The area has been abandoned by the Israeli government. But not by the Jews.
Too many Jews have been killed in the Hevron area. Those who said that Oslo is only an Arab tactic to make Israel smaller and weaker were right.
Why should the State of Israel care of one of the more isolated and barren regions of Judea, where just 10,000 Jews live? Because these Jews protect the entire Israeli infrastructure 70 years after Auschwitz.
Once decimated and obliterated by a pogrom in 1929, the Jews of Hevron finally rebuilt their community amid unrelenting Arab hostility, with so many of them wounded and killed in terrorist attacks. Kiryat Arba, where a beautiful Jewish girl was just murdered in her own bed, was founded as a response to Arab intransigence climaxed by the three “no’s” of thirteen Arab states at post Yom Kippur war Khartoum Conference: no peace with Israel, no negotiation with Israel, and no recognition of Israel.
From the beginning, Israeli soldiers were assigned to Hevron to maintain order and safety, yet they were instructed to intervene as little as possible, even when Jewish lives were at risk. The power of the Israeli army to protect Hevron Jews has been severely circumscribed. That defeatist policy must end.
Too many Jews have been killed in the Hevron area. Those who said that Oslo is only an Arab tactic to make Israel smaller and weaker were right.
The Israeli Jews who live inside the 1967 lines should only envy and esteem the fierce determination of those Jews who live in such a hostile and dangerous place, where so many of their predecessors had been brutally murdered. Like the families living in unheated one-room apartments in Beit Hashalom, with nothing but plastic window covers to protect them from severe winter.
Community leaders applied to the government for a permit to install windows, repair the roof, and run electric heating lines for the inhabitants. Defense Minister Ehud Barak denied their request. Since then, it has been a daily struggle to protect these Jews. If Jews could return to Jerusalem’s Old City and to Gush Etzion, why not to Hevron?
Hevron’s Jews don’t only connect Jewish past and Israeli present, they also protect their Jewish brethen in the coast from Hamas and Salafi terrorists based in the south. Hevron’s Jews are not only vitalfor the security and existence of southern approaches to Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish people. These Israelis keep alive the cradle of Jewish civilization.
Give them what they need to protect their lives and grow.