An Open Letter: To the members of TIPH

[from the Jewish  Community of Hebron] August 1, 2001

This letter is also available in Hebrew on the Hebron Web Site at:
http://www.hebron.org.il/hebrewnews/htiphletter1.htm You came to Hebron on a mission that was supposed to bring peace, relief and security. Yet since your arrival, and especially during the last year, the situation in Hebron has only gotten worse. Arab terrorists control most of the city, organize shooting attacks against Jewish residents, while perpetuating a corrupt and murderous regime over the Arab population. You must have asked yourselves many times what you might have done to prevent this situation as well as wondering to what extent you yourselves were to blame for the growing suffering of all the city's residents.

If you are honest with yourselves, you will not be able to avoid the conclusion that that you bear a large share of the blame for the situation, due to your one-sided, knee-jerk support of the Arabic terrorist aggressor. Through this behavior, you are encouraging the aggressor and sending him a message that he will enjoy international support if he attacks the Jews, using every means against them, however abominable, even shooting through a telescopic lens at the head of a ten- month-old-girl.

Unfortunately, the reality is that TIPH has become an anti-Jewish organization that is ready to support every unjust and abominable act on condition that it is perpetrated against Jews. The anti-Jewish political leanings of your organization were recently uncovered in the media when it was revealed that in one of your reports the following cruel, cynical words were used: "The Jewish Community of Hebron has not yet been dismantled." According to press reports, some of your people were in a school building from which Arabs opened fire on the Jews of Hebron, thereby providing cover for the perpetrators of this vile deed. Had the Israeli army shot back, you certainly would have reported that they had "fired at innocent observers" or "an innocent school."

Your spokesman, Mr. Chandler, was quoted as saying, "We report violations of the Accord and violations of human rights. We report what we see -- destruction of homes, stone throwing, shooting incidents, incidents involving settlers, everything that occurs." As far as the shooting, he was quoted as saying, "In Hebron it is hard to know who starts the shooting due to the echoes in the city..." The reports submitted by your organization are an encapsulated expression of one-sided racism, and they are the main factor contributing to the suffering of the city's residents.

Other quotes of an especially insulting and racist nature against the Jews of Hebron have been heard from the observers. It will be noted that you are so hostile to the State of Israel that you refuse to visit even Israel's Parliament, the Knesset, or the Western Wall.

In order for you to understand the injustice and discrimination that your organization exercises, you have to know where you are. You are in Hebron, the oldest Jewish city on Earth, the city where the patriarchs of the Jewish People, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, lived thousand of years ago. It was here that King David first ruled 3000 years ago. There was a Jewish community in this city down through the ages, until it was destroyed by the Arabs in a terrible, shocking and monstrous massacre, in which dozens of Jewish men, women and children were slaughtered, raped, torn apart, burnt alive. This massacre occurred in 1929, twenty years before the State of Israel's establishment. The Jews then were not "settlers." They were an innocent, peace-loving community who maintained good, close relations with their Arab neighbors, until the latter rose up in their thousands and perpetrated this heinous deed without any provocation.

After the last Jewish survivors were banished, those same Arabic murderers and their heirs plundered and destroyed the remains of the Jewish community, the houses, synagogues and even the cemetery tombstones. Now, years later, that we have been privileged to return to Hebron, our mission is clear: not to let terror win! The Jewish Community of Hebron is performing a mission of universal justice, one which every person of intelligence and culture, untainted by anti-Jewish prejudice, is obligated to support: to rebuild the Jewish community, and not to allow the plot of anti-Semitic Arabic murderers to be fulfilled.

Clearly, every civilized person will support the right of Jews to go back and renovate European Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust, and will reject with loathing the demand by Neo-Nazis and skinheads to banish the Jews in accordance with the abominable slogan, "Juden Raus!" Why then here in Hebron, where an ancient Jewish community was destroyed in a terrible pogrom, are you participating in the filthy demand that the Jews be banished from the city of their ancestors?

Why are you knowingly concealing information about gross violations of the accord by the Arab side, about unceasing attacks, backed up and organized by the Palestinian Police, about rocks, molotov cocktails and gunfire against Jewish targets? Why are you focusing on difficulties experienced by those Arabs living on the Israeli side, while simultaneously ignoring the fact that on the P.L.O. controlled side Jews experience no difficulties, since, in absolute opposition to the Hebron Accord, Jews cannot go there at all? In fact, any Jew who enters the area under the P.L.O.'s control risks cruel, atrocious death at the hands of an Arab mob. Why are you ignoring these violations? Why in your reports is there no expression of the true situation? Israel gave the P.L.O., in an accord signed by Arafat himself, 90% of the city in exchange for peace, but in return has received only terror, shooting and war. Why do you conceal the fact that in the Palestinian section of Hebron murderers are hiding, among them the man who murdered Shalhevet Pass, and that this section is an idyllic hiding place for the most abominable murderers and terrorists? Why haven't you addressed the recent destruction and desecration carried out in the ancient Jewish cemetery? Many of its tombstones have been heinously destroyed by Arabic terrorists who to perpetrate their deed moved easily from the P.L.O. section to the area defined by the Hebron Accord as a Jewish Holy Place.

Yesterday HaAretz newspaper reported that according to your own investigation, the source of shots fired at the former UN Human Rights director Mary Robinson in November, 2000 in Hebron  were from the H1  Arafat controlled area of Hebron. Your periodic report published in January, 2001 contained this information. Why was it not made public, thereby exonerating Hebron's Jewish community from baseless charges accusing us of this horrific crime?

We know that there are good people among you, fair-minded people who seek justice. How then has your organization become so anti-Jewish? Unfortunately, your organization is part of an international anti-Semitic condition that has been operating against the Jewish People for many generations, a condition which found its worst expression in the terrible Holocaust of the 1940's. At that time, millions of Jews fell prey to the Nazis. Sorrowfully, a sizable portion of the countries from which you arrived collaborated with the Nazi beast of prey. Jews were caught and sent to death camps by those same countries, with the full collaboration of the Arabs. The Palestinians were headed by their leader the Mufti Amin el-Husseini, known as "the founder of the Palestinian Nationalist movement." Husseini set up Muslim units in the Nazi army in Europe, and he planned with Hitler to carry out the "Final Solution" upon the Jews of Eretz Yisrael.

Unfortunately as well, we cannot avoid comparing the behavior of your organization to the shameful behavior of Unifil on the Lebanese border. Unifil provided cover for the shocking kidnapping of Israeli soldiers from territory defined by the U.N. itself as Israeli territory. Let us recall that most of the "enlightened" European countries from which you came, including Italy, Switzerland, France and Norway were among the countries that collaborated by handing over Jews for extermination. Even the United States, which could have prevented the destruction by bombing the train tracks traveled by the cattle-cars, refrained from doing so. All of this makes us think dour thoughts about the human evil that is constantly being exercised against the Jewish People.

All the same, we recommend that you make no mistake: we are not here thanks to you. The right of the Jewish People to Eretz Yisrael, and especially to Hebron, is not a topic for negotiations between anybody, especially not hostile parties. We have been in this city for thousands of years, and we shall continue to be here long after you leave. The Jewish People established a glorious kingdom in the Land of Israel thousands of years before the Arab incursion which destroyed the Land and left it a desert. The Jews are the only people who have given this land meaning, sanctity and independence, and today, Arab invaders are trying in vain to imitate them. We stand here, by virtue of our historic right, granted to us by G-d, and we face various enemies who for thousands of years have been trying to uproot us from here. All of them have failed and moved on, while we, thank G-d, despite all of the difficulties and crises, are here, and here we shall stay.

When you abandon your organization, and your one-sided, hostile approach, you are invited to visit here as tourists. Then, we promise you the hospitality we have learned from the Patriarch Abraham, symbol of faith and love for all of mankind. With blessings,

The Jewish Community of Hebron