It's not a matter of a few bad apples - Hebron attracts the religious-nationalist extremists and there aren't innocent settlers like the ones in Ariel living amongst them. The only 'positive' thing you showed me was a website from that Hebron Fund that announced it wanted to make Hebron totally free of Arabs. That's not exactly a glowing endorsement.
I'm not sure why you expect that if you can find a handful of people who aren't extremists, then the extremists of Hebron shouldn't be labelled as terrorists. And it really is wrong for you to call that bunch of thugs an 'ethnic minority', as though it's them who are suffering from discrimination and persecution. They're not. If you could come up with something showing me that the Hebron settlers are a bunch of innocent settlers like the ones in places like Ariel, I'd definately change my mind, but I'm pretty sure most, if not all, are violent extremist settlers...
Here's some information about the Hebron settlers that show it's not a case of a few bad apples, but the community as a whole, and that this has been going on for years now:
Hebron Time Bomb: Settlers Who ProvokeIt takes thick skin to be a Jewish settler in Hebron. This is the only place in the occupied territories where Jews live in the midst of Arabs, mingling daily with their hostile neighbors. "You have to be real tough to stick it out," says an Israeli government official.
The Jews of Hebron have been proving just how tough they are since 1968, when firebrand Rabbi Moshe Levinger and his American-born wife defied the Israeli government to lead a group of compatriots into the city and establish the first Jewish settlement in the newly occupied territories. Years later, when Levinger's car was stoned on a downtown street, he opened fire, killing an innocent Palestinian shopkeeper; he served only 10 weeks in jail for the crime.
Outrages on both sides have been common. "This is the wildest place in the West Bank," says a soldier on duty in Hebron. "Trouble waits around every corner." In a Palestinian community that tends to be deeply traditional and highly religious, Hebron's settlers move among their four compounds heavily armed. Especially visible among the 450 Jewish residents are 150 students of the Shavei Hebron Yeshiva: in pairs or threes they patrol the roads connecting the settler enclaves, assault rifles slung over their shoulders. As they saunter through the streets, Arab merchants grow anxious. The yeshiva boys frequently overturn their stalls or bash their cars. "It's a daily business the trouble they make," says shopkeeper Mohamad Sharif. The settlers admit to these actions, but say they commit them only when provoked.
Recent events, though, have rattled the Jews of Hebron. It is not that they are so fearful of Palestinian reprisals for the massacre at the Tomb of the Patriarchs two weeks ago. "Terror we live with always," says settler spokesman Noam Arnon. Rather, they worry about what their own government will do to them to calm the outrage provoked by the killings. Says Shani Horowitz, a native of the Bronx who moved to Hebron 12 years ago: "The left is using this opportunity to lynch us."
Already, some of Horowitz's neighbors are on the run from police, facing detention without trial, and others are to be disarmed and barred from praying at the tomb, which is holy to both Jews and Muslims. The community's greatest fear, though, is that it will be evicted en masse, an option advocated by six of the 16 members of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's Cabinet. "It's hard to imagine that the nation would allow it," says Horowitz, "but who knows? Anything might happen now." A Rabin aide tends to agree. "The Prime Minister knows that Hebron is a time bomb. He'll have to defuse it somehow, no question about it."
The Hebron settlers feel they are being unfairly condemned for the sin of Baruch Goldstein, who came from neighboring Kiryat Arba. "What, we've all turned into bloodthirsty murderers?" says Horowitz. "We don't eat people." But they do incense them no end. Says the Rabin aide: "At least in other settlements, Jews can move around without rubbing it in the face of the Arabs. Not the Hebronites." When they chose their home, the Hebron Jews meant to trumpet their presence in the West Bank. Now the government must contemplate ejecting them to send as vocal a message.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,980306,00.htmlAmong the Settlers
Will they destroy Israel?
by Jeffrey Goldberg
May 31, 2004THE ZEALOTS
On a late winter’s day, a slight, blue-eyed boy rode a bicycle down an empty street in the militant Jewish ghetto of Hebron, in the West Bank. Clipped to the boy’s hair was a green kipa, crocheted and oversized in the style of the settlers. A damp wind was blowing, and a bank of clouds hovered over the city, but the boy was jacketless. Scattered piles of rubble and garbage, flecked with broken glass, lined the road.
The buildings along what the Jews call King David Street and the Arabs call Martyrdom Street are tightly packed and decaying. The Jews live mainly on the east side of the street, and the Arabs live to the west. When I visited, much of the area was under curfew. The Jewish zone, where some Arabs live, is “sterile,” a soldier told me: only Arabs who hold the proper pass are allowed to enter. The soldier, a paratrooper in the Israeli Army’s Fighting Pioneer Youth Brigade, was guarding Hadassah House, a three-story building where several families of settlers live. A brigade of soldiers, coils of razor wire, and hundreds of concrete barriers stand between Hebron’s fewer than eight hundred Jewish settlers and its hundred and fifty thousand Arab residents.
Across from Hadassah House is a school for Arab girls, called Córdoba, after the once-Muslim Spanish city. On one of its doors someone had drawn a blue Star of David. On another door a yellowing bumper sticker read, “Dr. Goldstein Cures the Ills of Israel.” The reference is to Baruch Goldstein, a physician from Brooklyn, who, in 1994, killed twenty-nine Muslims when they were praying in the Tomb of the Patriarchs, just down the road. Across the closed door of a Palestinian shop someone had written, in English, “Arabs Are Sand Niggers.”
Jewish invective is answered by Muslim insults; over another door was a hand-painted verse from the Koran, attesting to the undying perfidy of the Jews. Nearby, peeling off a wall, was a poster dedicated to a ten-month-old Jewish girl named Shalhevet Pass, who was shot through the head three years ago by a Palestinian sniper. “May God Avenge Her Blood,” it read. Pass’s father is in jail in Israel; last July, the police found eight bricks of explosives in the trunk of his car.
A group of yeshiva students appeared, walking in the direction of the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a two-thousand-year-old stone palace. It sits atop the cave in which, tradition holds, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and their wives are buried. It is because of the tomb that Hebron is considered a holy city. The yeshiva boys wore flannel shirts and jeans. They had the wispy beards of young men who have never shaved.
Two Arab girls, their heads covered by scarves, books clutched to their chests, left the Córdoba School, and were walking toward the yeshiva boys.
“Cunts!” one of the boys yelled, in Arabic.
“Do you let your brothers fuck you?” another one yelled. I stopped one of the students and asked why he was cursing the girls. He was red-faced, and his black hair was covered with a blue knit skullcap.
“What are you, a goy?” he asked.
The girls fled down the street, and the boys disappeared. I asked the soldier guarding Hadassah House why he hadn’t intervened. “They didn’t hurt them,” he said.
The boy on the bicycle circled toward me and asked what I was doing there. I told him that I was waiting for a woman named Anat Cohen. He said that she was his mother, and that she had just gone to the market. Then he pedalled away, toward barricades at the end of the street.
Cohen pulled up a few minutes later, in a station wagon, its windshield cracked from stone-throwing attacks. She is one of the leaders of the Hebron Jews. A short woman in her early forties, she had a taut, windburned face and muscular arms, and her fingernails were chewed and dirty. As we walked through her front door, into a stone-walled living room, I asked her how she could let her son play amid the barbed wire and soldiers and barricades, and with snipers in the hills above.
“Hebron is ours,” she said. “Why shouldn’t he play?”
“Because he could get killed,” I said.
“There’s a bullet out there for each one of us,” she said. “But you can always die. At least his death here would sanctify God’s name.”
Cohen and other settlers say that they are obliged to fulfill God’s command that Jews settle the land of Israel. But there are safer places to live than King David Street in Hebron. I asked Cohen how she reconciled her decision to settle here with an even greater imperative of Judaism, the saving of lives—in this case, those of her children.
She glared at me. “Hellenizers”—secular Jews—“will never understand,” she said with contempt.
Anat Cohen is known, even among Hebron’s Jews, who are some of the least placatory of all the settlers, for her ferocity. According to Army commanders, she has cursed and insulted soldiers, and assaulted Arabs. The first time we met, she told me that she was a soldier of God.
Cohen has about ten children—like certain religious Jews, she refused to specify the number, in order to confuse the evil eye. The Cohen house is cramped and dark, and there are few toys. On one wall hangs a framed photograph of Meir Kahane, the zealot rabbi from Brooklyn, who advocated the expulsion of all Arabs from Israel. Behind a stone pillar hangs a photograph of Baruch Goldstein, with the inscription “The Saint Dr. Goldstein.” A candle burned in a makeshift shrine, in memory of Cohen’s brother, Gilad Zar. He was the security chief of the settlements in Samaria, the territory of the northern West Bank. He was killed three years ago by terrorists.
Read more of the article here:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/05/31/040531fa_fact2_a
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