By Stan Goodenough
Nov 17, 2008
Israelis living in Hebron and other parts of their nation's biblical and historical heartland were angered Sunday when Israel's High Court of Justice ruled in favor of the Olmert government and against Jews claiming ownership of a Hebron home.
According to the ruling, 20 Jewish families have three days to vacate a four-storey house despite the fact they have papers proving the property was legally bought from a Palestinian Arab.
Situated about halfway between the Cave of the Patriarchs (where Israel's founding father's lie buried) and the Jewish town of Kiryat Arba, the house has been the center of a dispute since Jews moved in in March 2007.
Hebron's overwhelmingly Muslim Arab population outright rejects the Jews' right to live in the city, despite its having been the longest-inhabited Jewish town, with Jews residing there for 3000 years before Arabs massacred them nearly a century ago.
After Judea was restored to Jewish control in 1967, Israelis began moving back into Hebron, triggering frequent expressions of usually-violent Arab intolerance.
Israel's leftist governments, going along with the international charge that "settlements are the major obstacle to peace," have systematically targeted these communities in Hebron and throughout Judea and Samaria, demonizing their inhabitants while ignoring mushrooming illegal Arab building and bending over backwards to cater to Arab complaints and demands.
The Olmert government has behaved with hostility towards the strongly-Zionist "settlers," in recent weeks especially, exploiting the run-up to the anniversary of the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to paint them as a threat to Israeli democracy and the likely spawners of another political assassin.