Louis Theroux and the Hebron Massacre

I recently watched the new Louis Theroux documentary on the Israeli settler movement.

I want to first clarify that I support a two state solution and regard violent extremists within the settler movement as a significant impediment to lasting peace.

That said, I want to raise the complicated history of the town of Hebron which Louis Theroux completely flattens in his documentary for political purposes.

He introduces the Jewish settlement in Hebron in the following terms: ‘‘In 1968, the year after it was occupied by Israel, a community of Jewish settlers moved in illegally. They now number some 700.”

He goes on to interview a Palestinian human rights activist named Issa. This man states: “This is my land. The settlers chose to come here. And if it’s not safe for them, why continue to build more settlements in my own city?”

Now, if you were watching this, you would have no idea that a Jewish community existed in Hebron centuries prior to the modern Zionist movement. You would equally have no idea that this community was ethnically cleansed by Arab ethno-nationalists in modern times.

For example, take that figure of 700 Jewish settlers living in Hebron today. In 1895 the Jewish population of Hebron was 1,429. Louis Theroux does not inform his viewers that the present Jewish population of Hebron is currently smaller than it was 130 years ago. Why is that the case?

To understand this demographic shift, we have to understand the history of Jewish presence in the town of Hebron.

Jews have lived in Hebron since antiquity - it is one of the Four Holy Cities within Judaism.

Biblical tradition holds that Abraham settled in Hebron where he purchased the Cave of the Patriarchs as the burial place for his wife Sarah. King Herod later built a massive stone enclosure around this site which remains standing today as the oldest structure in Israel still in continuous use. It has been a major site of Jewish pilgrimage ever since. For example, the famous Sehardic Jewish philosopher and rabbi Maimonides recorded in 1166: ‘‘I left Jerusalem for Hebron to kiss the graves of my forefathers in the Cave of Machpelah.’’

At various points in history, both Christian Crusader and Muslim rulers expelled the Jews from the town of Hebron. Islamic rulers banned Jews from praying within the Cave of the Patriarchs in the mid-thirteenth century. This did not stop Jews from looking toward the city as a holy site. Eventually a community of Jews expelled from Spain began to permanently settle in Hebron as dhimmis around six hundred years ago.

Modern Jewish history in Hebron therefore dates back to at least the 15th century. A visiting rabbi found at least 20 Jewish families living in Hebron in 1487 and this population grew over time to eventually make the town a revered site of Jewish learning.

These Jews faced brutal discrimination as dhimmis, constantly subjected to expropriatory taxes and steep fines by Islamic authorities. They were targeted with pogroms in 1517 and 1835. Yet despite this murderous oppression, the Jewish community of Hebron persevered and survived. It was only finally destroyed in 1929 as a result of the Hebron Massacre.

The Hebron Massacre saw dozens of Jews - including explicitly non-Zionist Jews who had lived in Hebron for generations - systematically murdered by Palestinian Arab ethno-nationalists. Chanting ‘‘Itbach al Yahud’’ (“Kill the Jews”), the mob ultimately slaughtered some 67 people. The murders were particularly gruesome with some Jews - including infants - tortured to death or beheaded.

One infant one-year old child named Shlomo Slonim was found beneath dozens of corpses, most of them relatives. Interviewed some 67 years later at the age of 68, he said: ‘‘For an infant to be in a house where a massacre is taking place, to hear screams, it penetrates his brain.’’

It is important to recognise that some brave local Arab families tried to shelter the Jews of Hebron, guarding them from the mob with swords. But the overall community was decimated. British authorities ordered the remaining Jews to leave the city and Jewish properties and homes were looted and destroyed. While some Jewish survivors tried to return and rebuild the community in 1931, British authorities ordered their final evacuation in 1936 as the Arab Revolt broke out.

When Jordan occupied Hebron from the years 1948 to 1967, they strictly prohibited Jewish access to the city and maintained bans on Jewish prayers at the Cave of the Patriarchs. They obliterated all remaining Jewish heritage in the city.

The Beit Hadassah building became an Arab girls' school and the ancient Abraham Avinu synagogue was destroyed. Under Jordanian occupation the ruins of this synagogue were used as a goat and donkey pen. The adjacent ‘‘Kabbalists’ Courtyard’’ courtyard was turned into an abattoir and public toilet and the ancient Jewish cemetery where victims of the Hebron Massacre were buried was desecrated. It was ultimately left as an overgrown vegetable patch.

This was part of a systematic apartheid-like policy practiced by Jordan against Jews in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They completely expelled all Jews from territories under their control and banned Jewish prayer at the site of the Western Wall. They razed up to 58 synagogues in Jerusalem’s Old City and desecrated the Jewish cemetery at the Mount of Olives.

Following Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six Day War, Jews were finally able to re-enter East Jerusalem and the city of Hebron. They could finally pray at the Western Wall again and visit the Tomb of the Patriarchs. This marked the first time in approximately seven hundred years that Jews were allowed to pray within the latter holy site. Tens of thousands of Jewish visitors streamed into the city to take this opportunity.

Despite this victory, the reconstruction of the Jewish community of Hebron was still no foregone conclusion. Some of the Jewish refugees from the 1929 Hebron Massacre attempted to reclaim their old properties with family deeds only to be rejected by the government.

Senior men of state like Moshe Dayan envisioned a historic treaty for the handover of the newly conquered territories in exchange for a lasting peace, telling the BBC: ‘‘We’re waiting for a phone call to the Arabs.’’ Their response came with the Khartoum Resolution of September 1, 1967 which formulated the infamous ‘‘Three Noes’’: ‘‘No peace with Israel, No negotiation with Israel, No recognition of Israel.’’ The new settlement of Hebron only began to take place against this backdrop.

Louis Theoux does not mention the Khartoum Resolution in his documentary. Nor does he mention the tortured history of the Jewish community of Hebron since antiquity. He only picks up the story here, when settlers “illegally” moved into Hebron.

These early Jewish settlers to Hebron attracted such hostility by the Israeli state that at one point Prime Minister Menachem Begin attempted to enforce a siege on a group of Jewish women and children occupying the abandoned Beit Hadassah building. Eventually the government relented under pressure from nationalists but the State of Israel remained ambivalent towards the legal status of the settlers of Hebron.

Local Palestinian Arab hostility towards the new Jewish settlers was unremitting, however. The Mayor Muhammad Ali Ja'abari told the New York Times that the people of Hebron entirely rejected any Jewish presence in the city. One seventeen year old Palestinian militant threw a grenade into a crowd of hundreds of Jewish worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs, injuring dozens. Another attack came a month later, when a Palestinian militant threw a grenade outside the tomb only to injure three Arab children.

The Israeli government responded to these early terror attacks by taking steps to formalise Jewish settlement in the city. Thus began a problematic cycle whereby Palestinian ethno-nationalists targeted Jews for massacre in Hebron, prompting retaliatory violence against Palestinian civilians and Israeli government steps to formalise and expand settlements.

Overtly genocidal sentiment became the norm in Hebron. After a terrorist attack in northern Israel that saw a group of Jewish babies and toddlers taken hostage with one two-year-old child murdered, Arab students in Hebron praised the a terrorist attack and chanted: ‘’We are going to do to you what they did in Misgav Am.’’

A mass rally soon took place where the qadi of Hebron Sheikh Raja Bayud Tamimi declared: ‘’The Jews have to know that this land is Muslim and that it is entirely Muslim. . . . We’ll fight until you, the Jews, are wiped out.’’ He indeed called for a genocidal holy war to completely cleanse the entirety of the Holy Land of Jews, declaring: ‘’The Jews have to know this land has masters and is entirely Muslim.’’ Soon after a squadron of Fatah militants fired on a crowd of Jewish civilians in Hebron in 1980, killing six and wounding twenty.

The 1980 massacre resulted in further steps by the Israeli government to formalise Jewish presence in Hebron. It also tragically prompted a new wave of retaliatory violence and tit-for-tat murders. Leading radical settlers devised a plan to hide explosives in the cars of outspoken Arab Palestinian West Bank mayors - the mayors of Nablus and Ramallah were seriously wounded and an Israeli demolitions expert was blinded by the accidental detonation of a device.

Later, settler extremists would carry out a massacre against Palestinian civilians at the Hebron Islamic College and plot more attacks. The Israeli state ultimately arrested twenty-seven extremist West Bank settlers involved in the radical right-wing Jewish Underground Makhteret and charged many of them with murder and terrorist offenses. These men had sought to plot a lunatic attack on the Dome of the Rock, something that could only have initiated a global Islamic crusade against Israel. Sadly, very few of them ever spent a significant time in prison.

Settler extremism ultimately culminated in the profoundly wicked Baruch Goldstein terrorist attack on Muslim worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs in 1994. The young Kahanist murdered twenty-nine Muslim civilians as they prayed - another one hundred and twenty five were wounded.

Prime Minister Rabin denounced Goldstein to the Knesset as a ‘‘villainous Jew’’ and declared ‘‘Sane Jewry vomits you from its midst … You are a disgrace to Zionism and a blot on Judaism.’’ In the aftermath of the massacre he came close to ordering the full expulsion of the Jewish settlement in Hebron. He was ultimately assassinated a year later following a hate campaign initiated by the young extremist right. A young Itamar Ben-Gvir was investigated by authorities in the wake of the killing - he was later known to keep a sickening portrait of Baruch Goldstein in his living room. He now serves as Minister of National Security in Netanyahu’s government.

Again, I want to clarify here that I sharply oppose and condemn extremist settlers in the West Bank. As a human being I passionately oppose Baruch Goldstein and the Ben-Gvirists with all my might. I simply recall this full history of Hebron - warts and all - to provide further illumination to Louis Theroux’s otherwise quite simplistic depiction of the history of Hebron.

Goldstein was a genocidal monster. Genocidal monsters also exist in the Palestinian ethno-nationalist camp. The 1929 Hebron Massacre was genocidal in intent and the qadi of Hebron who declared ‘’The Jews have to know that this land is Muslim and that it is entirely Muslim … we’ll fight until they are wiped out’’ was clearly expressing a policy of genocidal intent. Are we supposed to just ignore these declarations of genocidal intent?

I obviously condemn the extremists in the midst of the settler movement, but to the broader question of whether Jewish presence in the town of Hebron is legitimate, I simply ask why the massacre of 1921 means that the town must apparently be kept Judenfrei until the end of time.

I mean, how can it be fair that an ancient Jewish community was massacred and expelled from their homes and the de facto outcome for all time is that they must never be allowed to return?

When I raised this point on Twitter, one prominent Palestinian activist named Omar El Fares wrote: ‘‘Drew Pavlou is now justifying illegal settlements per international law by distorting history. Shame on you Drew and what you have become.’’

My response was simple. I simply pointed him to a photograph showing an ancient Star of David carved above the entrance to a now Arab home in the Old City of Hebron and asked him what happened to the original Jewish residents of the home.

I mean, these people were very transparently ethnically cleansed. Those who dream of keeping Hebron Judenfrei until the end of time presumably want to complete the ethnic cleansing of 1921 by permanently barring anybody from ever returning. I condemn extremists in the midst of the settlers but I don’t think that it is fair that Jews be permanently cleansed from Hebron forever.

What I ultimately wish to see happen is a two state solution with protections for refugees on both sides of the border - allowing some Jews and Palestinians to return to their previously shattered homes and communities. This is just my simple humanistic aim.

Does Louis Theroux’s documentary advance this cause? I don’t think any one-sided historical narratives do. Ultimately the entire history of the conflict must be appraised, warts and all. I’ve tried to do that here by discussing and condemning settler extremists like Ben Gvir and Goldstein even while questioning Louis Theroux’s two-dimensional portrayal of the overall history of Hebron. I think it would ultimately be nice if he was capable of this kind of nuance.

Sources

Jerold S Auerbach, ‘‘Hebron Jews: Memory and Conflict in the Land of Israel,’’ 2009. Professor Emeritus of History at Wellesley College.

Yardena Schwartz, ‘‘Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine that Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict,’’ 2024.