Lords of the Land by Idith Zertal

Author:Idith Zertal
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Nation Books
Published: 2011-04-06T16:00:00+00:00

A Just Man in Distress

It was not only around the murdered victims and their funerals that the settlers developed rites and cults, but also around a murderer. Particularly in Hebron, but also in less ideological and more moderate settlements, the man who carried out the massacre at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, Baruch Goldstein, was sanctified and became the savior of the Jewish people. The physician became a saint whose death embodied the sanctification of Hebron. If Hebron was perceived as atoning for the deeds and the sins of the entire Jewish people, Goldstein’s massacre of Muslim worshipers was perceived by the Hebron settlers as “a supreme act of sacrifice that prevented a new Holocaust,” a bodily and spiritual sacrifice for the salvation of the collective. It was as though Goldstein had brought with his act the 1929 massacre back to life, the memory of the murdered Jews hanging over the settlers of Kiryat Arba and Hebron as a threatening reminder of what might happen at any moment. “In a psychological process, many have reversed the order of events: They repress the fear of revenge for the incident at the Tomb of the Patriarchs. Instead, they speak about an event that was supposed to happen, which Goldstein, in his insane act, succeeded in preventing,” wrote an Israeli journalist.52

Goldstein did not intervene in the political process, as his friend Moshe Feiglin said, “but rather in a clear and palpable danger to the lives of many of Hebron’s Jews.”53 Thus the historical roles were reversed: The passive, frightened Jew who goes blindly to his death became a predatory and vengeful gentile. Goldstein not only redeemed the murdered Jews of 1929 but also liberated the entire Jewish people from passivity and from the traditional Jewish way of going like sheep to the slaughter. “Baruch Goldstein appeared and acted like a real gentile, with no inhibitions, during prayer time, from behind . . . shattering the house of cards in a single stroke, slaughtering the ‘sheepish’ image we had worked so hard to develop and upon which we relied. This basic element of the State of Israel, existential Zionism, was deeply undermined. It could not digest this, not to forget and not to forgive.”54

According to the book about Hebron Since the 1929 Pogrom to the 1994 Events, published after Goldstein’s mass killing, Goldstein himself is depicted as a descendant of the Schneorsohn family that was among the survivors of the 1929 massacre. Among the Jews there are still those who have not recovered from the trauma of 1929; while among those Muslims whom Goldstein killed, in the holy place of worship, there were also direct descendants of the murderers who participated in the 1929 massacre. Thus the immediate, material connection was made between the two acts of slaughter. The Brooklyn-born Jewish doctor’s deed is perceived as the closing of a circle, as a great act of healing and the restoration of order, if only temporarily. In requital for the twenty-nine yeshiva students and rabbis who were slaughtered in 1929, Goldstein slaughtered the same number of Muslim worshipers.

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