Jewish settlers rampage in Hebron after killing

HEBRON, West Bank, Jan 19 (Reuters) - Jewish settlers rampaged through the West Bank city of Hebron on Sunday, smashing the windows of Palestinian homes and setting cars ablaze as they prepared to bury a settler killed by Palestinians.

The violence came nine days ahead of Israel's elections, which polls show Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's rightist Likud party, seen as tougher on Palestinian militants, is likely to win.

Israeli forces in Hebron braced for possible rioting by settlers during the funeral procession of Nathanel Ozeri, killed by Palestinian gunmen on Friday as he ate Sabbath dinner with his family at their home in an illegal outpost near the city.

Israeli media reported that Ozeri was a member of the outlawed anti-Arab Kach movement and had been jailed for participating in riots during the funeral of another settler in Hebron in July.

Kach seeks the expulsion of Palestinians from Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Palestinians said that before the funeral procession from the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba into Hebron began, settlers beat up several residents of the flashpoint city, smashed the windows of several houses and damaged parked cars. Two people, including a Reuters photographer, were slightly injured when Israeli troops fired rubber-coated metal bullets as they tried to enforce a curfew in the city where some 400 militant Jewish settlers live among some 120,000 Palestinians.

Ozeri's funeral was delayed for several hours as Baruch Marzel, a Jewish extremist who is running for Israel's parliament, and Noam Federman, a Kach member, appealed to Israeli courts for permission to attend the funeral.

Both have been barred by court and military orders from visiting Hebron because of violence they allegedly committed against Palestinians in the city in the past. A Jerusalem court later allowed Marzel to attend the funeral, but the army refused to allow Federman to enter the city.

In an interview published on Sunday by the U.S. magazine Newsweek, Sharon dismissed as unimportant a quartet of peace envoys from the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations.

Asked what he thought of the quartet's Israeli-Palestinian peace plan, Sharon said: "Oh, the quartet is nothing! Don't take it seriously! There is (another) plan that will work."

There was no immediate comment from any of the four quartet members, including Washington, Israel's closest ally.

In the interview, Sharon reiterated his peace blueprint allowing for a Palestinian state with temporary borders if "terrorism" stops and turning President Yasser Arafat into a figurehead as part of Palestinian Authority reforms.

The Israeli leader said that once there was a complete halt to violence he would be ready to negotiate the final borders of a Palestinian state.

Palestinians have rejected Sharon's peace vision as a sham intended to sabotage efforts to broker a peace deal to establish a viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, lands captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.

The "quartet" of peace envoys has drafted a series of "roadmaps" towards ending more than two years of violence since a Palestinian uprising for statehood began in September 2000 shortly after peace treaty negotiations deadlocked.

The United States, trying to muster a coalition against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, has decided to delay releasing the Israeli-Palestinian peace plan until after Israel's general election.

Israeli and U.S. forces on Sunday began joint air defence exercises as the Jewish state prepared for possible Scud missile strikes by Iraq if the brewing conflict between Baghdad and Washington erupts into war.

Sharon told his cabinet on Sunday it was unlikely that Israel would come under attack if the United States launched an assault on Iraq over its claim that Saddam Hussein has amassed weapons of mass destruction.

In Tel Aviv, Judge Sarah Sirota, head of a three-judge panel, said a district court will begin hearing evidence on April 6 in the trial of prominent Palestinian uprising leader Marwan Barghouthi. He is being prosecuted by Israel for his alleged involvement in the killing of 26 people.

Israel accuses Barghouthi, a leader of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction in the West Bank, of masterminding a spate of attacks. Barghouthi denies the charges and says the trial is politically motivated.

The Hebron Massacre of 1929

by Shira Schoenberg

For some time, the 800 Jews in Hebron lived in peace with their tens of thousands of Arab neighbors. But on the night of August 23, 1929, the tension simmering within this cauldron of nationalities bubbled over, and for 3 days, Hebron turned into a city of terror and murder. By the time the massacres ended, 67 Jews lay dead and the survivors were relocated to Jerusalem, leaving Hebron barren of Jews for the first time in hundreds of years.

The summer of 1929 was one of unrest in Palestine. Jewish-Arab tensions were spurred on by the agitation of the mufti in Jerusalem. Just one day prior to the start of the Hebron massacre, three Jews and three Arabs were killed in Jerusalem when fighting broke out after a Muslim prayer service on the Temple Mount. Arabs spread false rumors throughout their communities, saying that Jews were carrying out "wholesale killings of Arabs." Meanwhile, Jewish immigrants were arriving in Palestine in increasing numbers, further exacerbating the Jewish-Arab conflict.

Hebron had, until this time, been outwardly peaceful, although tension hid below the surface. The Sephardi Jewish community in Hebron had lived quietly with its Arab neighbors for centuries. The Sephardi Jews (Jews who were originally from Spain, North Africa and Arab countries) spoke Arabic and had a cultural connection to their Arab neighbors. In the mid-1800s, Ashkenazi (native European) Jews started moving to Hebron and, in 1925, the Slobodka Yeshiva, officially the Yeshiva of Hevron, Knesset Yisrael-Slobodka, was opened. Yeshiva students lived separately from the Sephardi community, and from the Arab population. Due to this isolation, the Arabs viewed them with suspicion and hatred, and identified them as Zionist immigrants. Despite the general suspicion, however, one yeshiva student, Dov Cohen, still recalled being on "very good" terms with the Arab neighbors. He remembered yeshiva boys taking long walks late at night on the outskirts of the city, and not feeling afraid, even though only one British policeman guarded the entire city.

On Friday, August 23, 1929, that tranquility was lost. Arab youths started throwing rocks at the yeshiva students. That afternoon, one student, Shmuel Rosenholtz, went to the yeshiva alone. Arab rioters later broke in and killed him, and that was only the beginning.

Friday night, Rabbi Ya’acov Slonim’s son invited any fearful Jews to stay in his house. The rabbi was highly regarded in the community, and he had a gun. Many Jews took him up on this offer, and many Jews were eventually murdered there.

As early as 8:00 a.m. on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, Arabs began to gather en masse. They came in mobs, armed with clubs, knives and axes. While the women and children threw stones, the men ransacked Jewish houses and destroyed Jewish property. With only a single police officer in Hebron, the Arabs entered Jewish courtyards with no opposition.

Rabbi Slonim, who had tried to shelter the Jewish population, was approached by the rioters and offered a deal. If all the Ashkenazi yeshiva students were given over to the Arabs, the rioters would spare the lives of the Sephardi community. Rabbi Slonim refused to turn over the students and was killed on the spot. In the end, 12 Sephardi Jews and 55 Ashkenazi Jews were murdered.

A few Arabs did try to help the Jews. Nineteen Arab families saved dozens, maybe even hundreds of Jews. Zmira Mani wrote about an Arab named Abu Id Zaitoun who brought his brother and son to rescue her and her family. The Arab family protected the Manis with their swords, hid them in a cellar along with other Jews who they had saved, and found a policeman to escort them safely to the police station at Beit Romano.

The police station turned into a shelter for the Jews that morning of August 24. It also became a synagogue as the Orthodox Jews gathered there and said their morning prayers. As they finished praying, they began to hear noises outside the building. Thousands of Arabs descended from Har Hebron, shouting "Kill the Jews!" in Arabic. They even tried to break down the doors of the station.

The Jews were besieged in Beit Romano for three days. Each night, ten men were allowed to leave to attend a funeral in Hebron’s ancient Jewish cemetery for the murdered Jews of the day.

When the massacre finally ended, the surviving Jews were forced to leave their home city and resettled in Jerusalem. Some Jewish families tried to move back to Hebron, but were removed by the British authorities in 1936 at the start of the Arab revolt. In 1948, the War of Independence granted Israel statehood, but further cut the Jews off from Hebron, a city that was captured by King Abdullah's Arab Legion and ultimately annexed to Jordan.

When Jews finally gained control of the city in 1967, a small number of massacre survivors again tried to reclaim their old houses. Then defense minister Moshe Dayan supposedly told the survivors that if they returned, they would be arrested, and that they should be patient while the government worked out a solution to get their houses back. Years later, settlers moved to parts of Hebron without the permission of the government, but for those massacre survivors still seeking their original homes, that solution never came.

Sources: Arutz Sheva, Interview with Rabbi Dov Cohen, (August 1, 1999). Ben-David, Calev, “To live and die in Hebron,” The Jerusalem Post, (July 23, 1999). See also: Hebron.

The Death Of Netanel Ozeri

The murder of Netanel [Nati] Ozeri in his home while enjoying his Sabbath meal with his family on Friday night is a many-faceted tragedy, which has still not ended as we go to press.

Kiryat Arba Mayor Tzvi Katzover told Arutz-7 today what happened in the course of the terrorist attack as the Ozeri family, including five children, and their two guests, were concluding their meal on Hilltop 26 outside Kiryat Arba: "The terrorist knocked on the door and called out with a French accent, leading everyone in the house to think that it was the security coordinator of Kiryat Arba [who hails from France]. Despite this, Nati was suspicious; he told his two guests to get their guns ready, and he himself drew his gun as he went to the door - but the French accent apparently fooled him, and he opened the door without asking again who it was. The terrorists shot and killed him on the spot..."

Medic Uri Karzen of Hevron, who was alerted to the incident - his fourth such Friday night call in the past six weeks - told Arutz-7's Eli Stutz that at this point, the two guests showed incredible bravery:

"The mother took her five children into a side room, while one of the two guests - they had come around from the back - jumped on the two terrorists. One of the terrorists was holding an M-16 rifle, and the other was holding a pistol and an axe. Yechezkel [one of the guests] managed to pin down one terrorist, whom was shot and killed by the other guest, Elchanan. The second terrorist fired off a few shots, then ran and hid behind a car, and Elchanan fired through the car, and apparently wounded the terrorist, but he ran away. Yechezkel took three bullets in his leg..." Security forces later found and killed the second terrorist.

The terrorists' victim, Nati Ozeri, was a leader in the Hevron community in terms of both settlement and Torah study/teaching. A teacher at the Yeshiva of the Jewish Idea in Jerusalem, he moved out of Kiryat Arba a number of years ago to settle the hills around the city. His close friend, Noam Federman, said Netanel was "a courageous man, a hero, a person who knew literature and how to write… He was an interesting and unusual combination, the type of person who stood out as a leader. He was a man of Torah and a man of action." Federman noted that Netanel not only established new settlement outposts and interested youths in settling there, he also made sure to teach them Torah in a regular schedule. He is survived by his wife Livnat and five children, ranging in age from 1.5 to 11.

Netanel recently spent four months in jail after being arrested during the funeral of his friend, Elazar Leibowitz, who was murdered in the Hevron area last July by Arab terrorists. The police said that Netanel struck an officer at the funeral, while friends said he tried to help a child who was hit by an officer. Knesset candidate Baruch Marzel said that Ozeri "was one of the senior students of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane. He was... a giant of Torah who knew the Bible and its commentaries. Aside from that, he was a great educator. He was a Jew who gave his life in order to settle the hills. Recently, he was also active in the Herut party election campaign."

Nati was to have been buried today in Hevron, but the funeral was twice delayed. It was held up first by an order issued by OC Central Command Maj.-Gen. Moshe Kaplinsky banning Baruch Marzel and Noam Federman from taking part in the funeral. Kaplinsky explained his ban as based on "concern for public safety." The Jerusalem Magistrates Court later overturned the order regarding Marzel, in light of the strong request by the grieving family, and the funeral finally set out to the ancient Jewish cemetery in Hevron.

The funeral was again held up when a dispute broke out over where exactly to bury the deceased. Rabbi Dov Lior of Kiryat Arba ruled that he be buried in Hevron, while Nati's aging parents asked that he be laid to rest in Jerusalem, and friends and some family members insisted that the burial be near his home on the hilltop. This last option was ruled out by military authorities, and Nati's wife Livnat intends to protest this decision in Jerusalem.

It is only "news" when Jews rampage. When Arabs rampage, that is their normal condition.

Arab Violence Rages On

Arab terrorists from the Palestinian Authority operated on a number of fronts last night and early this morning.

Despite the curfew imposed upon Hevron after Arab terrorists murdered Netanel Ozeri in his home near Kiryat Arba, Arabs opened fire this morning on Jewish homes in the center of Hevron. One home was damaged but no injuries were reported.

In Gaza, a mortar shell exploded harmlessly in the yard of a Jewish home in the Gush Katif area, and a terrorist attempting to infiltrate Kfar Darom, in central Gaza, was shot and killed by IDF forces.

In other attacks today, Palestinian terrorists shot at the guard post at the entrance to Sa-Nur, in north-central Shomron... An Arab mob stoned Israeli vehicles at the El Hader intersection on the Tunnels Highway just south of Jerusalem. A number of vehicles were damaged, though no injuries were reported... An explosive device was hurled at IDF forces in Shechem, as troops were arresting an Arab wanted for questioning; no damage or injuries were reported...

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.