There is a place where the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is settled within a few meters. Wall to wall, literally. A building where the distance between Jews and Muslims is much closer than between the Wailing Wall and the esplanade of the Mosques, in Jerusalem. It is in Hebron: for Jews it is the Tomb of the Patriarchs – their second holiest place after the Wailing Wall –, while for Muslims the same temple is the Ibrahim Mosque – their fourth holiest site after Mecca, Medina and the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.
The Herodian construction, more than 2,000 years old, is divided in two, like Hebron, one of the most conflictive points in the West Bank, because of this monument claimed by Muslims and Jews and which is also venerated by Christians. It houses the tombs of six biblical patriarchs and matriarchs.
Security has been extreme since February 25, 1994 – the date on which the Ramadan and Purim festivities coincided – the US-born Israeli doctor Baruch Goldstein put on his reservist military uniform, entered the Muslim sector and, While the faithful were kneeling in prayer, he discharged four magazines with his rifle, killing 29 people and wounding another 125. Goldstein ended up dead, after being beaten by the survivors.
To approach the building from the Muslim sector, you must first enter the alleys of the Old City – declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO –, with almost all its shops closed, and go through a grated tunnel that leads to the first of the two. police checks in less than ten meters. “Do you carry weapons?”, first question. “Is he a Muslim?” second.
The internal doors that connect the two sectors from inside the temple are only open on ten different days a year, when each of the two communities has permission to pray throughout the premises. Four of the tombs flank the Jewish sector: those of Jacob, Leah, Abraham and Sarah; while those of Isaac and Rebekah are fully on the Muslim side. Ibrahim’s (Abraham) tomb is on the Jewish side, although it can be seen through bars from the Muslim side, as can Sara’s.
In reality, they are cenotaphs, since the tombs are supposedly underground, in the cave of Machpelah, on which this temple was built and from which, according to tradition, you can access paradise.
In the central space on the Jewish side, intended for prayer, two women, with their small children, talk in the space separated by screens and reserved for them. In the men’s area, eight men, one of them a soldier, organize to pray the Shacharit – morning prayer – but they have a problem: they necessarily need to be ten and they ask the journalist if he is Jewish so that he can join.
On one side, some Jewish girls look through the cracks in the internal doors that lead to the Muslim sector, but they see nothing. They cannot know that on the other side, at that time, a group of pilgrims from the Indian city of Madras pray facing Mecca. From the background, three men observe the prayer. One is blind and, when I ask him what he thinks about the controls to enter the mosque, especially during the Gaza war, he complains about the Israeli occupation and says that “Palestinians live without being able to do what they want with their lives.” . A few minutes earlier, the saleswoman in the soulless souvenir shop on the Jewish side told me that the Israelis “will never be able to trust the Palestinians again.”
Jews and Muslims separated by a wall, by a world and by a line that also divides Hebron into two sectors: the so-called H1, administered by the Palestinian National Authority, where some 200,000 Palestinians live; and H2, governed by Israel, inhabited by only a thousand fundamentalist settlers who move freely through the sector and 35,000 Arabs who see their mobility and lives restricted.
Hebron is surrounded by particularly extremist settler settlements. One of the oldest is Kiryat Arba, where some 8,000 people live, including the Minister of Security, the far-right Itamar Ben-Gvir. In that same colony lived Baruch Goldstein, who with his massacre, which caused riots throughout Palestine, contributed to ending the Oslo agreements of 1993, which were ended after another Israeli extremist, Yigal Amir, assassinated the prime minister in 1995. Yitzhak Rabin.
Ben-Gvir, who weeks before the attack on Rabin tore off the badge from the Labor premier’s Cadillac and publicly threatened him, had a poster of Goldstein in his home. Since the start of the Gaza war, the Security Minister has carried out a campaign to distribute thousands of weapons to Israeli civilians.
Goldstein and Amir – who is serving a life sentence – are today heroes for the ultranationalists of Hebron.
