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