The 1929 Arab Terror Attack: When Hebron Became Occupied Territory
Having just published my first book, The Price of Liberty – A Novel, I read this post with great interest, as it touches on a subject and theme I dealt with extensively therein.
Someone (Golda Meir?) once said, “There will be peace in the Middle East when the Arabs start loving their children, more than they hate the Jews.”
I believe this statement to be true.
The cycle of “blood for blood” will never end, until the Palestinian people – and the Arab world, in general – finally and irrevocably, recognize Israel’s right to exist, and to live peacefully alongside them.
Unfortunately, too many Arab “leaders” have exploited the plight of the Palestinians for their own purposes – Nasser, Arafat, Saddam Hussein, just to name a few.
This is why it is so important for Iraq’s experiment in self-government to succeed, and for it to become, if not a “Jeffersonian Democracy, like the United States(?), then a parliamentary democracy, in the style of Turkey.
This would be a tremendous example, and serve as a symbol of hope, for the disaffected throughout the middle-east, that there IS, in fact, something to look forward to in THIS life, and not merely the ethereal prospect of cavorting with 72 “doe-eyed virgins” in the next.
And though it’s also true that, for the sake of military or political expediency, in the 61 years since its establishment Israel has occasionally done things, or allowed things to be done that it shouldn’t have, (i.e. – the Lydda Death March, the U.S.S. Liberty incident, the Sabra-Shatila Massacre) when placed in the context of its daily fight for survival, these sad incidents can be somewhat understood – though certainly not excused or condoned.
It is tragic WHENEVER the innocent suffer – no matter what race, no matter what religion.
Having said that, however, there are those who try to draw some sort of moral equivalence between the innocents who are killed when Israel targets a member of Hamas or Hezbollah hiding among them, and the suicide bomber who blows himself or herself up, on a crowded bus in Haifa or Tel Aviv.
Let me be clear. There is no moral equivalence.
Eighty years later, as we remember those who died – and the world sits idly by, as Iran continues its quest for nuclear arms – the real tragedy of the Hebron Massacre is that sadly, the land of Abraham and Isaac, Ishmael and Jacob seems no closer to peace than it did on that muggy night so long ago.
T.W. Elliott
LCDR USNR (Ret.)
p.s. – The Price of Liberty – A Novel is available on-line at amazon.com, or at the following website:
https://www.createspace.com/3389002
