A Little Too Close to God by David Horovitz

Author:David Horovitz [Horovitz, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-57575-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2000-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

Shades of Gray

The Palestinian side does not seek today, and will not seek tomorrow to enter into any military struggle…. There can be no alternative to resolving the disputed issues between the two sides except through negotiations.

—Yasser Arafat, Stockholm, December 5, 1998

Our rifles are ready, and we are ready to raise them again, if anyone tries to prevent us from praying in holy Jerusalem.

—Yasser Arafat, Ramallah, three weeks earlier

Early in the morning of Friday, February 25, 1994, Israel Radio began carrying patchy reports of a horrific massacre inside Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs, a hulking twelfth-century shrine that is said to encase the tombs of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah, and is thus of tremendous religious significance to both Jews and Muslims. Typically, the first accounts of the incident were confused and contradictory: One, two, even three Jewish men had opened fire on hundreds of Palestinians kneeling in prayer. The gunman or men were described variously as soldiers and as settlers. The death toll ranged from a handful to dozens.

Sarah Helm, then the correspondent of the British newspaper the Independent, picked me up in her battered Fiat, and we set off for Hebron and one of the most terrible days in recent Israeli-Arab history. The main road out of Jerusalem was closed off by the army, so we circumvented the roadblock via a mud track and made it as far as Bethlehem. There again, the army was deployed in force, trying to impose a curfew on Palestinians, also hearing first reports of the shooting, who had taken to the streets to throw stones and burn tires. We zoomed up an alley just ahead of the army position downtown and found ourselves outside Bethlehem University, where students, ordered home by the Israeli authorities, were throwing stones at troops and dodging the tear-gas volleys coming back at them. Unfamiliar with the back routes that might lead us to Hebron without encountering further roadblocks, we stopped by a doorway occupied by a teenage Palestinian who, to our surprise, offered to escort us. Thanks to his local knowledge, we eventually made our circuitous way to Hebron ahead of most other journalists, finally being forced by near-hysterical Israeli soldiers to abandon the car on the western outskirts of the city.

That was just as well. After the rioting near the Cave of the Patriarchs and the local hospital, during which several more Palestinians were killed, Israel had forced all the townsfolk off the streets. But their fury was manifested in the rocks strewn all across the roads and by their continuing presence on the flat roofs above us. Several times as we traversed the eerily deserted streets, picking our way across a carpet of hundreds of thousands of stones hurled in anger, stern faces would peer down from the rooftops, and we would see arms raised, poised to throw more boulders down on us. “Sahafi,” we’d yell repeatedly, “journalists.” And our Palestinian guide—who walked slowly, with a limp, as a result

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