The mosque was the Ibrahimi Mosque a.k.a. the Cave of the Patriarchs, Hebron, Occupied West Bank, Palestine.
The mass murderer 25 years ago was not some young wannabe like the Christchurch murderer. Rather, he was 37-year-old Baruch Goldstein, M.D. by profession, a senior figure in the Kach Kahanist movement — the furthest right in Israel’s political map — and a member of his settlement-town council.
He chose to carry out his mass murder on the Jewish holiday of Purim, which in 2019 took place last week. In 1994, it was on February 25.
He murdered 29 worshippers who had arrived that day for the early morning prayer, but the damage he’s done and the impact upon Israel-Palestine history have been far far worse. That last part is not only due to his actions, but also to the atrocious responses by Israeli civilian and military authorities, and by Palestinian militant group Hamas. Just like in the aftermath of 9/11, the response is all-important.
As New Zealand faces the aftermath of a similar right-wing terror attack, and as the American Jewish community is not far removed from the worst terror attack in its history, this is an occasion to remember the importance of public response, beyond symbolic gestures of sympathy and unity, and politically expedient but meaningless moves.
More below the fold.
The Setting
It was only 5 months after the public start of the Oslo Process. Israel was still directly occupying all of the West Bank and Gaza; the Palestinian Authority wasn’t even set up yet, in fact the initial accord was just a declaration of principles; the first practical agreement was signed only in May 1994.
The Oslo announcement was a sea change in Israel-Palestine politics. The left and center were elated, and most center-right voters (the bulk of Likud constituency) were resigned to the process getting started, and willing to “wait and see”. After all, Labor headed by Yitzhak Rabin had campaigned on negotiating seriously with Palestinians, and won in a landslide in 1992. That landslide was driven in a large part, by the Likud government’s flailing, inconsistent and irresponsible handling of the 1987-1991 First Intifada and its aftermath.
By contrast to the silent majority, Israel’s far right was up in arms against Oslo from the get-go, as were similar Palestinian groups like Hamas. There was already an uptick in violence in the West Bank. Goldstein was no wild-eyed new convert. Born and raised in New York, he emigrated to Israel in the 1970s already a Kahanist, having been radicalized by Kahane himself. In 1984 he was #3 on Kach’s parliamentary election List; that was the year in which #1 Kahane actually entered the parliament. When the Oslo process started, he started wearing the Yellow Holocaust patch in protest. Then he decided to put his extreme thoughts into action.
There was Far More Killing That Day
Wearing his IDF reservist uniform (probably in order to not evoke suspicion, since it was soldiers who were guarding the place), Goldstein murdered 29 worshippers before stopping to change magazines. At this point, survivors rushed and subdued him, eventually killing him with blows — an act deemed self-defense in the Israeli committee of inquiry’s report.
But far more than 29 Palestinians were murdered. Israel military forces killed 5 more people in Hebron on the same day, an additional 7 across the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, and yet another 10 in the following week of trigger-happiness, including one Israeli whom the military had mistaken for a Palestinian. A total of 22 additional killings by the military, in direct relation to the massacre.
How did that happen? This B’Tselem emergency report provides some details (Hebrew pdf; this English pdf has some brief summaries). Here’s testimony from Hebron, from a director of the Al-Ahly hospital where massacre victims were treated (translation mine). He called Hebron’s military governor when he saw soldiers surrounding the hospital, and their presence provoking clashes.
Outside there were many youth, and I feared another massacre. The governor told me he cannot withdraw the soldiers, because there are two jeeps surrounded by youth. As we were talking the soldiers advanced further. The governor said he’ll try to pull them back.
After a while I noticed the soldiers are advancing yet again. They were right on the hospital’s fences, their shots hitting its walls. At 11:30 I called the governor again asking to withdraw the soldiers. He ignored me. I told him that the biggest problem is soldiers present near the hospital, that it continues to cause injuries….
...Suddenly I saw six soldiers climb a roof across from the hospital, continuing to shoot at the mass of people who were attacking them with rocks. The head of Hebron’s chamber of commerce arrived with a megaphone, calling the youth to leave the place. They heeded him and left.
I don’t understand why the soldiers arrived to the hospital in the first place. People were scared, angry and worried. They came to donate blood and to check on their relatives.
This pattern was most poignant in Hebron, but repeated itself elsewhere. Instead of standing down, maintaining a distance, and letting people vent and grieve without provoking them (and in Hebron’s case, take care of the health emergency) — the Israeli military went right into people’s faces, trying to stay “in control” of every situation at whatever cost to the population.
It should be noted that the military being the direct authority on Occupied Palestinian lives, meant they were also fully accountable for the Palestinians’ security, so they should have spent their energies keeping the victims safe rather than harass them further. However, I can testify firsthand, that as Israeli soldiers we were almost never trained to think of our task in that manner.
In Hebron and surely elsewhere in the Occupied Territories, it seems that soldiers were also not informed properly as to the cause of the sudden wave of riots. They saw it as a declaration of war, and acted accordingly. Meanwhile, on the Palestinian side too the information was unclear. In particular, Goldstein having worn IDF uniform (and as an M.D., he was automatically an officer), and the military’s subsequent behavior particularly in Hebron, lent credence to the rumor that this massacre was sanctioned from above.
The Government’s Cowardly Response
After the massacre there were some calls on the left to evacuate the Jewish settlers living in downtown Hebron. Hebron has had a blood feud running for decades. In 1929 during British rule, the longtime Jewish community there was forced to leave, after a massacre killed dozens among them. So when Israel took over the West Bank in 1967, this was prime target to the new messianic Orthodox right. On Passover 1968 a far-right group reserved rooms in a Hebron hotel under fake foreign names, then performed the Seder there and refused to evacuate until Jews are resettled in Hebron. A wave of celebrities visited them in the hotel, and the Labor government (headed by right-winger Golda Meir) willingly agreed to build a settlement-neighborhood on the outskirts of Hebron (then still a fairly small town), less than 1km from downtown. That was Kiryat Arba, soon to become one of the West Bank’s most extremist settlements, where Goldstein lived.
Then in 1980 a group of settlers returning from prayer in downtown Hebron was attacked, six killed. The government (now Likud-led) decided in retaliation, to allow resettlement of Jews in downtown Hebron. Almost none of the new settlers had anything to do with the old Hebron Jewish community. Rather, they were even more extremist than the Kiryat Arba contingent.
Just as an attack against Jews was used to settle Jews there, an attack by a Jew against Palestinians could serve as a sign that the dangerous experiment had failed. The Labor government certainly had political capital to remove that small and unsustainable settlement, and possibly even start steps for removing the larger Kiryat Arba.
But they did the opposite. They turned the curfew on Palestinians in the area surrounding the downtown settlement, into a permanent closure of its main street A-Shuhadaa St. This closure has continued through to the present. 25 years after the massacre, much of downtown Hebron is still a ghost town, as a direct result of the massacre. The victims have been punished for the crime.
Worse, much much worse: in the midst of a fledgling attempt to build trust and start a new dynamic, the government supposedly “the government of peace”, sent a clear message to the Palestinians still fully under its rule that when push comes to shove, it will always stand with the Jews and against them — no matter who’s the one doing the pushing and shoving, no matter even if the Jew in question was a frothing-at-the-mouth racist mass murderer. This message has never been forgotten...
In Steps Hamas
...and it was bound to have negative effects upon Palestinian attitudes.
In particular, it had a devastating effect upon the strategy of Hamas who of course opposed the Oslo process but like the right-wing in Israel, was challenged to find a foothold after the wave of enthusiasm upon the process’ announcement.
Little known fact: from its founding in the 1980s until the 1994 massacre, Hamas targeted only the military, occasionally also adult settlers.
But on the 40th day after the massacre, a Palestinian suicide bomber drove up to a bus in the northern Israeli town of Afula, and detonated the car, killing eight civilians, one of them a Palestinian-Israeli. Muslims, at least in Palestine, observe a 40-day period of mourning, and Hamas religious leaders had now allowed attacks targeting civilians. A week later, a Hamas suicide bomber detonated his bomb inside a bus in the town of Hadera, killing 5 civilians and one soldier. These were the first attacks of this style.
Hamas has found its ghastly claim to fame, and more importantly: a way to derail the Oslo process, and to expose the process’ leaders and symbols, and in particular Fatah, as weak and useless.
It also caught Israel’s all-powerful Shin Bet secret police, priding itself upon having collaborators everywhere in Palestinian society, flat-footed and helpless in defending Israeli civilians, a situation that would recur for most of the subsequent 25 years despite occasional boasts to the contrary, and would contribute to Israelis supporting whatever it takes to try and restore that lost sense of security.
The tacit cooperation between the Israeli and Palestinian far-right in perpetrating bloodshed and mayhem to derail any reconciliation, has become a dominant pattern of I-P reality.
Stumbling Ahead.
The process still continued along hitting its official milestones, albeit with increasing delays. In May 1994 the sides finally signed a practical agreement transferring most of Gaza and the town of Jericho to civilian Palestinian control, and establishing the Palestinian authority. But the momentum had been lost. Palestinian negotiators could not secure the re-opening of Palestinian downtown Hebron, neither then, nor in the broader October 1995 agreements, nor in the specific 1997 Hebron agreement (Hebron had been left out of the prior ones).
The Israeli government pretended to take “decisive action” against the far right, by outlawing Kach and a splinter group. But Kach had already been a pariah. The far-right has not been shamed, it has been emboldened. The far-right was so emboldened after the massacre, that in November 1995 an Israeli university student (not formally a Kahanist) murdered PM Rabin himself.
More generally, mainstream Israeli discourse has chosen to blame the suicide bombings upon the peace process, while giving the massacre, the mindset it was based on, and the atrocious Israeli military and government responses to it, a free pass. In the typical media and political narrative, the massacre is an isolated event connected to a few “bad apples”, which Israeli society has repudiated, and has not affected history to an appreciable extent. The was very little Israeli media attention to this ominous anniversary, and to its painful, poignant co-occurrence with the Christchurch massacre and with Bibi cozying up to Kahanist politicians.
This pattern continues; even now after decades of exclusive right-wing policies, any threat to Israeli security is still perceived as the left and the peace process’ fault, as well as indicative of something innately wrong with Palestinians. The contribution of deepening Occupation and military aggression is ignored.
Meanwhile, the very same scoundrels headlining Kach (Kahane was already dead) popped up in other groups identical in all but name and slight nuance. In particular, former Kach member Michael Ben-Ari who has never renounced his views, repeatedly ran to parliament in various far-right outfits, and even managed to get in for the 2009-2013 term. Upon getting elected he appointed other famous Kahanists as aides. His views and history were deemed so extreme outside of Israel, that the US denied his visa applications.
But Bibi had no problem with them last month, when personally brokering a deal between Kach’s current incarnation, “Jewish Power”, and Jewish Home which is Orthodox Zionism’s largest party, to run together in the upcoming 2019 elections. Ben-Ari himself was disqualified from the parliamentary List last week by Israel’s High Court because of his track record, but now “Jewish Power” demands in compensation that Baruch Marzel (yet another American import, and a resident of the very same downtown-Hebron settlement), who was essentially Kahane’s second-in-command, be appointed cabinet minister if and when Bibi wins. So the “banning” of Kach has proven a totally toothless window-dressing.
Meanwhile (h/t freshwater dan in the comments for the reminder), Goldstein’s own grave has become a pilgrimage site for Jewish supremacists. For years there was even a shrine there, repeatedly demolished and rebuilt.
To add insult to injury, last week Hebron’s settlers had their joy-filled annual Purim parade, right through the A-Shuhadaa Street that’s still closed to Palestinians, featuring the Kahanist parliament candidate (yet another Hebron settler), who has now become a household figure depicted in mainstream satire shows.
There have been many tragic turning points harming the prospects of Israeli-Palestinian peace and of ending the racist Occupation regime. Arguably, in 1999-2000 the process had recovered enough to obtain a second lease on life; but Barak and Arafat, each in his own way negligently unaware of how precarious it was, promptly blew it away.
And yet, the Purim massacre of 1994 stands as the single worst turning point of them all.
Blessed be the memory of all those who had died that day and in subsequent violence.
May we learn the lesson, and not be afraid to speak truth to power when power fails to heed the lesson.