zionist excesses and had
lived in amity with their
Arab neighbors up to that
day.
"But when the Arabs of
Hebron — an unruly lot at
best — heard that Arabs
were being killed by Jews in
Jerusalem and that the
Mosque of Omar was in
danger, they went mad .. .
The Jewish houses were
rushed by the mob and there
was an hour of slashing, kil-
ling, stabbing, burning and
looting.
"Among the Jewish vic-
tims were some American
boys who had arrived only a
short time before to study at
the rabbinical college.
Eight or nine of them died at
Hebron and an equal
number suffered severe
wounds."
The Hebron massacre
is not "history" to me; it is
,
one of my earliest, if
peripheral, journalistic
experiences and almost
literally my introduction
to Zionism and Palestine.
The Hebron massacre
occurred just after I first
began to ply my trade on
a New York metropolitan
daily. The Jewish Tele-
graphic Agency was then
the chief source of infor-
mation from Palestine for
most of the press (only
the New York Times had
a full-time correspondent
there — an anti-Zionist
Egyptian Jew).
At the end of my day's
stint on Park Row, I would
take the subway uptown to
the JTA office and help its
harassed staff work through
the awesome pile of cables
to be processed for delivery
to the Associated Press and
other clients.
That was my first expo-
sure to Palestine and that is
why, probably, I felt so
strongly about Joe Harsch's
casual reference to a city
"totally Arab." That mas-
sacre was part of the history
that Harsch overlooked in
his objections to the Hebron
development plan and the
Begin plans for the West
Bank generally. These will,
he says, "push many Arabs
out of their ancestral
homes." He also complains
that the Begin West Bank
settlement policy "is a di-
rect challenge to the
President of the United
States and his policies."
Harsch argues further
that the West Bank and
Gaza Strip "are not big
enough to hold both the 1.4
million Jews (which he says
is the Israeli settlement
goal) and the 1.2 million
Arabs who live there now."
The Israelis, he says, "are
frank about their intention
to push most of the West
Bank Arabs out of West
Bank and Gaza into Jor-
dan."
Anthony Lewis, the
New York Times colum-
nist and most persistent
critic of the Begin
policies, recently used a
report by Meron
Benevisti, former -de-
puty mayor of Jerusalem,
as the peg for a bitter at-
tack. Benevisti, a leading
critic of the Begin West
Bank settlement pro-
gram, recently told the
American Enterprise In-
stitute, a conservative
Washington think-tank,
that the Begin regime
planned to foreclose the
West Bank issue by set-
tling 320,000 Jews there
it 10 development proj-
ects.
Herbert Stein, a fellow of
the institute and former
economic adviser to the
President in three adminis-
trations, heard the Be-
nevisti talk and took issue
with both the Israeli and
Lewis for seeking to attach
a "sinister significance" to
the plan for settling up sub-
urban residential areas in
the West Bank.
The Benevisti report, Dr.
Stein said in a letter to the
New York Times, actually
showed that "the Arabs in
.
the West Bank have thrived
economically under Israeli
administration and in close c)
association with Israel."
The Arab population has
increased at an annual rate
of 1.4 percent under the Is-
raelis as compared to a 0.4
percent rate under Jorda-
nian occupation. The real
gross national product of
the West Bank has in-
creased at a 14 percent an-
nual rate — much faster, (I
Stein points out, than in Is-
rael, Jordan or even Japan.
About 50 percent of the
West Bank's labor force is c_i
employed in Israel and 25
percent of the West Bank's
total income is earned
there.
Lewis and Benevisti
described Israeli settle-
ment plans as "a kind of
pre-emptive colonization'
intended to prevent any
future political line be- :<
tween Israel and the West
Bank," Stein comments,
pointing out that "these
residential areas would
be within 30 minutes'
driving time from - 1
downtown Jerusalem or )
Tel Aviv" — about as far
as Washington's dormit-
ory suburbs are from the
capital.
- "Natural
economic
forces," says Stein, "would
explain the development of
the suburbs of Jerusalem
and Tel Aviv across political j
lines just as these economic -
forces have explained simi-
lar suburban development
areas across political lines,
including national bound-
aries, elsewhere in the
world."
The Benevisti report,
Stein says, shows that
"close economic integration
between Israel and the West
Bank will be essential to the
economic well-being of both
the West Bank Arabs and.L=
the Israelis. This would be I,
compatible with any one of
the variety of political set-
tlements. It would not be
compatible with a hostile,
closed border."
Some questions inevita-
bly arise. Barring the un-
likely opening of Soviet
gates or a development
catastrophic for Diaspora 1
Jews, where will Israel get
the Jews for massive set-
tlement projects without
dangerously denuding , 1
other areas? Large areas of
the Galilee et en now are
being swallowed up by the
growing Israeli Arab popu-
lation.
And how can Israel, with
a relatively low birth rate,
hope to retain its Jewish c,
character if it incorporates
another million Arabs with
a relatively high birth rate?
The secular Palestine
state Yasir Arafat claims is l i
his objective may yet be
achieved, not by PLO force c
of arms, but by deliberate
Israeli policy.
They love him, gentle-
men, and they respect him,
not only for himself, but for
his character, for his integ-
rity and judgement and iron
will; but they love him most
for the enemies he has
made.
—Gen. Edward S. Bragg