With the unprecedented heat wave Israel has been experiencing – the plague of wild dogs in my town, supposedly escapees from Gaza, as well as a single, loud donkey parked behind my house by some teenage boys – it has been difficult to sleep for weeks. Add to that the defeatist political protests against the war and constant political bickering, with every political disagreement within the coalition and army being trumpeted in the most unflattering way possible, I almost did not write this article. Finally, Canada, Great Britain, France, and Australia announced they were recognizing a “Palestinian” state, and the whole world started to look black. Wanting to write only positive things, I felt as though I had nothing to say.
But then I sat
under our air conditioner for five minutes, and the world looked brighter. Refreshed,
I will share with you two positive developments, reactions to that perfidious
state recognition.
Correcting Past Errors – Chevron’s
Machpela Cave
In 1967, during
the Six Day War, Israel conquered Judea and Samaria, including the Jerusalem
Temple Mount and Chevron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs. The Arabs, following Israel’s
lightning victory, were trembling in their boots. They reasoned that if they
had won the war, they would have massacred all the Jews in the Land of Israel,
so they assumed that we Jews, having won, were planning the same for them.
That is the background
of a story that has been told for the past 58 years or, more precisely, two
identical stories, one about Chevron’s Me’arat HaMachpeila and the other about
Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. Both stories focus on Moshe Dayan, Israel’s Defense
Minister during the Six Day War. As a resident of Kiryat Arba-Chevron, I will
tell the Chevron version, but believe me, the same thing happened in both
places.
Moshe Dayan was
not the most important figure in that war – far from it. But in terms of
symbols as they existed in 1967, with his boyish good looks and debonair
eyepatch, he was definitely the most important symbol to emerge from the war. For
hundreds of millions of people, he represented the “new Israeli” or the “new
Jew,” embodying what Israelis were capable of. And he represented Israel’s
lightning victory.
So, in 1967, the
story goes, Dayan, as defense minister, was approached by Wakf officials stationed
at Chevron’s Me’arat HaMachpeila, the Tomb of the Patriarchs. Trembling with
fear, those officials held out to Dayan all the keys to the various rooms of
the Herodian edifice, and in a stuttering voice they offered him the keys. Their
obvious intention was, “Take the keys! Just please spare our lives!”
But Moshe Dayan
responded, “No, no, no! You keep the keys! You’ll be the hosts, and we’ll
remain the guests”!
The same scene
played itself out at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. I myself heard that story
in the summer of 1971, when my parents and sister (13) and I (15) were tourists
at the Kotel on a three-week tour of Israel, our first trip there. The story
was told with pride by our tour guide, who belonged to the Labor party and had
been in the Palmach, the leftist elite fighting group before the Jewish State’s
founding.
We know the story
is true because it is told by both left-wingers and right-wingers. It is told
by left-wingers to prove how nice we Jews are, and it is told by right-wingers
to prove how stupid we Jews are!
Anyhow, for the
past 58 years on the Temple Mount, the results of our “guest status” have been evident.
The Temple Mount is treated as though it is a Moslem Holy site under the “custodianship”
of Jordan.
Meanwhile, at Me’arat
HaMachpeila in Chevron during the past 58 years, it was forbidden to install
bathroom facilities inside Me’arat HaMachpeila. The Moslem Wakf always forbade that.
Bathrooms were all outside the edifice, down 69 stairs, hundreds of meters away,
at street level. Imagine how difficult that is for the elderly.
Likewise, it has
been forbidden for us Jews to make physical changes to the edifice. It has been
forbidden for us to explore the lower levels of the building, approaching the
area where it is thought the patriarchs are really buried. What could be more
natural for the Jewish people, after 700 years of not being allowed into the
building (1267 to 1967), than to explore that direction of archaeology?
Thus, 20 years ago,
the Jewish community of Chevron, as a test case, devised a multi-faceted plan
to cover over the entire central plaza of Me’arat HaMachpeila with a glass
roof, the better to protect against rain and the better to install central air
conditioning and heating in what is today the most important Jewish prayer area
in the Me’ara most of the year. To this day, prayer in that main plaza takes
place under a kind of metallic tent that does not fully guard worshippers from
the elements, so when it rains during the winter, people get cold and wet.
As a translator in my town, I was hired to
translate the plan to English for submission to the Arab Wakf for their “approval.”
That is correct. Thanks to Moshe Dayan’s “friendly gesture,” we had to ask the
Wakf permission to roof our prayer area against rain and cold. But the
submitted plan was only a test. It was expected to be rejected, and sure
enough, the Wakf rejected the plan.
All of what I said
applied until now. The change – moving control over Me’arat HaMachpeila from
the Arab Wakf to the municipality of Kiryat Arba, has been made already with
barely a stir. It received the critical approval of the Minhal HaEzrachi,
Israel’s Civil Administration over Judea and Samaria.
This is significant
for a number of reasons. First, it will make the life of Jewish worshippers
more pleasant and convenient, thereby bringing true honor to the site. Second,
Moshe Dayan’s declaration that “we shall remain guests” is a way of denying
ownership of the site. It is a kind of rejection of the Bible. By contrast, reclaiming
it is a way for the Jewish people to take ownership over the site, to declare
to the entire world that Me’arat HaMachpeila belongs to us and is important to
us. The bathrooms will be installed, but the declarative aspect, declaring to
the world that it is ours, a gift from G-d, is what is really important here.
And our stark bravery in declaring the truth will only end up saving Jewish
lives.
Will further steps
follow? Will Israel begin to examine the underground corridors, looking for the
Patriarchs’ true graves? Will Israel open underground sections as additional
prayer sites? Only time will tell.
E1
To Be Constructed
East of Jerusalem
lies the town of Ma’alei Adumim. It is officially part of the “West Bank” or “Judea
and Samaria.”
Fifty years ago,
when I was a 19-year-old yeshiva bachur in Israel, my favorite nature
spot in Israel quickly became Ein Gedi, next to the Dead Sea, a hiking and
swimming paradise in the mountainous desert, with waterfalls running through it.
To get there, you took a bus traveling east from Jerusalem, in constant descent
through an empty, breathtaking desert, until reaching Jericho and turned right
to travel south along the Dead Sea. The entire trip down, you felt as though
you were traveling in a dune buggy on the moon. Whenever I visited Ein Gedi,
that trip through the desert was part of the pleasure of the day.
Today, those empty
hills now host Ma’alei Adumim and other towns on the road leading south to
Jericho, such as Meishor Adumim and Mitzpe Yericho. But the first and largest
is Ma’alei Adumim.
Ma’alei Adumim has
37,000 inhabitants, one of them being my only cousin in Israel. It is 50 square
kilometers in size. It was founded in 1975, and 10 years later, when I visited
it, it was still very small. Considering that Jerusalem is 125 square
kilometers in size, and holds a million people, Ma’alei Adumim is still largely
empty and has tremendous growth potential. Still, by the 1990s, Ma’alei Adumim
was a modern, bustling town.
My one cousin in
Israel, a baal teshuva, has a brother in America who is a leftist and an
atheist and has always expressed the view that Israel should “abandon the
territories to their rightful owner.” But 20 years ago, after he spent a number
of days with his brother in Ma’alei Adumim and saw the reality and beauty of
this sprawling town, with its parks, man-made lake, shopping malls, and music
conservatory, I asked him if Israel should withdraw from there. He responded,
looking very serious and somewhat shaken: “This place isn’t going anywhere…”
That said, one
quarter of Ma’alei Adumim, 12.5 square kilometers, is called “E1,” and since
the founding of Ma’alei Adumim in 1980, it has been forbidden to build in E1.
Why? Because north of Ma’alei Adumim lie Samaria and Binyamin, including large
Arab towns like Ramallah and Al Bira, and south of Ma’alei Adumim lie Bethlehem
and the rest of Judea. In other words, once you build in E1, Ma’alei
Adumim cuts a potential Palestinian state in half, making it unviable. Indeed,
once you build in E1, Jerusalem and Ma’alei Adumim seamlessly run into each
other and are unified.
Because you could
not build in E1, Arabs in Ramallah could easily drive south to
Bethlehem. But it looks like all that is going to change now. The government recently
threatened that if England, Canada, France, and Australia made good on their
threat to recognize a Palestinian state as “punishment” to Israel for pursuing
the destruction of Hamas, it would “punish” them in return by advancing Israeli
sovereignty over Judea and Samaria.
Without any
prompting from the Europeans, Israel has already declared legal hundreds of
small young towns in Judea and Samaria that were in danger of destruction. And
in a truly important move, the government revoked the decree of the
Disengagement regarding the three towns of Northern Samaria – Sanur, Kadim, and
Chomosh – where 2,000 Jews were banished from their homes in 2005. Now, G-d willing,
Jews will return there forever.
And within the
last few days, with a nod from Netanyahu, and presumably from Trump as well,
the government has given its approval for the construction of 3,400 homes on
E1. This may not sound like much, but it represents another first step
towards Israel’s annexing all of Judea and Samaria. And when Israel does that,
the mistakes made after 1967, Madrid, Oslo, and the Disengagement, etc., etc.,
will be atoned for.
.
