Sabboth Havoc

New tensions roil Hebron

It was just two hours after sundown and the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath in the Arab town of Hebron on the Israeli-occupied West Bank. A score of Jewish seminarians had finished their prayers at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the shrine where the prophet Abraham is said to have been buried. The seminarians walked the short distance to the former Hadassah clinic in the old Jewish quarter. There they planned to have refreshments with the Israeli squatters who have occupied the building for the past year.

Suddenly, as they approached the gate, havoc erupted: from rooftops, three assailants opened fire with automatic weapons and lobbed six grenades into the group. Israeli troops guarding the clinic returned the fire. When the fusillade had ended, five of the students were dead and 16 had been wounded. Within an hour, Israeli soldiers clamped a curfew on Hebron, set up roadblocks around the town and scoured the area for the terrorists. At week's end a Palestinian commando group with headquarters in Damascus took responsibility for the brutal attack.

The terrorism was the worst yet in a furious new round of violence between Jews and Arabs on the West Bank. After Arab youths stoned Israeli vehicles last month, Jewish militants from the settlement of Beit El outside Ramallah went on a window-smashing rampage through Arab towns, attacking cars and houses with stones and steel hammers. Tensions were inflamed further last week when Israeli military officers shot and killed a 17-year-old Palestinian in a schoolyard scuffle in the West Bank village of Anabta. After the funeral, angry villagers paraded through the streets waving Palestinian flags, chanting anti-Israeli slogans and throwing stones at army vehicles.

Hebron itself--and the occupied Hadassah clinic, in particular--has lately become the unhappy focus of Israel's controversial settlements policy. Relations between the city's 50,000 Arabs and the 4,000 Jews in the nearby settlement of Qiryat Arba took a turn for the worse after militant followers of Rabbi Moshe Levinger took over the Hadassah clinic in 1979. Levinger, a zealot who advocates the "divine right" of Jews to settle anywhere in territory that belonged to biblical Israel, used the squatters' presence in the old Jewish quarter to pressure the government of Premier Menachem Begin to allow further Jewish settlement in the city. Begin's Cabinet reversed a policy prohibiting Jews from settling in heavily populated Arab cities and gave the Levinger group the go-ahead to build two Jewish schools in Hebron. That decision enraged the Palestinians, who protest that they are the victims of frequent acts of vandalism by Jewish vigilantes.

Last week's attack will greatly increase the bitterness on both sides and could cause even more difficulties at the long stalled autonomy talks between Egypt and Israel, which are grinding toward a May 26 target date. In response to the onslaught, at week's end Israeli military authorities accused three local Palestinian leaders of having incited extremism in the area: the mayor of Hebron, the town's Muslim religious leader and the mayor of neighboring Halhul. Within 36 hours, all three had been forcibly deported to Lebanon.

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