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Hebron

 


Hebron (Heb: Hevron, Arab: Al Halil/Khalil), is the largest city in the West Bank, located in the south, 30 km south of Jerusalem. It is home to some 167,000 Palestinians and over 500 Israelis. Hebron lays 930 meters (3,050 ft) above sea level. The Biblical region of Judea is the second holiest city in Judaism after Jerusalem.

 

Etymology:

The name "Hebron" traces back to two west Semitic roots, which coalesce in the form hbr, having reflexes in Hebrew, Amorite and Arabic, and denoting a range of meanings from 'colleague', 'unite', 'friend' or 'to be noisy'. In the proper name ‘Hebron’, the sense may be alliance. In Arabic, ‘Ibrahim al-Khalil’ means Abraham the friend, signifying that, according to both Islamic and Jewish teachings, God chose Abraham as his friend.

It is locally well-known for its grapes, figs, limestone, pottery workshops and glassblowing factories. It is also the location of the major dairy production. The old city of Hebron is characterized by narrow, winding streets, flat-roofed stone houses, and old bazaars. Hebron is home to Hebron University and the Palestine Polytechnic University.

 

Sites:

The most famous historic site in Hebron sits on the Cave of the Patriarchs. Although the site is holy to Judaism, Christianity and Islam also accept it as a sacred site, due to scriptural references to Abraham. According to Genesis, he purchased the cave and the field surrounding it from Ephron the Hittite to bury his wife Sarah. Subsequently Abraham, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob and Leah were also buried in the cave (the remaining Matriarch, Rachel, is buried outside Bethlehem). For this reason, Hebron is also referred to as 'the City of the Patriarchs' in Judaism, and regarded as one of its Four Holy Cities. In settling here, Abraham made his first covenant, an alliance with two local Amorite clans who became his ba’alei brit or masters of the covenant.

Over and around the cave itself churches, synagogues and mosques have been built throughout history. The Isaac Hall is now the Ibrahimi Mosque, while the Abraham Hall and Jacob Hall serve as a Jewish synagogue. In medieval Christian tradition, Hebron was one of the three cities, the other two being Juttah and Ain Karim, that boasted of being the home of Mary's cousin, Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist and wife of Zacharias, and thus possibly the birthplace of the Baptist himself.

 

History:

Jewish Era

Archaeological excavations reveal traces of strong fortifications dated to the Early Bronze Age. The city was destroyed in a conflagration, and resettled in the late Middle Bronze Age. King David reigned from Hebron for over seven years. Initially as a vassal of the Philistines and anointed by the men of Judah, while he gradually extended his authority over a wider area, until he was able to incorporate the remnants of Saul’s kingdom with the capture of Jerusalem, where he was subsequently anointed king of the Kingdom of Israel. It constituted an important local economic centre, given its strategic position along trading routes, but, as is shown by the discovery of seals with the inscription lmlk Hebron (to the king. Hebron), it remained administratively and politically dependent on Jerusalem.

After the destruction of the First Temple most of the Jewish inhabitants of Hebron were exiled, and according to the conventional view, their place was taken by Edomites in about 587 BCE. Some Jews appear to have lived there after the return from the Babylonian exile, however.

This Idumean town was in turn destroyed by Judah Maccabee in 167 BCE. Herod the Great built the wall which still surrounds the Cave of the Patriarchs. During the first war against the Romans, Hebron was conquered by Simon Bar Giora, the leader of the Sicarii, and burnt down by Vespasian's officer Cerealis. After the defeat of Simon bar Kokhba in 135 CE, innumerable Jewish captives were sold into slavery at Hebron's Terebinth slave-market. Eventually it became part of the Byzantine Empire. Byzantine emperor Justinian I erected a Christian church over the Cave of Machpelah in the 6th century CE which was later destroyed by the Sassanid general Shahrbaraz in 614 when Khosrau II s armies besieged and took Jerusalem.

 

Islamic era

Hebron was one of the last cities to capitulate in Syria (which at the time defined also Palestine). The Rashidun Caliphate established rule over Hebron without resistance in 638, and converted the Byzantine church at the site of Abraham's tomb into a mosque. Trade greatly expanded, in particular with Bedouins in the Negev and the population to the east of the Dead Sea. The Jerusalem geographer al-Muqaddasi, writing in 985 described the town as:

 

"Habra (Hebron) is the village of Abraham al-Khalil (the Friend of God)...Within it is a strong fortress...being of enormous squared stones. In the middle of this stands a dome of stone, built in Islamic times, over the sepulcher of Abraham. The tomb of Isaac lies forward, in the main building of the mosque, the tomb of Jacob to the rear; facing each prophet lays his wife. The enclosure has been converted into a mosque, and built around it are rest houses for the pilgrims, so that they adjoin the main edifice on all sides… All the countryside around this town for about half a stage has villages in every direction, with vineyards and grounds producing grapes and apples called Jabal Nahra...being fruit of unsurpassed excellence...Much of this fruit is dried, and sent to Egypt. In Hebron is a public guest house continuously open, with a cook, a baker and servants in regular attendance. These offer a dish of lentils and olive oil to every poor person who arrives, and it is set before the rich, too, should they wish to partake. Most men express the opinion this is a continuation of the guest house of Abraham, however, it is, in fact from the bequest of [the sahaba (companion) of the prophet Muhammad] Tamim Al Dari and others… At present time I do not know in all the realm of al-Islam any house of hospitality and charity more excellent than this one"

 

Tamim al-Dari, prior to converting to Islam, lived in southern Palestine. The prophet Muhammad arranged for Hebron, Beit Einun and surrounding villages to be a part of al-Dari's domain; this was implemented during Omar's reign as caliph. According to the arrangement, al-Dari and his descendants were only permitted to tax the residents for their land and the waqf of the Ibrahimi Mosque was entrusted to them.

The custom, known as the 'table of Abraham' (simāt al-khalil), was similar to the one established by the Fatimids, and in Hebron's version, it found its most famous expression. The Persian traveller Nasir El Khusraw who visited Hebron in 1047 records in his Safarnama that:

 

"...this Sanctuary has belonging to it very many villages that provide revenues for pious purposes. At one of these villages is a spring, where water flows out from under a stone, but in no great abundance; and it is conducted by a channel, cut in the ground, to a place outside the town (of Hebron), where they have constructed a covered tank for collecting the water...The Sanctuary (Mashad), stands on the southern border of the town...The mihrab (or niche) and the Maksurah (enclosed space for Friday-prayers) stand in the width of the building."

He further recorded that:

"They grow at Hebron for the most part barley, wheat being rare, but olives are in abundance. The [visitors] are given bread and olives. There are very many mills here, worked by oxen and mules, that all day long grind the flour, and further, there are slave-girls who, during the whole day are baking bread… there are some days when as many as five hundred pilgrims arrive, to each of whom this hospitality is offered."

 

Crusader rule:

The caliphate lasted in the area, which was predominantly populated by peasants of various Christian persuasions until 1099, when the Christian Crusader Godfrey de Bouillon took Hebron and renamed it "Castellion Saint Abraham". He then gave Hebron to Gerard of Ayesnes as the fief of Saint Abraham.

 Gerard of Avesnes was a knight from Hainault held hostage at Arsuf, north of Jaffa, who had been wounded by Godfrey's own forces during the siege of the port, and later returned by the Muslims to Godfrey as a token of good will. As a Frankish garrison of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, soon governed by Tancred, Prince of Galilee, its defense was precarious, being 'little more than an island in a Moslem ocean'. The Crusaders converted the mosque and the synagogue into a church and expelled the Jews living there. In 1106, an Egyptian campaign thrust into southern Palestine and almost succeeded in wresting back Hebron in 1107 from the crusaders from Baldwin I of Jerusalem, who personally led the counter-charge to beat the Muslim forces off.

In the year 1119 during the reign of Baldwin II of Jerusalem, then, according to Ali of Heart (writing in 1173), a certain part over the cave of Abraham had given way, and ‘a number of Franks had made their entrance therein’. And they discovered ‘(the bodies) of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’, ‘their shrouds having fallen to pieces, lying propped up against a wall...Then the King, after providing new shrouds, caused the place to be closed once more’. Similar information is given in Ibn At Athir's Chronicle under the year 1119; ‘In this year was opened the tomb of Abraham, and those of his two sons Isaac and Jacob ...Many people saw the Patriarch. Their limbs had nowise been disturbed, and beside them were placed lamps of gold and of silver." The Damascene nobleman and historian Ibn al-Qalanisi in his chronicle also alludes at this time to the discovery of relics purported to be those of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, a discovery which excited eager curiosity among all three communities in Palestine: Muslim, Jewish, and Christian.

Towards the end of the period of Crusader rule, in 1166, Maimonides visited Hebron, and wrote,

'On Sunday, 9 Marheshvan (17 October), I left Jerusalem for Hebron to kiss the tombs of my ancestors in the Cave. On that day, I stood in the cave and prayed, praise be to God, (in gratitude) for everything'.

In 1167 the Episcopal See of Hebron was created along with that of Kerak and Sebastia (the tomb of John the Baptist). In 1170, Benjamin of Tudela visited the city, which he called by its Frankish name, St. Abram de Bron. He considered the funerary structures of the patriarchs the handiwork of Gentiles, and remarked on the way pilgrims desiring to see the 'sepulchres of the fathers' were subject to extortionate fees.

 

Ayyubid and Mamluk rule:

The Kurdish Muslim Saladin took Hebron in 1187, and changed the name of the city back to Al-Khalil. A Kurdish quarter still existed in the town during the early period of Ottoman rule. Richard the Lion Heart subsequently took the city soon after. Richard of Cornwall, brought from England to settle the dangerous feuding between Templars and hospitallers, whose rivalry imperiled the treaty guaranteeing regional stability stipulated with the Egyptian Sultan As-Salih Ayyub, managed to impose peace on the area. But soon after his departure, feuding broke out and in 1241 the Templars mounted a damaging raid on what was, by now, Muslim Hebron, in violation of agreements.

In 1260, Sultan Baibars established Mamluk rule. The minarets were built onto the structure of the Cave of Machpelah/Ibrahami Mosque at that time. Six years later, while on pilgrimage to Hebron, Baibars promulgated an edict forbidding Christians and Jews from entering the sanctuary, and the climate became less tolerant of Jews and Christians than it had been under the prior Ayyubid rule.

Non-Muslims wishing to visit the site were often required to pay a fee or bribe, and were only allowed to climb up to a certain step outside the Eastern wall unless they had permission from the Sultan. The edict for the exclusion of Christians and Jews was not strictly enforced until the middle of the 14th Century, and by 1490 not even Muslims were permitted to enter the underground caverns.

 

Many visitors wrote about Hebron over the next two centuries, among them Nachmanides (1270), Ishtori Haparchi (1322), and Rabbi Meshulam from Volterra (1481). It was in this period, also, that the Mamluk Sultan Al-Ashraf Sayf Al Din Qai't Bay revived the old custom of the Hebron 'table of Abraham', and exported it as a model for his own madrasa in Medina. This became an immense charitable establishment near the Haram, distributing daily some 1,200 loaves of bread to travelers of all faiths.

 

 

 

Ottoman rule

The expansion of the Ottoman Empire along the southern Mediterranean coast under sultan Selim I coincided with the Reyes Católicos (Catholic Monarchs) establishing inquisition commissions. The fear engendered during the Inquisitions caused a migration of Conversos (Marranos and Moriscos) and Sephardi Jews into Ottoman provinces, ending the centuries of the Iberian 'convivencia' (coexistence). The migrants initially settled in Constantinople, Salonika, Sarajevo, Sofia and Anatolia and could now freely travel throughout the territories that had fallen under Turkish administration, enabling the sparse Jewish population of Hebron to grow.

With the Ottoman rule of the Holy Land, a slow influx of Jews performing ‘aliyah’ (return) took place. By 1523, a Karaite community, consisting of 10 families, is registered as living in Hebron. In 1540 Rabbi Malkiel Ashkenazi bought a courtyard (El Cortijo) and established the Sephardi Abraham Avinu Synagogue. This structure was restored in 1738 and enlarged in 1864, but the community was small. The congregation also suffered from heavy debts, almost quadrupling from 1717 to 1729. However, in 1807, a 5-dunam (5,000 m˛) plot was purchased, where Hebron's wholesale market stands today.

During the Ottoman period, the dilapidated state of the patriarchs' tombs was restored to a semblance of sumptuous dignity. Ali Bey, one of the few foreigners to gain access, reported in 1807 that:

'all the sepulchers of the patriarchs are covered with rich carpets of green silk, magnificently embroidered with gold; those of the wives are red, embroidered in like manner. The sultans of Constantinople furnish these carpets, which are renewed from time to time. Ali Bey counted nine, one over the other, upon the sepulcher of Abraham'.

 

Hebron also became known throughout the Arab world for its glass production, and the industry is mentioned in the books of 19th century Western travelers to Palestine. For example, Ulrich Jasper Seetzen noted during his travels in 1808-09 that 150 persons were employed in the glass industry in Hebron, while later, in 1844, Robert Sears wrote that Hebron's population of 400 Arab families "manufactured glass lamps, which are exported to Egypt. Provisions are abundant, and there are a considerable number of shops."

Travelers also remarked on Hebron's flourishing agriculture. Apart from glassware, it was a major exporter of dibsé, grape sugar, from the famous Dabookeh grapestock characteristic of Hebron.

19th Century

Northern Hebron in the mid-19th century (1822–1898):

In 1823, the Lubavitcher Hasidic movement established a community in Hebron.

An estimated 750 Muslims from Hebron had been drafted as soldiers, and some 500 of them were killed. In response, Qasim al-Ahmad, clan leader of Jamma'in near Nablus raised the area now known as the West bank in the Palestinian-Arab revolt of 1834. Hebron took part in the rebellion and suffered badly in Ibrahim Pasha's campaign to crush the uprising. The town was invested and when the defenses of the town fell on 4 August it was sacked by Ibrahim Pasha's army. Most of the Muslim population managed to flee beforehand to the hills. The Jews however remained, and during the general pillage of the town many of them were killed.

 

In 1835, Mr. Fisk, an American missionary, visited Hebron. He estimated that there about 400 Arabs families, and 120 Jewish families; the Jewish population being significantly reduced since the 1834 rebellion.

In 1838 Hebron had an estimated 1,500 taxable Muslim households, in addition to some 240 Jews, 41 of whom were tax-payers. 200 Jews and one Christian household were under European protections. The total population was estimated at 10,000.

At the time, the population of Hebron was given according to the number of taxpayers, i.e., male heads of households who owned even a very small shop or piece of land.

When the Government of Ibrahim Pasha fell in 1841, the local clan-head Abd ar-Rahman once again resumed the reins of power as the Sheik of Hebron. Due to his extortionate demands for cash from the local population, most of the Jewish population fled to Jerusalem. In 1846 the Ottoman Governor-in-chief of Jerusalem (serasker), Kibrish Mehmed Emin Pasha, waged a campaign to subdue rebellious sheiks in the Hebron area, and while doing so, allowed his troops to sack the town. Though it was widely rumored that he secretly protected Abd ar-Rahman, the latter was deported together with other local leaders (such as Muslih al-'Azza of Bayt Jibrin), but he managed to return to the area in 1848. By 1850, Hebron had grown to the point where it was considered a large village or small town.

The Jewish population consisted of 60 Sephardi families and a 30-year old Ashkenazi community of 50 families.

 

In 1855, the newly-appointed Ottoman Pasha (governor) of the Sanjak (district) of Jerusalem, Kamil Pasha, attempted to subdue the rebellion in the Hebron region. Kamil and his army marched towards Hebron in July 1855, with representatives from the English, French and other Western consulates as witnesses. After crushing all opposition, Kamil appointed Salama Amr, the brother and strong rival of Abd ar-Rachman, as of the Hebron region. After this, relative quiet reigned in the town for the next four years.

Hungarian Jews of the Karlin Hasidic court settled in another part of the city in 1866. Arab-Jewish relations were improving, and Alter Rivlin, who spoke Arabic and Syrian-Aramaic, was appointed as Jewish representative to the city council.

From 1874, the Hebron district as part of the Sanjak of Jerusalem was administered directly from Istanbul.

 

Late in the 19th century the production of Hebron glass declined due to competition from imported European glass-ware, however, the products of Hebron continued to be sold, particularly among the poorer populace and travelling Jewish traders from the city. At the World fair of 1873 in Vienna, Hebron was represented with glass ornaments. A report from the French consul in 1886 suggests that glass-making remained an important source of income for Hebron: Four factories were making 60,000 francs yearly.

The Jewish community was under French protection until 1914. Hebron was highly conservative in its religious outlook, with a strong tradition of hostility to Jewish minorities.

 

Twentieth century

The British took control of Hebron on 8 December 1917. Later, this action was sanctioned as part of the British Mandate of Palestine.

The Palestinian-Arab decision to boycott the 1923 elections for a Palestinian Legislative Council was made at the fifth Palestinian Congress, at which most of the Palestinian-Arab political organizations were represented. It was reported that there was intense resistance in Hebron to the elections.

At this time, following attempts by the government to draft yeshiva students into the army, the famed Lithuanian Knesses Yisroel, relocated, after consultations between Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel Yechezkel Samal and Moshe Mordechai Epstein, to Hebron. The majority of the Jewish population lived on the outskirts of Hebron along the roads to Be'ersheba and Jerusalem, renting homes owned by Arabs (a number of which were built for the express purpose of housing tenants) with a few dozen within the city around the synagogues.

In the 1929 Hebron massacre, Arab rioters killed 67 Jews and wounded 60, and Jewish homes and synagogues were ransacked; 435 Jews survived by virtue of the shelter and assistance offered them by some Arab neighbours, who hid them. Two years later, 35 families moved back into the ruins of the Jewish quarter, but on the eve of the Palestinian-Arab national revolt in April 1936, the British Government decided to move the Jewish community out of Hebron as a precautionary measure to secure its safety. The sole exception was Ya'akov ben Shalom Ezra, who processed dairy products in the city, and resided in the city on weekdays.

In November 1947, in anticipation of the UN partition vote, the Ezra family closed its shop and left the city.

           

At the beginning of the 1948 Arab – Israeli War, Egypt took control of Hebron.

By late 1948 part of the Egyptian forces had been isolated around Hebron and Bethlehem; Pasha Blubb sent 350 Arab Legionnaires and established a Jordanian presence there. With the signing of the Armistice agreements the city fell exclusively under Jordanian Military control.

The day after the truce agreement, Shaykh Muhamad 'Ali al-Ja'bari, Mayor of Hebron and supporter of King Abdullah of Jordan, attended the Jericho conference of Palestinian notables where the resolution calling for the unification of the Palestinian West Bank and Jordan was adopted. In 1950 the West Bank was unilaterally incorporated into Jordan.

 

After 1967

After the Six-Day War in June 1967, Israel, according to the Allon Plan, was to exchange parts of the West Bank with Jordan in a proposal for trading land for peace, with Israel annexing 45% of the West Bank and Jordan the remaining part.

David Ben–Gurion disagreed, and told the BBC that Hebron was the one sector of the conquered territories that should remain under Jewish control, as it became - in his view - Jewish four thousand years before under Abraham.

In 1968, a group of Jews led by Rabbi Moshe Levinger rented the main hotel in Hebron and then refused to leave.

The Labor government survival depended on the National religious party, and was reluctant to evacuate these settlers, given the massacre that occurred decades earlier. After heavy lobbying by Levinger, the settlement gained the tacit support of Levi Eshkol and Yigal Allon. After more than a year and a half of agitation and an Arab attack on the Hebron settlers, the government agreed to allow Levinger's group to establish a town 'on the outskirts of the city', in an abandoned military base at Kiryat Arba.

In 1979, a group of settlers headed by Levinger's wife Miriam led 40 Jewish women and children to move back and take over the former Hadassah Hospital, now Beit Hadassah in central Hebron, to found the Committee of the Jewish community of Hebron near the Abraham Avinu Synagogue. The take-over created severe conflict with Arab shopkeepers in the same area, who appealed twice to the Israeli Supreme Court, without success.

This was later extended to other Hebron neighborhoods including Tel Rumeida, and settlers are currently reported to be trying to purchase more homes in the city.

Six Jews were killed and sixteen were injured in Hebron on May 2, 1980. They were returning from Friday evening services on foot, following Jewish religious law on the Sabbath, and were fired upon and attacked with grenades from the rooftops.

 

A total of 86 Jewish families now live in Hebron. Many reports, foreign and Israeli are sharply critical of the settlers. Supporters of Jewish resettlement within Hebron see their program as the reclamation of an important heritage, dating back to Biblical times, which was dispersed after the massacre of 1929. Survivors and descendants of that prior community are mixed. Some support the project of Jewish redevelopment; others commend living in peace with Hebronite Arabs, while a third group recommends a full pullout. Descendants supporting the latter views have met with Palestinian leaders in Hebron. In 1997 one group of descendants dissociated themselves from the settlers by calling them an obstacle to peace.

Recently, on May 15, 2006, another group, one of whom is a direct descendant of the 1929 refugees, urged the government to continue its support of Jewish settlement, and allow the return of eight families evacuated the previous January from homes they set up in emptied shops near the Avraham Avinu neighborhood. Beit HaShalom, established in 2007 under disputed circumstances, is now under court orders to be evacuated.

 

Since early 1997, following the Hebron Agreement, the city has been divided into two sectors: H1 and H2. The H1 sector, home to around 120,000 Palestinians, came under the control of the Palestinian Authority. H2, which was inhabited by around 30,000 Palestinians, remained under Israeli military control to protect several hundred Jewish residents in the old Jewish quarter. A large drop has since taken place in the Palestinian population in H2, identified with the impact of extended curfews, strict restrictions on movement with 16 check-points in place and the closure of Palestinian commercial activities near settler areas.

 

Current developments and the Future of the Settlements

The issue of the settlements has proven to be extremely controversial. Many (including the PA and Hamas) see the existence of the settlements as one of the main obstacles to peace in the region.

During the recent talks held in May 2009 with Mahmoud Abbas, president of the PA, the U.S. president Barak Obama declared that Israel must halt West Bank settlement activity and that the Palestinians need to increase West Bank security to advance the Middle East peace process.

In response, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his Cabinet that Israel will not build new West Bank settlements, but it will continue construction in existing communities to accommodate 'natural growth'. Nevertheless, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put pressure on the Israeli administration, declaring that: 'a stop to settlements, [is] not some settlements, not outposts, not natural-growth exceptions'.

However, Lieberman called demands that Israel halt construction in Jewish settlements a 'mistake'. He declared: "We are trying to formulate some understanding with the U.S. We don't speak of building new settlements. We don't speak of expansion. We try to build only within existing construction lines, [but] we cannot suffocate our own people".

More than 12,000 Palestinians are employed by both Jewish and Arab contractors building new homes in the settlements. Khaled Abu Toameh (Jerusalem Post), points out that a sudden freeze of the construction may also mean a deep crisis for thousands of Palestinians working in settlements in the West Bank.

In his recent speech at Bar-Ilan University on June 14 - a response to Obama's speech held in Cairo the week before – Netanyahu endorsed the idea of a Palestinian demilitarized state, but refrained from making clear statements on the subject of halting construction in the settlements.

The talks are open.