Dr. Baruch Goldstein was so blinded by enmity toward Arabs as to seem “batty” even to some of his fellow ultranationalist, fervently religious neighbors in the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba, near Hebron in the West Bank. About a year ago, he was heard to prophesy, in a synagogue no less, that “there will come a day when a Jew will get up and kill many Arabs for killing Meir Kahane” — the Jewish zealot slain in New York City in 1990.
But this was no simple crazy act. Goldstein was a fanatic who took precise steps carefully calculated to reach a clear, if evil, goal. Presuming the American-born doctor intended to kill the Palestinian-Israeli peace process while avenging what he considered crimes against Jews, he chose time, place and method well to produce the most inflammatory effect possible. What better time than a Friday, the Islamic holy day, during Ramadan, the month of fasting and prayer, the same day as the Jewish feast of Purim, which commemorates the killing of the Persian royal minister Haman and his followers before they could carry out a planned massacre of Jews? What better place than the Ibrahim Mosque, where Muslims pray at the Tomb of the Patriarchs — a site thought to contain the graves of the prophets Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, guaranteed to draw a wall-to-wall crowd of worshippers? What better method than to spray clip after clip of bullets into them without warning?
Which Goldstein did, with shocking efficiency. By 5:20 a.m. about 700 men, women and children, having risen in the dark to down a hurried breakfast, had jammed into the mosque for the dawn prayers that mark the start of the sunrise-to-sunset fast on each of the 30 days of Ramadan. Prayers had just begun; the worshippers were kneeling forward on plastic mats, touching foreheads reverently to the floor.
Mohammad Suleiman Abu Sarah, a mosque guard, saw Goldstein, well known to the Muslims as a troublemaker, approach. He was wearing a reserve captain’s olive-green army uniform and a yarmulke and carrying a military-issue Galil assault rifle. As a Jew living in the occupied territories, he was entitled to carry the weapon wherever he went. Speaking good Arabic, “he asked to go inside during the prayers,” said Abu Sarah. “I said it is forbidden. He said, ‘I am the officer in charge here, and I must go in.’ ” With that, Goldstein swung his rifle butt into Abu Sarah’s shoulder, knocking him down, and then rushed into the mosque.
Inside, Goldstein “didn’t say even one word,” reported Abu Sarah. He simply took up a position close to the backs of the worshippers in the rear row and opened fire. “I saw seven people die immediately,” said Abu Sarah. “They were hit in the head, and their brains spilled out. It was total chaos. Everyone was running here and there to try and hide. The mosque was full of blood and wounded people, dead people.”
A second guard, too scared to give his name, corroborated: “People started screaming and running away. Others who were hit were calling for help. People were swimming in blood. It was difficult to distinguish between the dead and the living, because everyone was covered in blood.” Worshippers raced outside with bodies and jammed them into ambulances without pausing to sort the living from the dead. Ambulance driver Khaled Jaabry discovered only when he reached a local hospital that among the wounded he carried there were his own son and brother.
The firing inside the mosque continued for about 10 minutes, but the confusion outside the blood-soaked shrine lasted far longer than that. A particularly hot issue is whether some worshippers were shot by Israeli soldiers amid the chaos that Goldstein started. The second guard said he saw three men in Israeli army uniforms enter the mosque and shoot. Israeli TV, quoting army sources, gave a different version: two soldiers rushed into the mosque, saw worshippers starting to overpower Goldstein, interpreted the scene as an attack by Palestinians on a uniformed Israeli and opened fire. Nabil Shaath, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s chief peace negotiator, claimed that eight worshippers were killed at the mosque entrance by Israeli soldiers. Even if true, these contentions would not necessarily point to the conspiracy that P.L.O. chief Yasser Arafat alleged; the few soldiers on the scene could simply have panicked as hundreds of frantic and bleeding Palestinians fled the carnage.
The Israeli army said a preliminary investigation indicated that Goldstein had acted alone, firing about 100 bullets; investigators recovered roughly that many casings from the mosque floor. The most the army would concede on Saturday was that when worshippers started pouring out of the mosque in great numbers, soldiers outside did fire — but supposedly only warning shots in the < air. But the charges were serious enough to initiate an official investigation. Military sources also said some Palestinians may have been trampled to death in the headlong rush to escape the bullets. All told, the total of dead and wounded last Friday exceeded even the number Goldstein could have hit, hard as he was trying. Israeli officials counted 39 people killed at the mosque; the Palestinians figured 52, plus 70 wounded.
Those figures leave out one more death: that of Goldstein. He was eventually cracked over the head by a fire extinguisher hurled by someone in the crowd and then beaten lifeless. He seems to have expected something of the sort: before leaving on his murderous foray, he sent goodbye notes to the town council of Kiryat Arba and to a colleague who had worked with him at the clinic there, indicating that he would not return. To the co-worker he wrote, “I enjoyed working as a doctor. Wishing for full redemption.”
This was the doomsday scenario friends of the peace process had long imagined, anticipated, dreaded. All it would take was one crazy extremist from either side to open fire on an opposing crowd, and the Israeli-P.L.O. accords would fall apart.
Ever since the September peace accord was signed on the White House lawn, radical settlers, especially from the Kahane movement, have been loudly announcing their determination to take matters into their own hands to stop the delivery of land they consider their biblical birthright into the hands of the Palestinians. Settlers in Hebron have been caught on videotape firing repeatedly on Palestinian stone throwers. Jewish militants have stopped Palestinians on the roads and harassed them. The Israeli army for the most part has stood by, doing nothing to subdue them.
Yet the ramifications of the Hebron massacre may not be quite what was anticipated. Arafat spoke with justifiable outrage and a hint of reluctance to continue negotiating, but he kept his options open. Yitzhak Rabin made a point of sounding genuinely horrified when he called Goldstein “deranged,” and he extended uncharacteristically warm offerings to the Palestinians while imposing unheard-of measures against the settlers. Bill Clinton, with unusual decisiveness, made merit out of mayhem and invited both parties to resume their talks in Washington immediately. The Hebron rampage may end up achieving the opposite of what Goldstein intended: speeding up the Israeli-P.L.O. peace negotiations rather than wrecking them.
That is still far from a certainty, since the massacre touched off stone throwing and rioting throughout the Israeli-occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israeli soldiers firing on protesters killed 19, bringing the total for Friday and Saturday to somewhere between 58 and 71, depending on the toll in the mosque; another 250 people were wounded in the riots. Friday was the bloodiest day in the occupied Palestinian lands since Israel conquered them in 1967.
Displaced Palestinians demonstrated in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, countries that are negotiating with Israel. In Israel proper there were outbreaks of stone throwing among Arabs in such cities as Nazareth and Jaffa, an ominous development: Israeli Arabs, while sympathetic with their brethren in the occupied territories, have hardly ever resorted to violence.
The air rang with the sort of cries for blood that can make continued talk of peace a hollow mockery. “Today is for the Jews, but tomorrow is for us,” vowed a Palestinian on the sacred grounds of Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock. Even Freih Abu Middain, the normally moderate head of the bar association in the Gaza Strip, talked of future bloodshed: “Had this massacre happened after we had a Palestinian police force, we would be going into the Jewish settlements and killing at least 100 people there. Our people will not remain silent.”
But in the fanatic Jewish precincts in Hebron, settlers danced in the streets and praised Goldstein’s martyrdom. The Purim parades continued as if nothing had happened, and some residents of Kiryat Arba called his act “a great gift.” One settler, stopped by a soldier as she tried to assault a Palestinian journalist, shrieked, “We should kill 500, not 50!”
Yet leaders on both sides, forced to look into the abyss of madness, retreated to sanity. Rabin phoned Arafat in Tunis and said, “I am ashamed as an Israeli that such a horrible incident took place here.” That was an astonishing expression from the icily reserved Rabin, especially given his never concealed loathing for the P.L.O. chief. Politicians on the don’t-give-the-Arabs-an-inch Israeli right also spoke in tones of sorrow and repentance. “It’s a crime, a terrible crime, and I condemn it totally,” said Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the Likud party, which has said that if it returns to power it will not abide by the agreement for Palestinian self-rule. The National Religious Party, composed of the strictly Orthodox who, like Goldstein, are totally opposed to trading any part of the West Bank for peace, said the massacre had “cast a shadow on the entire people.”
In Washington, President Clinton canceled his morning jog to meet with foreign policy advisers about the news. Their conclusion, after a two-hour meeting: the lagging peace negotiations must be speeded up. There were risks in trying to do so, and in involving the U.S. more deeply in the process. But, says an adviser, the risks of not doing so were much greater: continued rioting, bloodshed and calls for vengeance could all too quickly destroy the commitment of peace-minded Israelis and Palestinians and reward extremists who want no accommodation.
Within hours of hearing about the massacre, Clinton asked the P.L.O. and the Israeli government to move to Washington the talks they had been conducting over the past five months in Paris, Cairo and the Egyptian resort town of Taba. He proposed the two sides keep their negotiators in the U.S. capital until they get not just an agreement to agree or an agreement in principle, but an i’s-dotted, t’s-crossed accord. Said the President: “We must prevent them ((fanatic extremists)) from extinguishing the hopes and aspirations of ordinary people for a life of peaceful existence.”
Rabin accepted immediately. Arafat withheld a public reply, but Clinton and Secretary of State Warren Christopher talked to him by phone and reportedly got an informal promise that P.L.O. negotiators would be there. U.S. officials hope the talks will start this week. American representatives will not sit in unless they are asked, but they will stand by, offer informal suggestions and talk to the two sides separately to clear up misinterpretations by one side of what the other’s true position is.
U.S. policymakers have high hopes that the talks will go much faster than the drawn-out negotiations so far. The agreement sealed in Washington on Sept. 13 set a target date of Dec. 13 for Israeli troops to begin leaving and Palestinians to assume self-governance in the Gaza Strip and Jericho as a first step toward autonomy throughout the occupied territories. On Feb. 9, the two sides signed an agreement settling most of the security issues but leaving some details undecided. Palestinians complain that the Israelis have been shying away from anything suggesting they were giving the Palestinians the appurtenances of statehood: they did not even want to let the Palestinians issue their own postage stamps. Arafat’s aides say Rabin seemed to think time was on his side; the longer an agreement took, the more desperate the P.L.O. would become to get one.
The Israelis say they realize that even before the Hebron massacre, Arafat was having growing trouble maintaining support for the peace process among his own people. The slaughter in the mosque only made things much worse: some of the subsequent rioting and demonstrations took a sharply anti-Arafat as well as anti-Israeli tone. When Faisal Husseini, the head of the West Bank division of Fatah, Arafat’s own faction, visited the Dome of the Rock in East Jerusalem, Palestinian mobs stoned him until he was forced to leave. They chanted, “Arafat is a bastard!” or “Arafat is a Jew!” In Lebanon, Munir Magdah, a former Fatah leader, urged Arafat to commit suicide.
More worrisome to Israelis as well as to Arafat is the prospect of growing support for Hamas, the militant Islamic organization that is the P.L.O.’s chief rival for the allegiance of Palestinians in the occupied territories. Hamas called the mosque massacre “a final message to Arafat and his group to either return to his people and abandon his surrender to the Jews or his people will consider him and his group part and parcel of Zionism.” Freih Abu Middain thinks the massacre “crowns Hamas as the group that speaks the straightforward truth about the Israelis.”
Israelis insist that they understand more clearly than ever that Arafat needs to show his people they are getting something out of the peace process — and that Jerusalem must make some concessions to help. “Paradoxically ((the massacre)) may hasten the peace process because Israel will be under pressure to finish the negotiations as soon as possible,” says Ariel Merari, an expert on political violence. To get an accord, he predicts, Israel will “have to make more concessions than it meant to make.”
It is not yet certain that the high-speed negotiations will even get under way this week. Odds are that Arafat will eventually make good on his private pledge to send his negotiators to Washington, but he started to stall in public. He called the P.L.O. team home to Tunis for weekend consultations before giving Clinton an official reply. The purpose was probably to patch together another consensus within the P.L.O., but it still delayed a commitment.
At the same time, Arafat has been putting great emphasis on the threat that settlers pose to Palestinian civilians. He demanded that U.N. peacekeepers be sent to the territories. He requested a Saturday-night meeting of the U.N. Security Council to discuss the idea, but predictably it broke up without taking any action. Since the U.S. would be sure to veto such a move, the P.L.O. chief was mainly trying to put additional pressure on Jerusalem before the new negotiations begin.
Arafat’s maneuvers demonstrate how the massacre has added a troublesome new subject to the negotiating agenda. Instead of postponing a final arrangement on the question of the settlements to talks two years hence, the P.L.O. chief is insisting that the issue be addressed now. He wants to get some kind of guarantees that violence by extremist Jews will stop.
The Hebron bloodbath may actually make it easier for Rabin to comply. The Prime Minister and the more fanatic settlers are anything but allies, and his government has made no secret of its distaste for holding the entire Israeli population hostage to the Greater Israel dreams of a few thousand zealots. His reward has been to be jeered by settlers who yell, “Rabin is a traitor!” on his rare visits to their towns. Even so, his government has been assiduous in negotiations about safeguarding the settlers in the Gaza and Jericho areas once the Israeli army withdraws.
Now the Jerusalem government has a valid excuse for taking some action. Immediately after the mosque massacre, the government slapped a curfew on Jews in Hebron and Kiryat Arba, an unprecedented step in applying to Jews a remedy used regularly against Palestinian troublemakers. Government ministers emerging from a Cabinet meeting after the Hebron slaughter discussed a number of other ideas with reporters. Environment Minister Yossi Sarid spoke of expelling militant settlers from the territories. Education Minister Amnon Rubinstein advocated completely outlawing Kach, the political party established by Kahane, with which Goldstein was affiliated. The party is already barred from participating in elections. Tourism Minister Uzi Baram suggested disarming Kachniks.
Israeli television reported that security forces were drawing up lists of particularly dangerous Jewish extremists, with a view to either putting them in detention or banishing them from the territories, and confiscating their weapons. The government now gives guns for self-protection to many settlers. None of that is likely to satisfy the P.L.O.; among other things, it wants all settlers disarmed.
Rabin and his aides think of one day buying out any of the 130,000 settlers who would be willing to move back to more conventional communities if they were amply compensated. That might lure the estimated one-third to one-half of the settlers who have moved into the territories for pleasant scenery and lower living costs. But it would do little to remove those who live in the land they call Judea and Samaria out of religious conviction — the burning belief that it is not just the right but the duty of Jews to occupy the entire biblical Land of Israel — and who openly declare that they will die rather than move.
Rabin will be under heavy pressure from Palestinians and many Israelis to do something drastic about the settlements now. Yet adding such a volatile issue to the official agenda could easily prevent the quick agreement on Gaza and Jericho that many believe is essential to keep the peace process from collapsing under the weight of last week’s slaughter. The U.S. hopes it can resolve the dilemma by shunting the settlement issue over to intense informal discussions as an accompaniment, but not impediment, to the formal talks.
Nothing, of course, is ever certain in the Middle East. But there are things that look exceedingly unlikely, and one is that Israel and the P.L.O. will drift back into an endless round of negotiations that go nowhere. Dr. Goldstein has seen to that. There was much talk in Washington last week about how sometimes it takes a great tragedy to bring movement toward peace by forcing statesmen to look at the hell into which they are drifting. Witness Bosnia, where the killing of 68 people by a mortar shell in the Sarajevo market brought a detectable, if far from conclusive, movement toward an agreement. It would indeed be one of history’s rare beneficial ironies if Goldstein, against all his intentions, gave Israel and the P.L.O. a strong push down the road to peace. He could still succeed in his evil mission. The only thing certain is that the mosque massacre has brought both parties to the most critical crossroads yet in their negotiations for a better tomorrow.
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