by Yossi Achimeir, former senior advisor to Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamir and Director of the Jabotinsky Institute, translated by Hillel Fendel.
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The day before Shmini Atzeret, October 6th one month ago, was the last day of the "previous" version of the State of Israel. The headlines of that day dealt with the infighting regarding how to celebrate Simchat Torah in public – with or without partitions, or whether to do so at all. And the next thing we knew, instead of dancing joyfully with the Torah, we found ourselves in the worst of calamities.
Our days are now spent seeking to wipe out Hamas-ISIS and counting our dead. A new and wretched chapter has begun in our country's history, featuring a very difficult war, as well as quiet anxiety regarding the major domestic changes that are sure to follow.
The ongoing war in Gaza made some major changes to our expected calendar of events for October, which by all accounts was to feature more anti-government protest demonstrations, stronger societal fissures, ever-increasing internal Arab violence, and even the opening of the new Philharmonic season. But two other important dates were also all but deleted from the public consciousness: the memorial days for Lt .-Gen. (res.) and Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin, who was murdered on Nov. 4, 1995, and that of Maj.-Gen. (res.) and Tourism Minister Rehavam (Gandi) Ze'evi, who was murdered by Palestinian terrorists on Oct. 17, 2001.
Who this month had time or energy to commune with the memory of these two, when so many hundreds of Israelis were just murdered on one terrible day? After hundreds were abducted to Gaza, after entire communities were reduced to ruins, and more than 350 IDF soldiers fell at once?
But let us focus momentarily on Ze'evi and his legacy for our times. He was murdered in his hotel room, before the eyes of his wife Yael, as he was preparing for a morning media interview. He was a great warrior, a son of the Land, quite familiar with the extremist Arab elements and their deep murderous hatred and dreams of driving the Jews out of the Holy Land. Gandi, as he was known, paid with his life at the hands of three terrorists who specifically sought him out because of his promotion of the idea of "voluntary transfer." His conception of the solution of the bloody ongoing conflict between the Jewish Nation and the Arabs living here was the relocation of the latter to the east, past the Jordan River. He understood that only total separation would do the job.
He was spared from seeing how the idea of transfer was actually forced upon a different population – the Jews of Gush Katif, by his colleague Ariel Sharon in 2005. And both of them were spared from seeing the disastrous consequences of this expulsion 18 years later that turned our lives upside down and brought upon us our greatest catastrophic blow since the Holocaust.
Gandi was a man of books. No one was a greater lover of the homeland than him, as attested by his rich home library of books on everything about the Land of Israel. Whenever he had time off from his political work, he translated into Hebrew and edited the travel diaries of 19th-century European voyagers to the Land. These, of course, spoke of a desolate, primal, largely empty land, dotted with Arab villages, and a few Jewish residents(translators note: In 1844, Jews comprised the largest population group in Jerusalem, and by 1896 had an absolute majority), and many Biblical place names.
Seven years before his murder, Ze'evi published a treatise on the Hebron massacre of 1929, in which 67 Jews were cruelly butchered by their Arab neighbors. The survivors of the travesty were then relocated out of the city, ending the Jewish presence in the City of the Patriarchs, until it was once again renewed following the Six-Day War.
That slaughter, too, like the one a month ago, took place on a Sabbath. Ze'evi wrote in his introduction: "The Arabs of Hebron beat, stabbed, cut off limbs, pierced stomachs, raped women, murdered and slaughtered every Jew they could find – children, women, men, the elderly. The Arabs burnt the ancient synagogues, destroyed the Hadassah medical clinic, and looted the homes of the Jews… The holy city of Hebron became a city of killing. Pogroms, slaughter and massacres had been a part of Jewish history throughout our history, but here they were being repeated in all their horror in the Holy Land as well."
This was a book designed to shock. Its photos spared barely any of the sickening details: a baby with its skull split open, a hand with its fingers chopped off, a severed arm, many corpses, burnt Torah scrolls – and even a photo of 13-month-old Shloimeleh Slonim whose parents had been murdered. The look in his frightened eyes tells the whole story – though he, Shlomo, survived and lived to reach the age of 86.
Some 65 years after the Hebron massacre, in the 46th year of the State of Israel, Gandi wished to present, as he put it, a "monument to the memory of those who were slaughtered, and a reminder to the living. The murderous riots of 1929 in Hebron and elsewhere in the Holy Land teach us that we cannot deposit our security in the hands of foreign elements. They further teach that the Arabs will take advantage of every opportunity to cut us off from our homeland and from the Land of Life – and will then even deny our accounts and will call them 'Jewish lies and propaganda.'"
Just like the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, the Hebron massacre of 1929 has been imprinted strongly upon our national consciousness. Both were the result of unbridled anti-Semitic hatred and chiefly of Jewish helplessness. Rehavam Ze'evi presented us with a warning sign – in his military career, in his political activity, in his Knesset speeches that angered many, and in this booklet – so that we would free ourselves of distorted ideas about living in peace with murderous enemies before they cost us in blood.
As Commander of Israel's IDF Central Command, Gandi was well aware of the terrible attacks carried out by terrorists in his time. He pursued the terrorist organizations in full force, and in most cases, the long arm of the IDF caught the wretched murderers and prevented more disasters. But I doubt whether even he ever contemplated the possibility of the calamitous failure that happened to us last month on Simchat Torah.
Now, after it has happened, will the lessons he wanted to teach us be learned? Will we make the necessary changes?
And to those who wish to spare us the horrors of exactly what happened in southern Israel a month ago, is there any point in doing so? Gandi, in his hard-to-read book, did not spare us; is there in fact any reason to hide the horrors of our day, those that show the essence of our enemies, so that we may finally give up our illusions?