'Coexistence bothers the radicals on both sides, right and left'
Photo: Gil Yohanan
Elyakim Haetzni
Photo: GNET
The transparent Palestinians
Op-ed: Majority of Hebron Arabs work and make a living in surrounding Jewish communities; rioters are a minority.
A television report: Twenty years since the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre.
Riots in Hebron,
injured, arrests. I learned how to "believe" such images during the first intifada.
Later, when I heard a reporter on the Israeli television describing an Arab trade strike in a dramatic voice, with a long line of closed stores in the background, I already understood what my eyes were seeing.
One of my clients as a lawyer, the owner of a glass blowing factory in the Glass Junction at the entrance to Hebron, complained to me that a young hooligan had showed up and demanded that he shut down his business. Why? A strike, an intifada. He didn't close it, and the next day his electric control panel was burned. He went to the governor, asked for protection, and was told: "We can't station a policeman next to every store." I got the message, my client noted, and in the next strike he shut down the factory "like a good boy."
Divided City
In two decades that have passed since murder of 29 people in Cave of Patriarchs, shops have closed, streets have been deserted and few remaining Palestinian residents lament apathy: 'The world carried on, but here nothing has changed.'
Netanyahu divided Hebron, giving 90% to the Palestinian Authority, while in the remaining 10% the civil and municipal control is in the hands of the PA, while the security responsibility and several limited civilian matters were left in the hands of the IDF, like Area C in Judea and Samaria.
Shortly before the IDF withdrawal, then-Knesset Member Moshe Peled asked me to meet with a group of young Hebron residents on an urgent matter. They were presented by their leader as activists in the first intifada, who realize now that they were wrong in light of the deeds of the Arafat government in Gaza and Nablus.
They asked to have a meeting arranged with the governor in order to plead with the Israeli authorities not to hand the city over to the Palestinian Authority and to leave it under Israeli rule. The man pulled out an identification card proving that he is, believe it or not, a member of Arafat's Force 17.
I turned to the governor, Baruch Nagar, but he was not at all impressed. Such delegations, he said, come to him "from morning to night."
The report on the recent riots in Hebron briefly mentioned that the participants included activists from Israel and abroad. Who are they? Who funds them? What hostile forces do they serve? And most importantly, how many of them are authentic residents of the city of Hebron?
And who represents the public opinion better: The protestors, or those who at the time were working and making a living in the nearby Kiryat Arba and the surrounding Jewish communities?
These Arabs are transparent. They don't exist as far as the common Israeli is concerned, just like the common Israeli is unaware of the fabric of life between Jews and Arabs in Jerusalem. The young man in the booth at the parking lot, the taxi driver, the waiter, many of the salespeople at the Malha Mall, Arab patients, nurses and doctors in the Jewish hospitals, Arab lecturers and students – they are all transparent. Not like those who take to the streets to riot. Those are very visible.
Those pretending to be a state are being fed from our hand – and are biting it. They are being fed with water, gas, electricity, labor, professional and technical knowledge, port services and the collection of a great part of their taxes, medical services, as well as protection of members of their establishment. Even with the construction of the city of Rawabi they need Israeli companies.
There is a simple explanation for the twisted presentation of life on both sides of the Green Line: Coexistence bothers the radicals on both sides, right and left. It spoils their wet dream of a transfer – for both Jews and Arabs. Let's not forget: "They are there and we are here" is a Kahane slogan which has been adopted – reversibly – by the Left.
