by Louise Lief, David Makovsky, Khaled Abu Toameh, Todd Shields
In the Bible, Abraham used blood to seal his covenant of peace with God. But last week at the mosque in the West Bank town of Hebron that contains Abraham's tomb -- an ancient shrine holy to Muslims and Jews alike -- the blood symbolized anything but peace. Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn-born physician who hated Arabs so much that he refused to treat them in his West Bank emergency room, donned an Israeli Army uniform, walked into the mosque and fired an automatic assault rifle into a crowd of Palestinians gathered for Ramadan prayers. Before he was apparently beaten to death by some of his would-be victims, the 42-year-old Jewish settler had shot more than 100 worshipers, at least two score of them fatally. It was the worst single day of violence in the occupied West Bank since Israel captured the territory in 1967.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin called the massacre "the crazed act of psychopaths" and apologized personally to Yassir Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. But the damage was already done. Palestinians in Hebron charged that the Israeli Army unit stationed outside the tomb failed to intervene for more than 10 minutes and perhaps even colluded with the gunman. As the Islamic fundamentalist group Hamas vowed revenge, riots broke out throughout the occupied West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem, leaving even more dead and wounded.
The killings could not have come at a worse time. After many months, Israel and the PLO were finally close to completing arduous negotiations to implement the much delayed Israeli-PLO peace accord and begin an Israeli withdrawal from occupied Gaza and Jericho. President Clinton, trying desperately to keep the peace talks on track, abandoned America's hands-off policy and called the negotiators to Washington. They should keep talking, he said, until issues are resolved.
Future worries. In the short run, the Hebron massacre enhances Rabin's ability to take stronger measures against vigilantes among the 120,000 settlers in the West Bank and Gaza. But over the longer term, the prime minister has a ticking time bomb on his hands. Under the peace accord, the Israeli Army is responsible for controlling settler violence, but many in Israel's citizen Army sympathize with the settlers. And Rabin's parliamentary majority is so thin it would be difficult to carry out a controversial move like disarming the settlers.
But urban areas like Hebron, with their lethal mix of militant Jewish settlers and Palestinian fundamentalists living cheek by jowl and worshiping at the same shrine, make security a nightmare for both sides. The Tomb of the Patriarchs, site of the massacre, "has been an accident waiting to happen," says former U.S. Ambassador Samuel Lewis. "It's a very dangerous situation."
