From Hebron to Beersheba

Wednesday, September 01, 2004

But practically, the city of Hebron was under one of the tightest sieges it has known in years, as Israeli troops went from one target to the next, seeking those intelligence says might have been responsible for the horrific double suicide bombing yesterday in Beersheba. Ironically, just the night before the bombings yesterday, the army had been in Hebron, looking for members of Hamas cells.

Hamas-Hebron is autonomous from the rest of Hamas, and operates essentially as family operation – the Qawasmes are the dominant clan in the area, with some estimates saying that as many as a quarter of the Palestinian population of the most religious city in the West Bank belonging to the clan. One of the bombers yesterday was a Qawasme, cousin to the current head of the Hamas in Hebron, Imad Qawasme. The other bomber was a member of th Jabari clan, another important clan in the region south of Jerusalem.

Woman Crucified # 13 by Silvia Rosenberg, mixed media on recycled paper, 20x30 cm.

ebron is probably the most dangerous flashpoint in the territories due to the presence of about 500 intensely zealous settlers in the heart of the ancient town’s Old City area, within walking distance of the holy site of the Tomb of the Patriarchs where believers say the biblical parents of western monotheism, starting with Judaism -- Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah -- are buried. The settlers there are among the most deliberately provocative of all the settlers in the territories, but for domestic political reasons, no Israeli government, not even governments formed by the Labor Party, have ever dared to move against the group, which technically have been squatters since a handful showed up at a Hebron’s Park Hotel for Passover in 1968 and refused to leave. However, if and when evacuation takes place, there will necessarily be a showdown with the settler movement, and there is every reason to expect the Hebron settlers to be among those who man the front lines of opposition to any evacuation of any settlement, with some of the younger ones likely candidates to use violence to resist any evacuation.

And Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is determined to go ahead with the evacuation, or so it seemed yesterday launched another assault on his own party, announcing to his Likud Knesset faction that nobody was going to stop his disengagement plan. Predictably, those in favor of disengagement – including Sharon – used the Beersheba bombing to argue that disengagement was the way to end such terror, while those opposed to disengagement, such as former minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Army Radio, ‘the solution is to do what the Americans are doing in Iraq and the Russians in Chechnya.’ Lieberman said that he is ‘against hurting innocents, but those people celebrating in the streets of Gaza after the bombing are not innocent.’

For now, it seems, the army is undertaking a ‘more of the same’ policy, since the consensus – excluding the far Right of Lieberman’s ilk – now seems to be that is about all it can do, while preparations move ahead for disengagement and the fence. Moderate Right and moderate Left nowadays agree on at least two things: the army’s ‘war against the terrorists’ must go on, and the separation fence must be built. They depart on two issues: where the fence should go, with the moderate Right saying that the High Court of Justice should be obeyed, meaning the fence should infringe as little as possible on Palestinian rights, but that the Jewish right to safety comes before the right of some Palestinians to freedom of travel, and the moderate Left saying that the fence should go up on the Green Line, because, as former deputy chief of staff Matan Vilnai of Labor said, ‘it is the most efficient way to provide security.’ The settlers, anyway opposed to the fence, complain that means their blood is cheaper than the blood of other Israelis, an argument that strikes a chord with the moderate Right, meaning Sharon has yet to bite the bullet and approve a fence route that sticks to the Green Line, even though that is the route the army recommended from the start (once it accepted the idea of the fence.)

‘Where there’s a fence, there’s no terror, and where there’s no fence, there’s terror, that’s the formula,’ said Tzachi Hanegbi yesterday, a delicious sound byte that became his last as public security minister. If not for yesterday’s bombing, he would have been the focus of all the press this morning, because last night after hours of live broadcasts from the scene in Beersheba, with endless talk from commentators, Attorney General Menachem Mazuz announced he was ordering the police to investigate the allegations raised by a State Comptroller report about wholesale political appointments made by Hanegbi as minister of environmental affairs. Mazuz didn’t have much choice. Former Supreme Court Justice Elizer Goldberg, the state comptroller, explicitly had written ‘Hanegbi brutally trampled over the law.’ Another former Supreme Court justice, Yitzchak Zamir, made a relatively rare media appearance to say bluntly that in any civilized country, Hanegbi would have resigned immediately on publication of the report.

It took Hanegbi barely three hours from the time of the Mazuz announcement to ‘suspend himself’ as public security minister. Sharon named him minister without portfolio, until the investigation is over. After all, how can the police investigate their own minister? The likely candidate to replace Hanegbi is former deputy minister Likud MK Gideon Ezra, a former Shin Bet officer. But will Hanegbi be prosecuted? Considering he has been proudly describing himself for the last few years as ‘the champion’ when it comes to Likud ministers using their powers to hand out jobs to Likud central committee members (who control the nomination process for Likud MKs such as Hanegbi, so according to Zamir, at least, any political appointment is essentially bribery). In other words, Hanegbi did not behave at any point as if he believed he was doing something wrong, which will make it very difficult to prove criminal intent. On the other hand, he could end up saying, as Spiro Agnew once famously said, ‘the bastards changed the rules and nobody told me.’

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