We are in Hebron. There is nothing more oriental to offer a traveler. The roads are made for cinematographic dramas. Very good! But this is all Arab. Where is the ghetto? You look but you do not see it. However, you have been told that it was here, in this covered bazaar, between this intersection and that sunken mosque. No ghetto! No Jews!

You return to the information bureau. They then give you a guide. The guide takes you back to the covered bazaar and you stop between the stand of a merchant of Turkish slippers and that of a merchant of skinned lamb. There in the wall, a hole: it is a door, the door to the ghetto.

You pass through it, bent over in two; you straighten up and then, if up to now you have not seen anything, now you see something. Seeing is not enough, but you must also believe what you see. What you see is incredible. This ghetto is a mountain of houses, a real mountain with its crests, its passes, its ravines, a small, insignificant, gloomy mountain without a square centimeter of soil; it is completely covered with houses everywhere! To reach the first floor of the second shanty, you have to go over the roof of the first shanty. From the roof of the second, we are on the same level as that of the third. It is like this for each one. Where are the streets? After all, where are they? No streets! Nevertheless, I am walking and I am not always walking on a roof! No! But I climb stairs; I go through a passageway, I loose my way in the labyrinths. Believing that I have come out to a public square, I find myself in a bedroom. A tall Jew, standing straight up at the entrance of his house would have his head in his house and his feet in his neighbor’s… one arm somewhere else and the other in the synagogue! Three adjoining synagogues crown the insane State. The sun has nothing more incredible to heat on all the surface of the earth!

One thousand Jews live there…

Friends of the Arabs? Almost. In any case, not at all enemies! They all know each other, greeting each other by name for ten years, since always. Hebron was well known, not for its nationalist feelings, but for its Talmudic school.

Now the Arabs will not attack Tel Aviv, but Hebron… On August 23rd, the day of the mufti, two Talmud students are slaughtered. They were not discussing politics; they were exploring the Sinai with the hope of discovering God’s shadow there!

The next day, from the morning, some Arabs express their concern for the fate of the Jews. Not all the Arabs are fanatics. Unfortunately, purity of spirit is not the rule in the land of Islam.

« Save yourselves! They say to the Jews. »

Some of them offer the future victims the hospitality of their roofs. One of them, a friend of the Rabbi, even walks all night and comes to stand firmly in front of the door of his protege. He shields the entrance against the insane members of his race.

Read on.

About fifty Jews and Jewesses had taken refuge outside of the ghetto in the Anglo-Palestinian Bank led by one of their own, the son of Rabbi Slonin. They were in another room. The Arabs, the soldiers of the mufti did not delay in discovering them. It was Saturday, August 24th, nine o’clock in the morning. Having blasted the door of the bank open… In short, they cut off their hands; they cut off their fingers; they placed some heads on a small stove; they gorged out their eyes. A steadfast Rabbi commended his Jews to God: they scalped him. They carried away his brain. They sat six yeshiva students on the lap of Mrs. Sokolov and one by one, they slit their throats while keeping her alive. They mutilated the men. They knocked down thirteen year old girls, mothers and grandmothers in the blood and raped them in unison…

Twenty-three cadavers in the room in the bank. The blood still covers the tile like thick jelly.

A. Londres, The wandering Jew has arrived

The survivors – about thirty families – do not return to Hebron until 1931 only to again be evacuated during the night of April 23, 1936. From 1948 to 1967, the city, no longer inhabited by its Jewish population, is connected to the kingdom of Jordan. After the Six Day War, which allowed the Israelis to extend their jurisdiction over all Judea, Kiryat Arba, an exclusively Jewish neighborhood, is established on the hills on the outskirts of Hebron. Soon after, the old Jewish quarter is restored and again inhabited by members of Gush Emunim, a nationalist, religious movement. Throughout all these years, Hebron does not cease to be the scene of bloody clashes between the Palestinians and the Israelis. In 1994, a Jewish extremist from Kiryat Arba fires at a Moslem congregation assembled at the Cave of the Patriarchs for the Ramadan prayers, killing more than thirty and injuring about a hundred. Finally, the majority of the city is handed over to the Palestinians, with the exception of the Cave of the Patriarchs, the Jewish quarter and some other enclaves.

A compromise must be worked out in order to permit the descendents of Abraham to live side by side in this seething city.