“…Even in order to live in Tel Aviv, we need a root in Hebron.”: Arik Sharon …

This author received an email today from a friend in Baltimore who sent a quote from Arik Sharon which appears in the current January 23 & 30 issue of the New Yorker Magazine.

The article is entitled “The General” by Ari Shavit of Ha’aretz. The quote appears on page 58 in the hardcopy magazine, but unfortunately there is not a direct link online to the article, only to the Q & A with Ami Davidson which appears on page 52 in the hardcopy of the magazine.

Be that as it may, here is the quote, sure to knock your socks off;

“‘Ben-Gurion called Hebron Jerusalem’s elder sister. If we were a normal nation, when a visitor arrived here we would take him not to Yad VaShem but, rather, to Hebron. We’d take him to the place where our roots are. No other people has a monument like the Tomb of the Patriarchs, where Abraham and Sarah are buried. And Isaac and Rebecca. And Jacob and Leah. There isn’t anything like it. Therefore, under any agreement Jews will live in Hebron.'”

“‘We put too much stress on the security issues,’ he went on. ‘That was a mistake. My mistake, too. The element of the cradle of the Jewish people is critical for us to be able to live here. Indeed, there is a constant questioning of our right. We have to talk about the continuum of Jewish life that has been here. Even in order to live in Tel Aviv, we need a root in Hebron.'”

Commentary;

Not that this author can put a lot of credence in Sharon’s quote for, as we’ve seen, he’s had a penchant for totally reversing himself when expedient for Arik Sharon. Case in point, all of the years when the Religious Nationalists and the population of Yehuda and the Shomron loyally, dutifully and unquestioningly supported Sharon when no one else would through the 1980s and 1990s, after the Lebanese War, after Sabra and Shaltilla only to then suffer Sharon’s perfidy as he politically stabbed them in their backs when initiating the expulsion from Gush Katif and the Shomron last summer.

But the quote, in reality, gets to the core of the conflict being waged between the G’d-fearing and the G’dless. What make’s Tel Aviv any more Kodesh – Holy then Chevron, where the Patriarchs and all but one of the Matriarchs of the Jewish People are buried? This author holds that if Jerusalem is the heart of Judaism, then Chevron is the very root from whence we became a people, a nation. MB