Mordechai Ben David, Chaim Yisrael, Udi Davidi and Shlomo Katz performed to a packed audience on Wednesday in the Jewish biblical city of Hebron, burial ground of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, matriarchs Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah, and Jewish ancestors and notables Jesse, Ruth, and Avner.

Former IDF Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Moshe “Boogie” Yaalon also made an appearance at Sukkot celebrations in the city.

“It just shows how much people love Hebron”, English spokesman for the Jewish Community of Hebron David Wilder told the Jewish Press.

Images of Sukkot 2012 in Hebron.

A Hebrew interview with Yaalon in Hebron.

Once again, the nonsense that a child is wiping up blood in Gaza as a picture is used again. This time, it is claimed by Syrian rebels to be a child there. In defending the Syrian rebels, Linda Juniper attempts to set the story straight…and misses completely.

Nice try, Linda – but it isn’t a “photo of a child wiping blood after an air strike on school in Gaza” – and though the rebels try to claim it was in Syria, it has already been proven here that this image is of a young Palestinian boy in HEBRON (not Gaza, not Syria), who was wiping up the blood of a COW (not his brother’s blood and not the results of an Israeli air strike).

There is no honor in combating one lie, Linda Juniper, by spreading another.

Visit A Soldier’s Mother.

A video uploaded to YouTube by English Spokesperson for Hebron David Wilder shows a stream of blood on the rocks of the Abraham’s Well underground spring, following a near-fatal rock attack by a local Arab on a 60 year old Jewish man who came to immerse in the spring.

Jewish tradition connects the Patriarch Abraham – the central figure connecting Judaism and Islam and one of three great Jewish patriarchs buried in Hebron – with the small natural spring, saying it was the place where Abraham and his wife Sarah would go to purify themselves.

On Wednesday, a 60 year old resident of Kiryat Arba went to perform a cleansing immersion at the site, and when he reached the bottom of the stairs, was attacked by an Arab who threw a large rock at his head.  The man was found unconscious on his back at the bottom of the stairs leading to the well.  He regained consciousness at a Jerusalem hospital, to which he was evacuated by paramedics.

Likud MK and Knesset Deputy Speaker  Danny Danon said that if Defense Minister Ehud Barak is not stopped now, there are nine thousand housing units in Judea and Samaria which are being challenged like Ulpana Hill and the Jewish purchased residences in Hebron.

“We must stop this erosion and say, enough, we won’t let Barak carry out a creeping erosion of the settlements of Judea and Samaria,” Danon told JewishPress.com Sunday night, at the end of a crowded assembly outside the homes of Ulpana Hill in Bet El, under the banner “The Likud Is With the Settlement Movement” (Ha’Likud im ha’hityashvut).

MK Danon was one of a dozen or so Likud MKs and other dignitaries who arrived Sunday evening to show their support for continued and even expanded Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria.

Danon promised before Passover to pass legislation to correct the Migron issue, whereby the Israeli High Court had annulled a deal signed between the government and the settlers to prevent a forcible evacuation, and instead provide them with alternative housing on a nearby hill.

“Last week the Knesset convened during its recess, to discuss these very issues,” Danon told JewishPress.com. “Migron was the beginning. It continued with Machpelah House, and now Bet El.”

“There are a few legislative options,” Danon continued. “I have endorsed the Settlement Regulation Act. It’s a good, appropriate, Zionist option. There are other ideas as well.”

The Settlement Regulation legislation determines that after some time has passed and a previously unknown Palestinian claimant comes up with documentation of ownership of an existing settlement, the alleging owner will receive monetary compensation or alternative land, if they can prove their ownership.

Some speakers at the Likud solidarity meeting outside the Ulpana Hill homes have suggested that today all a Palestinian person has to do is go to the Palestinian Authority and receive a piece of paper saying a certain plot of land belongs to him. We asked Danon how the court would go about verifying such claims, which are becoming rampant with the encouragement of leftist, pro-Palestinian Israeli organizations, many of which are directly or indirectly funded by the European Union.

“The mother of all evils is the fact that we have not enforced Israel’s authority over Judea and Samaria,” said Danon. “Today the process is that they don’t go to a court, but instead they begin with filing an appeal with the Supreme Court. And there the entire process of proving ownership is more problematic (as the high court may accept evidence which would never be acceptable to a civil court — YY). If the same claim were filed with a normal court, this would not have been the outcome.”

The highly publicized IDF expulsion from Hebron’s Beit Hamachpela of Jews who purchased and were residing in it was an extraordinary event. And it does not bode well for what we can expect from the Israeli government regarding historical Jewish sites.

For one thing, the forced evacuation came about after Prime Minister Netanyahu asked Defense Minister Barak, who has the final say on such matters under Israeli law, to delay any evictions. For another, there does not seem to be any doubt that the Jewish claimants actually owned the property. Mr. Barak was invoking a narrow technicality plainly at odds with the place of Hebron in Judaism.

The IDF had ordered the Jews to leave the Beit Hamachpela apartment building, adjacent to the Cave of the Patriarchs in a Palestinian neighborhood under Israeli military control, not because there was a question about the legitimacy of the purchase but rather because the occupants had not received final approval from the IDF – which has to consider whether certain developments might be “disruptive of the public order” – to move in.

The Jewish occupants had moved into Beit Hamachpela claiming to have purchased it from a Palestinian who was under a Palestinian Authority death sentence for selling land to Jews, and saying they were fearful the empty building would invite Palestinian squatters.

Significantly, Mr. Barak said in a public statement on the issue, “I won’t allow settlers to dictate how the government runs the country.” He went on to say the eviction must be enforced immediately because of the importance of maintaining the rule of law in Israel and that he would not allow “settlers to establish facts on the ground” while his ministry investigated the sale.

He said nothing about the legitimacy of the Jewish claim to the property.

At any rate, the treatment of the Beit Hamachpela purchasers is starkly inconsistent with what should have been expected.

On December 7, 1994 then-MK Netanyahu said:

We dwell in Hebron not out of benevolence but as a right. Hebron belongs to the Jewish people eternally as a result of our right and as a result of our strength, our strength of faith, strength to stand up for what is legitimately ours…. We must protect the foundation of Eternal Israel. Hebron is ours, Jerusalem is ours, the entire Eretz Yisrael is ours.

And the following are quotes from then-MK Netanyahu when he led a delegation of 14 Likud MKs to Hebron on September 7, 1995 to demonstrate solidarity with the Jewish residents there:

The Jewish settlement will remain in Hebron permanently. If someone tries to take it away, my friends and I will be here, and they will have to take us away as well…. It will be fatal mistake to bring hundreds of armed Palestinian policemen here, and there will be a small area where the Jews can pass and where the police and IDF can operate. If there will be a conflict, the IDF will not be able to function and will quickly collide with the Palestinian forces. This is a prescription for tragedy…. There is one body responsible, and that has to be the IDF.

Will the real Benjamin Netanyahu please stand up?

At a press conference outside Machpelah House which had been evacuated Wednesday in Hebron, Shlomo Levinger and attorney Doron Nir-Tzvi told reporters that the purchase of Machpelah House had been in the making for some three years. The tenants had planned to patiently await government approval for their purchase of the house from a local Arab.

But the arrest of several Arabs by the Palestinian Authority on suspicion of selling real estate to the Jewish group – a crime which could be punished with death – changed the plan, and the group decided to move in despite the murky prospects of staying.

Knowing full well how hard it would be to establish residency in a newly purchased house—facing a hostile Israeli civil authority whose directive is to strictly limit the growth of the city’s Jewish community, the group of buyers was moving slowly and quietly, through intermediaries and straw men, forever remaining below the radar for three years.

At the press conference, Levinger said they paid four times the value of the house, which has been estimated at around $250 thousand. Earlier in the day, when the Jewish Press asked Levinger to confirm a rumor that they paid half a million dollars for the house, he said, “I wish it would have been that amount.”

The money for the purchase came from donations of Jews from Israel and abroad. “Every week we would travel to meetings in private homes, collecting one shekel after another,” Levinger said. “There were times when we came back with only a few single shekels, other times we’d pick up thousands. We spent days and nights collecting this money, faithfully and lovingly.

“Once the money had been collected, we embarked on the purchase deal. It was a Sysiphian labor. We knew that the Attorney General’s office would be looking everywhere for possible holes in the deal.”

According to Doron Nir-Tzvi, in Judea and Samaria, real estate deals are conducted in an anachronistic fashion, whereby a deal must first be completed before the buyers are permitted to apply for government approval (Heter Iskah). Therefore, once every last T was crossed and I dotted, the buyers planned to wait patiently for their deal to go through.

Sources in the Civil Administration were telling them they couldn’t find faults with the deal, that despite themselves they would end up having to approve it.

But then the PA arrested both straw men who had been carrying out different part of the bargain, followed by the jailing of their family members as well.

At this point, Levinger et al felt that their only recourse was to take possession of the property, or risk losing the deal altogether.

Both Levinger and Nir-Tzvi expressed concern for the jailed Palestinians. Levinger told the Jewish Press earlier that he was urging the Israeli government to demand their release of the Palestinian Authority.

If Defense Minister Barak refuses to sign off on the deal, the buyers are planning to appeal to other government authorities. But Attorney Nir-Tzvi said he would not recommend that his clients approach Israel’s Supreme Court with their plight, as it would likely be an imprudent use of their financial resources, considering the probable response of the court.

I reminded Shlomo Levinger that the cause cited by Defense Minister Ehud barak for the evacuation Jewish tenants from Machpelah House was not any fault he cited in the deal itself, but the fact that as things stand in Judea and Samaria, the Defense Minister is permitted to use his power arbitrarily to maintain public order. In other words, even if the real estate deal is, indeed, pure as the driven snow, and all the sides, buyers and sellers alike, have been willing participants with not a hint of coercion – Barak would still be within his rights to evict them.

“You must have heard the saying, “Pornography, a matter of Geography,” Shlomo Levinger cited Sakini from “The Tea House of the August Moon” in the middle of hot and dusty Hebron.

“Danger to the public order is in the eye of the beholder,” he continued. “The chiefs of police here have told me, Shlomo, we passed the request along to the higher echelons, everything in our opinion has been quiet after you moved in; the Arabs were cognizant of the deal, they expected it to take effect, they took no issue with it.”

The group of evacuated tenants is determined to stay in their protest tent (“protest parasol” is how our man on the scene Stephen Leavitt called it) until Ehud Barak is ready to sign off on their right to the house – as had been originally promised by Netanyahu’s cabinet. For now, they will be celebrating the seder under that scant tent, and Levinger is asking folks not to come in droves before the Sunday of Chol HaMoed. “We don’t have enough room for everybody at the seder table,” he apologized.

On Tuesday, March 13, an archaeological site inspector in Hebron’s Old City discovered that the archaeological site there had been severely damaged – the diggings in progress were ruined and covered up.

A group of Arab workers, apparently contracted by the Palestinian Authority, breached an ancient terrace bordering the antique path that connects Avraham’s Well and the tombs of Ruth and Yishai. They further removed a fence near an IDF outpost. Next, they brought trash and dumped it in the archaeological diggings, which contain findings from the Canaanite period. They then set fire to the trash.

Remnants of an ancient mosaic at the archaeological site in the Old City of Hebron

This destructive process was stopped only after the inspector called the police, the army, and the Civil Administration. Surprisingly, the vandals were not arrested and were allowed to continue with their work, receiving only a warning about further damage to the archaeological artifacts around them.

It is significant to note that this is not the first time Arabs have been engaged in the destruction of archaeological artifacts in Hebron. They have previously perpetrated similar acts of vandalism, but have recently begun to work in an organized fashion, leading to suspicions that the acts are purposeful and orchestrated by an entity bent on the erasure of archaeological artifacts that testify to the ancient Jewish roots in Hebron.

Chaim Bleicher, a resident of Hebron, told Tazpit that they have been doing their best to combat these trends. The army and Civil Administration have made no real attempts to halt these actions, and it has been reported that the army even intends to close off part of the archeological site to eliminate friction, working only to maintain the peace, even if it means the irreplaceable loss of archaeological artifacts and the cover up of Hebron’s Jewish identity.

Theses incidents in Hebron are not unique to the area. Similar incidents have been recorded throughout Israel, especially in Jerusalem and on the Temple Mount. The Arabs are aware that the archaeological findings point to an ancient and prolonged Jewish presence in the Land of Israel, and therefore do all they can to destroy these artifacts, doing their best to cover up the simple fact that the Jews have deep roots in the Land of Israel.

The absence of the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron and the Tomb of Rachel in Bethlehem from a list of sites to receive funding as part of Israel’s National Heritage program has raised the ire of MKs in support of Jewish rights in Judea and Samaria.

MK Aryeh Eldad (National Union) and MK Ze’ev Elkin (Likud) expressed disapproval that the two sites – the burial places of the Jewish foreparents Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah in Hebron, and Rachel in Bethlehem – were absent from a renovation funding list presented at a ministerial committee meeting on Tuesday.

Eldad defended the importance of the sites, and warned that withholding funding from the sites is equivalent to removing them from the National Heritage Program.

In February 2010, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu announced a NIS 500 million investment plan aimed at rejuvenating sites of importance to the Jewish People and the State of Israel.  Israel was criticized by the US and the UN body UNESCO for including the two sites on the list.

The Prime Minister’s Office responded to concerns by saying the renovations necessary at the sites were not critical at this time, and that not receiving funding was no indication that the sites had been removed from the National Heritage list.

“Hebron wasn’t funded this time around, but we’ve been assured at the highest levels that in the near future, we will be”, said David Wilder, Spokesman of the Jewish Community of Hebron in an interview with The Jewish Press.  “It wasn’t taken off the list.”

Tel Shiloh, the site which housed the Mishkan (Tabernacle) prior to its installation in the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, will likely be picked for immediate renovation by the committee.  It is located north of Jerusalem in the community of Shilo in Samaria.