"I say the land belongs to us, and the Arabs don't belong to us, so the land we should keep. The Arabs we should let go. I think it's feasible to do so. Militarily it's no problem ...
"You can't have both a democracy in which any group can become a majority and a state which is inherently Jewish ... Democracy is a nice concept for gentiles to live by ... but in Judaism we have an absolute truth ... I'm not looking to punish the Arabs. I'm looking to rid ourselves of this danger, and any way that's possible, I think it should be done ..."
This was Dr Baruch Goldstein speaking to Ellen Hosmer, editor-at-large for Multinational Monitor, in the spring of 1988. This way of thinking took the Brooklyn-born Goldstein, dressed in an army uniform and possibly accompanied by one or two other armed men, to the Ibrahim Mosque on February 25 during dawn Ramadan prayers.
The man who gunned down as many of the 500 praying Muslims as he could was described as a "deranged gunman" and "madman" by Israelis and the US press. According to Robert Fisk, writing in the UK Independent, "not a single Western newspaper or television station called him a terrorist". The phrase of choice used to describe the massacre by President Clinton was "terrible tragedy" — as if it were caused by an impersonal act of nature.
The "lone mad gunman" explanation could not easily withstand the mounting evidence presented to the official Israeli inquiry that he was not alone when he entered the mosque. Two Israeli soldiers have admitted that they fired on the fleeing worshippers after shutting a door to block their escape.
Many of his fellow settlers, and an alarming number of Israeli high school students, have deemed Goldstein a hero. Rabbi Yaakov Perrin eulogised, "Even one million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail" (New York Times, February 28).
As Labor Minister Ora Namir put it, "There is one law for Arabs and one law for the Jews. This group of crazy people can do whatever they want."
The March 9 report by the Israeli Human Rights group B'Tselem on the deaths of 62 Palestinians killed by settlers between 1988 and 1993, for which only 13 settlers were tried and most immediately released, has not merited further examination.
Neither has the press examined the ideology and actions of the Kiryat Arba settlement in which Goldstein lived, a stronghold not just of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane's small Kach Party but of the 15,000-strong spearhead of the settler movement known as Gush Emunim. Kiryat Arba, founded in 1968 by the Rabbi Moshe Levinger (who served ten weeks in prison in 1990 for the unprovoked killing of a Palestinian merchant) was home to the so-called Jewish Underground.
In the early 1980s these disciples of the Rabbi Levinger booby-trapped the cars of Palestinian mayors, sprayed the Hebron Islamic College with machine-gun fire killing three students, fire-bombed houses and a soccer stadium, tossed grenades into churches and mosques, and tried to blow up five buses full of Palestinian passengers and the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.
All of those arrested for these deeds served fewer than seven years in prison. The "brain" of the Underground, Menachem Livani, is today living in Kiryat Arba as a civil servant.
The assumption that Jewish lives are more valuable than Palestinian is fundamental to the settler mentality, a fact which must be understood if dangers facing the current "peace process" are to be fully comprehended.
Some of the parties which have strong support among settlers and embrace the notion of an Arab "transfer" out of the territories maintain a secular outlook. The Tsomet Party which Rabin tried to bring into his coalition in the days after the massacre is one of these. Its leader, Rafael Eitan, told the Knesset in 1983 that "when we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle".
The religiously based settler movement Gush Emunim, with its redemptionist "Greater Israel" nationalism, represents, in Professor Ehud Sprinzak's words, a "huge time bomb for Israel whose safe defusing is becoming harder each day the occupation continues".
Gush ideologues, as well as the more openly extreme Kach Party and Kahane Chai settlers who are practitioners of Meir Kahane's vigilante violence, interpret the Torah in literal terms to back up their claims that Jews are the only people in the world with a "divinely ordained" relation to the land. Palestinians are "Canaanites" or "Amalekites" — "persecutors" who must either submit to Jewish rule or leave.
Jewish blood is not the same as Arab blood, as Rabbi Ginzburg, the head of a yeshiva in Nablus, told an inquiry into a murder of a Palestinian committed by one of his students in 1989.
In a Yediot Ahronot article of March 3, 1994, Shulamit Har-Evan explained that when a religious settler of this mind set "sees an Arab go off to his daily work" he will not see "the living man — rather, he will see an Amalekite. Such a religious person may live for years across the road from an Arab village or town and not know its name ..."
Har-Evan maintains that "the rabbis granted absolute permission to shed Palestinian blood the moment they proclaimed that all Arabs are to be regarded as 'persecutors' who, according to religious law, can be attacked and harmed any time, any place".
As long as these religious settlers believed that the government supported the redemption of "Greater Israel", they would obey its laws. But a government prepared to trade territory for peace had lost all claims to legitimacy and must be overthrown.
On January 18, 1989, Kahane's Kach and other small settler groups announced their determination to establish an "independent state of Judea" on any land evacuated by Israel in the context of a peace treaty. They declared that their allegiance to the state of Israel would be terminated as soon as the government began to negotiate handing over territory to Palestinians, and that they would then take up arms to defend the land.
They have been as good as their word, forming paramilitary groups, establishing a new yeshiva in Jericho after the Oslo accord was signed, and moving new settlers into Hebron after the massacre.
Four days before Goldstein sacrificed himself for the redemption of the land, New York Times journalist Joel Greenberg visited the Kahane Chai stronghold of Kfar Tapuah.
Greenberg reported that if land is turned over to the Palestinians, settlers have vowed to drive them out and create "a new independent state for Jews who want to live here freely, not under Arab rule". They did not shrink from the possibility of armed conflict with other Jews: "Whoever tries to uproot Jews from the Land of Israel or surrenders parts of the land is a traitor ... If there's no other choice, we'll fight them."
Measures by the Rabin government since February 25 to disarm and imprison a handful of "extremists" and ban Kach and Kahane Chai (which have announced that they will operate underground) and the official Israeli policy of discouraging families from leaving the settlements — at least 100 people from Kiryat Arba had asked the government to help them settle within Israel after the massacre — seem ruinously short-sighted. If armed settlers carry out their repeated threats to shoot at Palestinian police, "autonomy" will be anything but an experiment in peaceful coexistence.
A Peace Now report states that Israel might have to triple its number of soldiers in the territories to guard settlements during the interim period. It calls for the immediate dismantling of settlements in the Gaza Strip, Hebron, Nablus and Jericho, with these settlers being compensated from US loan guarantees.
[Abridged from Breaking the Siege, newsletter of the (US) Middle East Justice Network.]