• Supreme Leader Khamanei himself spoke out, warning that those who attack Iran “should prepare themselves for strong slaps in the face and the iron fists.” Oh, so you wanna slap, huh? [WP]

• In fact, according to one expert, the regime feels confident solely because of its nuclear weapons program, which it sees as the one guarantor of its stability. [Haaretz]

• The regional U.S. undersecretary of State called the fall of the Assad regime “inevitable.” [JPost]

• UNESCO formally complained over a cartoon in (of all places) Haaretz that showed Prime Minister Netanyahu ordering soldiers to bomb UNESCO. God it’s called satire. [Haaretz]

• A misunderstanding at a Hebron checkpoint led Israeli soldiers to shoot and kill a Jewish settler. [Haaretz/Forward]

• A onetime Jewish Obama donor who refuses to allow his name to be used “(let’s call him John)” tells a conservative blogger that he is abandoning the president and it’s not because of Israel. Clearly Obama needs to improve his standing with the Jewish community. [Right Turn]

• Kinky Friedman backs Gov. Rick Perry. Clearly Obama needs to improve his standing with the Jewish community. [Ben Smith]

• Joe Klein questions Glenn Beck’s recent comments about the Jews. [Time Swampland]

• A Mexican-Jewish cookbook? Sign me up! [Book Bench]

• Mardy Fish isn’t Jewish. I weep. [Kaplan’s Korner]

Stay safe, everybody.

• Glenn Beck is moving his “Restoring Courage” rally next month in Jerusalem from the Temple Mount to an as-yet-determined location; having it at the Temple Mount is seen as making him an assassination target and also as gratuitously provocative and tasteless, although he only cited the former reason. [Huff Post]

• When an earthquake hit New Zealand earlier this year, it killed 181 people, three of them Israeli. One of them, according to a new report, was in Mossad. [Haaretz]

• Jeff Goldberg says Michele Bachmann loves Israel not wisely but too well. [Bloomberg Views]

• Michael Walzer visits Hebron. [Dissent]

• Jason Diamond apologizes for having inadvertently worked for the international campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state. [Jewcy]

Oh yes, there is a new Beastie Boys video. (And, oh yes, Spike Jonze directed it.)

There are plenty of shots of Jewish kids and teenagers acting like brats—throwing stones to bait Palestinian schoolchildren their own age, talking back to elderly missionaries trying to intervene. But what really shocks are sequences like the one about ten minutes in, where a Jewish woman living in a settlement bloc guarded by IDF troops walks up to the chicken-wire fence surrounding her Palestinian neighbors’ house, puts her face right up to the barrier, and begins hissing, “Sharmouta”—Arabic for “whore.” The presence of the camera only seems to goad her on; she drops her voice to a sibilant whisper, repeating her curse over and over again. It’s difficult to watch. In the context of the film, it doesn’t really matter what set the woman off, or how just her irritation may have been. What matters is that she chose not to turn to the soldiers very expensively stationed along the road for help, but rather to be petty and mean: To engage in taunts for the sake of demonstrating her power—as bullies do.

To an American ear, it is particularly galling to hear the many Brooklyn and New Jersey accents, in English and in halting Hebrew, from people who insist repeatedly that God, the Torah, and the long, sad history of the Jewish people excuse their holding on to the land they so fervently believe is their birthright. “I’m not talkin’ to you!” one man shouts at a television journalist who interrupts him while he’s screaming at IDF soldiers that they, as fellow Jews, should be defending the holy, sacred children of the settlers rather than Arab residents of one neighborhood.

Those viewers who defend the settlers will find fault with the film, because it fails to take seriously the possibility that there are actual security threats to the city’s 600 or so Jews; because the unapologetically anti-settlement Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy is the movie’s voice of reason; because it gives equal time to settler leaders and to advocates from B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence, two left-wing groups. But it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to seriously defend some of the slimier behavior discovered by the filmmakers, Giulia Amati and Stephen Natanson, from religious young Jewish men casually calling passersby Nazis and unleashing vile torrents of f-bombs and other multi-lingual verbal abuse, to parents employing their clearly terrified and screaming infants as pawns in front of the cameras. And it’s hard to avoid the tragedy at the heart of the film: That, more than 15 years after the American-born settler Baruch Goldstein committed his Purim massacre in a Hebron mosque, successive Israeli governments have failed to defuse a powder keg that could easily blow up even the most ironclad peace deal—when, or if, such a thing is ever reached.

The trailer below:

This Is My Land… Hebron [Film Linc]
Related: Among the Settlers [The New Yorker]

Which, Israel being the subject matter, is guaranteed to make some people mad. Amir Ofek, the press attaché at Israel’s embassy in London, told the Israeli press that the show is “an attempt to demonize Israelis” and the worst example of anti-Israeli propaganda he’d ever seen. Writing in the Jewish Chronicle, England’s premier Jewish publication, one columnist argued that the series’ script could have been written by Fatah. The institutionalized Jewish community in England issued strongly worded press releases. Pundits in Israel shrieked. By the time the show had finished its run, more people had read about The Promise than had actually seen it.

That’s a shame, because contrary to these howls of discontent, the show is a rare and riveting example of telling Israel’s story on screen with accuracy, sensitivity, and courage. It begins with Erin (Claire Foy), a recent high-school graduate, visiting her dying grandfather in the hospital in London 2005. The old man, we’re led to understand, had gone through life being somewhat of a sod, but then Erin finds his diary. In a series of flashbacks, we learn that Grandpa Len (Christian Cooke) had been among the liberators of Bergen-Belsen. This is conveyed via raw and harrowing documentary footage of the camp’s aftermath; seeing the skeletal corpses piled up, we understand every tormented line wrinkling Len’s handsome face.

But the plot soars once Len and Erin arrive in Israel, each in his or her own era, he as a rosy-cheeked British soldier and she as a contemporary tourist, reading the diary and doing her best to retrace her grandfather’s steps. After we see Len injured in the 1946 attack on the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, Erin meets with an old Israeli who, as a member of the Zionist paramilitary group Irgun, was one of the attack’s perpetrators. This genial septuagenarian tells Erin that having lost his entire family in the Holocaust, he was happy to fight for the Jewish homeland by any means necessary. Erin—like presumably many viewers—finds the attack noxious, but the old man’s version of events is emotional and intelligent, ripe with the nuances that make Israel both deeply appealing and hopelessly complex.

The show’s writer and director, Peter Kosminsky, walks this tightrope of evenhandedness remarkably well. One moment we follow Erin as she survives a Palestinian suicide bombing and wanders, bleeding, through the corridors of a hospital packed with disfigured, writhing victims. The next, we follow her to Hebron, where the suffering of the Palestinian population—largely imprisoned by a small and vitriolic community of Jewish settlers defended by a large military force—is acutely felt. The same is true for Len, shown in pre-State Palestine between 1946 and 1948, as his sympathies shift between the Jewish underground operatives fighting for independence and the local Arabs with whom the Jews vie for land. To Kosminsky’s credit, nothing and no one in the series is simple, and even the most zealous characters are allowed moments of humanity, a few good arguments in support of their cause, and a few moments of grace.

One such moment comes toward the end of the series, when Erin, looking for one of her grandfather’s old acquaintances, makes her way into Gaza. Through a complicated set of circumstances, she ends up spending the night with the family of a female suicide bomber who had exploded herself in Tel Aviv the previous day. Erin is woken up in the morning by determined-looking members of the Israel Defense Forces (the show is set before the IDF’s withdrawal from Gaza in August of 2005), who inform her that the house, per Israel’s policy of combating terrorism, is slated for immediate demolition. Erin is angry—she doesn’t see the point of punishing the family for the actions of their fanatic daughter—and decides to chain herself to a post in an attempt to block the soldiers’ path. Enter Eliza (Perdita Weeks), Erin’s best friend and now a young IDF soldier serving in Gaza. Throughout her visit to Israel, Erin had been staying with Eliza’s family, supporting her friend—a dual citizen of England and Israel—as she finished her basic training. A plausible plot twist puts Eliza in the same condemned house with Erin, and a fierce dialogue unfolds between the two women. Erin weeps for the Palestinian family about to be rendered homeless; Eliza makes a compelling argument that reminds Erin—and the viewers—of the atrocities of terrorism and of Israel’s right to defend itself. What the English audience sees, then, is two young English women, one wearing a kafiyah around her neck and one in a tight olive IDF uniform, each making her point emotionally and eloquently, each convincing.

Viewed through the much narrower prism of the professional propagandist, however, it is not difficult to see why someone might take offense with the show. Several of Israel’s highly questionable practices are shown here accurately and unequivocally. In Gaza, for example, Erin and a local Palestinian child are grabbed and used as human shields by soldiers searching a nearby house; this controversial practice has been repeatedly deployed by the IDF in Gaza and the West Bank for the past decade or so. Similarly, the portrayal of Hebron’s Jewish settlers as violent aggressors is unflattering but not inaccurate. But as he’s done in his previous shows—about the radicalization of British Muslims, the lead-up to the war in Iraq, and other deeply controversial and multilayered subjects—Kosminsky never allows these harsh truths to steal the focus away from the story. Watching the show, audiences are likely to care as much or more for Erin’s personal drama—the beautifully mundane tale of a young woman emerging from the cocoon of childhood, blinking, blinded by sex and family and other impossibly bright lights—as they do about the morsels of reality planted here and there throughout the plot. This, perhaps, was what reality television was meant to be all along: edifying but never preachy, entertaining but seldom silly, a lesson in history and current events that realizes that for anyone to care, facts and emotions must be given equal footing and the opportunity to clash with each other for the viewer’s sympathy.

For the most part, and despite the vocal criticisms, English audiences seemed to embrace the show and its complexities. More than a million and a half people, or a strong showing of 7 percent of the television-watching audience, tuned in to The Promise, and there was occasional praise from across the political spectrum for the show’s even-handedness and thoroughness. If The Promise gets what it deserves, it will be given an airing here and in Israel, injecting a note of artfulness and subtlety into a debate too often dominated by the shrill.

At first glance Manekin, with his trim black beard and kippa, could be one of them. Indeed, part of what makes him such a formidable peace activist is how much Zionist credibility he has. He’s an Orthodox Jew and a veteran of the elite Golani battalion, where, among other things, he protected settler roads and liaised with settler security. His last position in the military was an instructor in an officer-training academy. Like other members of Breaking the Silence, an organization of young Israeli army veterans, he can discuss the occupation with authority, because he was one of the people charged with carrying it out.

Other than the armored car, a few kids in knit skull caps, and some Orthodox women pushing baby carriages, the streets of Hebron were empty. They are, in IDF parlance, “completely sterilized,” meaning that Palestinians aren’t allowed on them. Those who need to traverse the area must cut through a nearby cemetery. Most of the Arabs who once lived near the settlers’ encampment have since left. The few that have remained mostly stay inside their apartments. Bars protect their windows and balconies from the settlers’ stones. If they must go out, they have to climb onto the roof and down a fire escape into a back alley, because the concrete outside their front doors is reserved for Jews. If they get seriously ill, they’re in trouble. “The Jewish subset of the Red Cross doesn’t treat Palestinians here,” says Manekin. “What you see a lot of times is Palestinians carrying people by foot to an area with an ambulance.”

As he talks, our driver, a bluff man in his 50s who lives in Netanya and speaks English with a heavy Israeli accent, shakes his head. “I didn’t know,” he says. “People don’t know.”

Breaking the Silence was formed almost by accident in 2004. It started as an exhibition of photographs and video testimonies by soldiers who had served in Hebron and were anguished by their own behavior. The IDF wasn’t happy—military police raided the Tel Aviv gallery where the exhibit was mounted and confiscated one of the videos—but thousands of Israelis attended. Many of them were soldiers who’d never discussed their own shame. Among them was Manekin, who’s still dealing with what he describes as a “great sense of discomfort about my own personal behavior” during his army service. He agreed to give his own testimony, and soon he was part of a nascent movement.

There was no single epiphany that radicalized Manekin, no moment when he realized that much of what he’d taken for granted about Israeli righteousness was wrong. The son of two professors—his mother teaches modern Jewish history, his father medieval Jewish philosophy—he grew up in a home that was religiously Orthodox and decidedly Zionist, if also politically liberal. He had dual Israeli-American citizenship, and he spent a lot of time going back and forth between the two countries. When he was a teenager, Manekin’s family moved to Israel full-time, and he was sent to an Orthodox high school where right-wing politics predominated.

For Manekin, being accepted into the Golani battalion was like getting into a good college. “You want to excel,” he says. He enlisted for four years, one year more than required. He served first in Southern Lebanon and then in the Nablus region in the West Bank. During that time, he did things that he’s ashamed of, though they’re the sorts of things that any soldier controlling a restive, angry population would do, such as shooting stun grenades at Palestinians to intimidate them at checkpoints. Once, when his unit was assigned to protect the route to a settlement, the soldiers commandeered a house in a nearby village to serve as a lookout, and then, suspecting others might be more suitable, they took over those instead. Manekin was troubled by the soldiers’ cavalier attitude toward Palestinian homes. When he voiced his concerns, he was summoned to the battalion general, who asked if he was uncomfortable serving in the territories.

At the time, he was indignant at the suggestion that he wasn’t ready to do everything required by his military position. But in retrospect, he realized the general was right. There is no way to maintain an occupation without cruelty and moral squalor. That’s the message of Breaking the Silence: The abuses its members document stem directly from government policy. “On the whole, the military is actually fine,” he says. “This is not about the settlers. It’s not about the military. It’s about the state.”

A large part of Breaking the Silence’s work involves collecting and disseminating soldiers’ stories about their experiences in the occupied territories—to date, the organization has interviewed over 700 combatants, including members of every unit that has fought in the territories in the last 10 years. The group has just published a harrowing new book, Occupation of the Territories: Israeli Soldiers’ Testimonies 2000-2010. A selection of oral histories culled from interviews with more than a hundred soldiers, it presents episodes of the daily, casual degradation and brutality that occupation entails. Manekin’s own testimony is among them, though, in keeping with the rest of them, it’s anonymous.

Cumulatively, the testimonies describe a system intended to break the Palestinians’ will by subjugating their lives to Israeli whims, a system in which tyranny can always be justified with the rhetoric of security. Where there is self-rule, it’s granted on sufferance and can be taken away at will. The soldiers are not bad people, but, as one of them says, “It’s the power that you have in your hands. At some point it fucks you up, if you are a human being.” One soldier recounts detaining Palestinians arbitrarily, shackling them for eight or nine hours at a time. Another describes how harassing Palestinians became a form of entertainment: “One of the goals was always: I got him to cry in front of his kids, I got him to crap in his pants.”

A soldier in Hebron describes his shock at realizing how routinely settlers attack Palestinians, including women and children, with utter impunity. “And it exists here in the State of Israel, and no one knows about it, and no wants to know, and no one reports about it,” he says. There are numerous reports of soldiers smashing up Palestinian homes as a sort of catharsis. “I think it’s really like when you see people on MTV smashing their guitars on stage,” says one. “[O]ver there you have the power to act it out, and these things are not your own things, and what’s more, you’re at war.”

The book describes “mock arrests,” in which new soldiers arrest innocent Palestinians for practice. “They would actually do intelligence work to find out a Palestinian is innocent before arresting him, so as not to endanger the troops,” Mikhael says. Soldiers, he said, have two rationales for this. The first is training. Second, he says, it creates “a feeling of lack of understanding on the Palestinian side. Suddenly, an innocent person is being arrested. Nobody understands what’s happening, and the sense of insecurity and fear among the Palestinian population fits in very well with the overall strategy, which is instilling that fear in the population.”

One might see all this as the regrettable but inevitable price of self-defense. Palestinian terrorism, after all, is real, even if it has abated significantly in recent years. Many Israelis would dearly love to end the occupation if they didn’t believe doing so would put their own lives at risk. Breaking the Silence is addressed to them as well: Those who support Israeli policy have as much of a duty to understand what it entails as those who oppose it.

The American Jewish mainstream doesn’t like to listen to the sorts of stories that Breaking the Silence tells, but Manekin is more able to reach them than most. He was recently in the United States, giving talks in New York and Washington. When he spoke at Columbia with Peter Beinart, the political writer, the event was co-sponsored by LionPac, a campus pro-Israel group. In addition to briefing the State Department and the United Nations, he met with AIPAC, and he found the group impressively responsive.

Of course, in Israel, Manekin and his group have come under attack from the right: It’s one of the targets of the Knesset investigation into left-leaning NGOs. Manekin wrote a scathing response for the +972 blog, writing that he wouldn’t pander to his persecutors by testifying about his own Zionist bona fides before the committee. “I don’t owe them anything,” he wrote. “They don’t need to love us or tell us that we are patriots. They are doing far more damage to this place than we are.” Still, he has a charming inability to muster much outrage on his own behalf. The attacks “don’t really bother me,” he says. “We’re still part of the ruling class. I’m still a liberal Israeli Jew, so I’m not that worried.”

For all his frustrations with Israel, Manekin has no plans to go anywhere. Some of his friends are leaving—as he wrote in +972, “they want to find a place that is normal, a place that does not shame their existence. A place they can live in.” But he says, “I see my future in Israel. It’s just my home.” His 3-year-old daughter knows no language besides Hebrew. Besides, being there offers him the opportunity to put his ideals into practice. “I like to be part of changing things,” he says. “Activists in general don’t feel a sense of despair.”

• Obituaries of the 37 Jewish men and women of the U.S. armed forces who died in Iraq and Afghanistan. [Forward]

• Syria and Qatar offered Hamas $50 million to keep kidnapped soldier Gilad Schalit and not do an exchange deal with Israel: This according to none other than Mubarak, who informed a U.S. diplomat, who then reported it in a cable since released by WikiLeaks. [JPost]

• Jewish settlers’ third annual Hebron 10K road race will, for the first time, pass through the Palestinian areas of Hebron itself. Stay classy, guys. [972]

• “The Dead Rabbis Society of Brooklyn” may not be great search-engine optimization bait, but it’s a damn fine headline. [The Brooklyn Ink]

• Alan Slifka, founder of the Big Apple Circus as well as of the Abraham Fund Initiatives—which aimed to bring about increased Jewish-Arab cooperation in Israel—died at 81. [NYT]

The Sway Machinery, the cantorial funk outfit (not a typo), has a new album coming out. And a new video:

The area outside of the coffee shop is peppered with images and slogans that could only be found in Israel: a map of the country with the Palestinian areas removed; a soldier with the slogan “no legs, no problems”; a stencil of the national anthem, with the words changed (“the land of Zion and Jerusalem” has been replaced by “the land of Palestine and Jerusalem”). And, though Nocturno is a favorite hangout for art students from the Bezalel Academy, it’s hardly the only such canvas.

Graffiti has long been the focal point of the collective imagination here. In one form or another, it can be found everywhere from Hebron to Bethlehem, engaging both Israelis and Palestinians from all points on the political spectrum. Famously, it has also attracted scores of high-profile outsiders with statements to make, including the biggest names in the graffiti and street art worlds.

Israel has long had a unique passion for exchanging slogans in the street. In 2007, the country’s best-known hip hop outfit, Hadag Nahash, penned a tune in collaboration with the novelist David Grossman. Titled “Sticker Song,” it took its lyrics from the bewildering array of political slogans that can be found on bumper stickers up and down the country.

“These slogans are like capsules of Israeliness,” said Sha’anan Streett, the frontman of Hadag Nahash, when I met him at Nocturno. “They mirror the rhetorical ping-pong which is becoming a substitute for proper debate in a country that has lost any sense of hope.”

A similar sentiment haunts the walls 40 miles west, in the very different city of Tel Aviv. Locals have grown accustomed to images of the “Character,” a spindly, black-and-white vision of fragility, always struggling under an invisible weight, with a heart-shaped hole in the center of its chest. The Character is the creation of an Israeli artist who goes by the name Know Hope.

“The Character expresses the complex burden that Israelis grow up with,” said Know Hope, at his studio in Jaffa. “I weave moments of human fragility into a political statement.” Some of his best pieces, he said, are on the separation wall. One portrays the Character having his severed arm sewn together by a bird. Another has him pulling bandages out of his heart-shaped hole, on which is written: please believe. Later, beside a downtown café, I find another of his pieces: the Character holding a weeping bird to his mouth, as if about to breathe life into it—or devour it.

Several hours north, in the settlement of Hebron, the graffiti looks quite different. In 2001, the IDF closed down a Palestinian market that was built on disputed land, as it had become a flash-point of violence. This has had a profound impact on the local economy, and now the place is a ghost town. On the rows of boarded-up shops are strings of spray-painted Stars of David, accompanied by belligerent slogans, the most radical of which—“death to the Arabs”—has been (badly) painted out.

In the Palestinian territories, the graffiti is dramatically different again. According to Matt Rees, a crime author and former Jerusalem bureau chief for Time magazine who accompanied me across the checkpoint, graffiti in Palestine tends to be linked to the militant groups. Slogans there are color-coded according to faction, he said: Yellow for Fatah, red for the PFLP.

On a recent afternoon, Rees and I passed through a little-used checkpoint into the West Bank. As we entered the Duheisha Refugee Camp, all around us were graffiti portraits of Intifada-era martyrs. Most prominent of these was an imposing image of Ayat al-Akhras, the third and youngest female suicide bomber, who lived her whole life here. The unsigned portrait, completed in 2002, has been recently given a fresh lick of paint.

Perhaps the most famed piece of graffiti in the region is located on the nearby partition wall, a part of which has become a Mecca for international graffiti artists since the reclusive British sensation Banksy painted here five years ago.

Banksy’s work brought the region prominence and with it the possibility of commercial advantage. Rees introduced me to two Palestinians, one of whom said he used to be a bodyguard for Yasser Arafat. They took us to a location where they had stashed a piece of a wall from someone else’s house. On it is an original Banksy: a soldier frisking a donkey. Although they worry about Palestinians being compared to animals, they wanted to sell it. “We will use the money for the children of Palestine,” the ex-bodyguard told me.

But graffiti in the region doesn’t only get inspiration from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—it’s also used as a language for domestic Israeli issues. In Jerusalem, in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Meah She’arim, the anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox Neturei Karta sect has plastered the neighborhood with anti-statehood slogans.

“God wants the State of Israel to be totally dismantled,” says Yoel Kroiz, a leading figure in the radical organization. “Since the establishment of the State of Israel, we haven’t had one day of peace. Jews should be living as a minority within a Palestinian state. That’s the only way to end the conflict.”

Kroiz, who was detained last year for an alleged tear gas assault on a woman he considered immodest, sees himself as part of a long tradition. In his cluttered quarters, he showed me his dust-covered collection of Orthodox street-posters, which stretches back over 90 years. Among the religious edicts and signs protesting the desecration of ancient graves is his anti-Zionist collection. “We mourn the existence of the State of Israel,” says one. “Arabs, yes, Zionists, no,” reads another.

On a wall a little further down the road, the two extremisms are in collision. “Death to the Arabs” has been scrawled on a wall by a member of the hardline settler movement. An ultra-Orthodox radical has crossed out “death,” changing the slogan to “Palestine to the Arabs.” The conflict of views here—all types of views—is nowhere as clear as on its ancient walls.

Jake Wallis Simons is a U.K.-based novelist, journalist, and graphic artist.

Born in Jericho, on the West Bank, raised under Israeli military occupation, and educated in Arizona (where he received an undergraduate degree in finance and then an MBA), Areikat toggles back and forth between the somber acknowledgment of competing narratives of nationhood and oppression, sharp political gossip, and more muted versions of the fiery speeches about colonization and dispossession that made the secular Palestinian national cause a favorite among Western students in the 1970s, in the days before Islamists seized the mantle of resistance.

Yet for all the fluidity of his style and the intelligence of his presentation, there is something insubstantial about Areikat that seems less like a personal failing than a product of the fact that his title is a well-meaning lie: He is an ambassador without a country, the emissary of a dream-state without borders that has commanded and frustrated the imagination of the world for over 40 years. The deferral of the Palestinian national dream through war and peace, international conferences and agreements, self-inflicted wounds, settlement and occupation, year after year and decade after decade, has become one of the defining characteristics of a dream that refuses to die yet resists being born. The delivery date is always pushed back another year or two, and then another year. Arguments about whether the failure lies with Israel or the Palestinians, Arafat, Sharon, Clinton, Bush or Obama, meddling Iranians, Likud hardliners, Baruch Goldstein or Hamas, the Holocaust, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, or the Sykes Picot agreement of 1916 have lost their savor even for the bitterest ideologues. The world won’t stand for it any longer, but then the world moves on to something else. With the West Bank ruled by the Israel Defense Forces and Gaza ruled by Hamas, the Palestinian people seem more divided now than at any time since their national movement began.

Areikat displays excellent control over his body language and enjoys playing games. When I arrive to meet him in the lounge of a busy tourist hotel in midtown Manhattan, I find him seated with a glass of water in front of him and his jacket and tie slung over the back of the opposite chair. He watches me, curious to see whether I will ask his permission, move it myself, or sit down and then lean forward for the rest of the interview. When I move his jacket to a nearby chair, he smiles and then stands up to shake my hand, while continuing to talk on his cell phone to Ramallah in Arabic about his meeting with the editorial board of the New York Times. I set out the instruments of my trade on the table and listen in on his conversation until he is done.

For decades many Jews in Israel and America denied that there was such a thing as a Palestinian people. I think that most people in our community today see that as a shameful thing. However even as the Jewish community has stopped for the most part propagating this kind of false and insulting narrative, we wonder why there is not a similar recognition on the part of Palestinians of our deep historical and emotional connection to our national homeland.

One hundred years of struggle over that piece of land that was called Palestine produced a lot of misconceptions and misperceptions. We witnessed the rise of national movements that were struggling to create homelands for their own people, and neither one wanted to acknowledge the presence of the other. I think of the early Zionist slogans of a land without a people for a people without a land, all the books and the papers and the statements that were made by the early Zionists and the Israelis after the creation of the state of Israel, the denial of the existence of the Palestinian people, and then later the denial by the Palestinians of the existence of the state of Israel, that they have to go back to where they came from. I remember former Prime Minister Golda Meir saying that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people in the early ’70s. I remember Palestinians saying that the only Jews in the land of Palestine are going to be Palestinian Jews. I think the bloody conflict brought leaders on both sides to their senses. We have seen at least, from the Palestinian side, since 1988, a clear acceptance of the existence of the State of Israel.

I wrote a cover story for the Atlantic about the Ra’is, Yasser Arafat right after he died, and I interviewed all the Palestinian leaders who were close to Arafat, as well as the leading Israeli, American, and international policymakers who dealt with him. One story that I heard many times is how the Camp David negotiations fell apart when Arafat would not acknowledge that there was a Jewish temple in Jerusalem.

This was used by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren in his recent op-ed in the New York Times, and I just want to know, how did he base his statement. On what information?

Bill Clinton tells the story, too. I also interviewed Madeleine Albright and Ehud Barak about it, and they said the same thing. They remembered that Clinton was very angry. He said, “Look, it was in the Encyclopedia Britannica, how can you say it was not there?” And Arafat said, “There was never a Jewish temple in Jerusalem. It didn’t exist. It’s a myth. Maybe it was in Hebron. Maybe the Jews came from Saudi Arabia.” You know the kind of nonsense he used to talk.

People forget that Chairman Arafat was the first Palestinian leader to take the major risk of signing an agreement with Israel that recognized Israel’s right to exist. I don’t think there would have been any other Palestinian leader who would have had the courage to do that. And they just, in a moment of rage because you know he didn’t go along with a plan that was submitted to him at Camp David, decide to make him the bad guy.

OK. Now that we are sitting across the table here in New York 10 years later, under completely different circumstances, let me ask you this: Was there ever a Jewish temple in Jerusalem?

I’m not a historian.

I have the reference right here from the Encyclopedia Britannica. Is it wrong?

I’m not a historian.  What are you trying to get to? That Jews were present then?

Were they?

President Abbas in his meeting with the leaders of the American Jewish community in June said that yes, the Jews were in the Middle East, and that one-third of the Quran talks about Jews.

Are the people who say they’re Israeli Jews today related to the people who were Jews in the time of the Quran?

It’s for historians to establish the link. I believe many Jews who lived at one point in that land continue to live in that land, and their descendants stayed in that land.

So, today’s Palestinians are the real Jews?

Everywhere in the world, Jews follow the nationality and citizenship of the country where they live. In the United States, you have American Jews, who live in the United States. You have French Jews. And this was the original argument between us and the Jews. Why can’t you be Palestinian Jews?

Is Judaism simply a religion, or are Jews also a people—like Kurds or Armenians?

That is something you have to work out for yourselves. At one point, we believed that Jews are followers of religion, and not a nation and a people, and I’ll tell you why. In order to be one people, one nation, you have to be homogenous. Look at Jews all over the world, you see American Jews who are blond and with green-blue eyes. You see Yemeni Jews who are dark like me with brown eyes and brown hair—not brown anymore for me—and you see French and Russian Jews who are a mixture of this and that. So, basically a lot of historians on the Palestinian side and the Arab side say, “Well, if they were a people, one nation, they would be homogenous, 90 percent alike except for 10 not-alike, as we Palestinians are.” Some of us still make the same arguments of the ’60s and the ’70s: “No, they are not a nation, they are the followers of a faith, they should live in every country as citizens of that country.”

That approach didn’t work out so well for us in Europe.

I think you have been very much influenced by the Holocaust. And the thing that my Jewish listeners, audience, or readers should understand is that we Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust. As a matter of fact, Palestinians, in the early years of the Jewish migration to Palestine, tried to help the Jewish immigrants as much as possible, to make them feel at home.

In our community, we’re taught that the toleration of Jews in most Muslim empires was greater than it was in Christian Europe. But we also hear that, for example, the other day the head of the Palestine National Council, Salim Zanoun, said that the Palestinian people can never recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

I said it yesterday!

Why did you say that?

Israel is a political establishment that claims to represent Jews all over the world. I very much doubt that Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu represent every Jew in the world. I know there are Jews who don’t agree with Netanyahu.

You know the saying: Two Jews, three opinions.

But what I want to say about tolerance is that the Jewish-Muslim relationship enjoyed much more years of peace and tranquility than the Christian-Jewish relationship or the Muslim-Christian relationship. My grandfather was a partner with a Jewish man in a bakery shop in west Jerusalem. When he was—when my grandfather left in 1948, he left everything, he left his home, he left his bakery, he left everything, but he was a partner. My mother used to tell me stories about how they lived in peace and harmony. That’s why a lot of people argue that the politicization of Judaism led to the friction and the conflict with the Palestinians. In the beginning we used to say, “We are not against Jews or Judaism.” We were against Zionism as a political theory.

So, explain why it’s impossible for the Palestinian people to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

We have no problem whatsoever with what Israel calls themselves. Israel can call themselves “The Great Empire of the Jewish People.” But don’t ask me to recognize that.

Why not? You want us to recognize the validity of your narrative of Palestinian people-hood.

We are still negotiating an end to this conflict. Let’s say that tomorrow the Palestinian leadership comes out and says, “OK, we’re ready to recognize the Jewishness of the state.” What implications would that have, immediately, on the Palestinians? You know that in our view the refugee problem is the crux of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Today we have 6.5 million registered refugees out of 10 or 10.5 million Palestinians. One out of six refugees in the world is Palestinian. By accepting Israel’s claim now, that they are a Jewish state, we are telling the Israelis: Forget about the refugees, forget about their plight, no right of return, no U.N. General Assembly resolution 194; we are giving up the refugee issue, we are taking it off the table before we even started negotiating.

Secondly, you know that there are between 18 and 20 percent non-Jews who are living in Israel, who are mostly Palestinians, and who are part of the Palestinian people. By accepting the Israeli plan that they are a Jewish state, we are undermining the rights of this minority, who are already suffering discrimination at the hands of the Israeli authorities.

Doesn’t the U.N. partition resolution on which you base your own national claims for a Palestinian state already recognize Israel as a state for the Jews—a Jewish state?

The partition plan of 1947, which I talked about yesterday at my speech at Columbia, did give 54 percent, 55 percent to a Jewish state, and 45 percent to an Arab state. The Arabs rejected that. Israel launched war and won the war, and they expanded their territory from 55 to 78, but the only time in my memory that a Jewish state was really mentioned was in the partition plan 181. Does Israel want us to go back to that? Fine.

So, you refuse to call Israel a Jewish state, but if they gave you more land it would be OK?

We’d be getting double the amount of land. Who would refuse that? But do you really want to turn that now into a political maneuver by trying to put forth a condition that you know in advance the Palestinians are not going to accept? The real issues are: ending the conflict, ending the Israeli military occupation, allowing the Palestinians to be independent, and providing security for Israel.

When you imagine a future Palestinian state, do you imagine it being a place where Jews, if they wish to become Palestinian citizens, could own property, vote in elections, and practice their religion freely?

I remember in the mid-’90s, the late [PLO official] Faisal Husseini said repeatedly “OK, if Israelis choose to stay in a future Palestinian state, they are more than welcome to do that. But under one condition: They have to respect and obey Palestinian laws, they cannot be living as Israelis. They have to respect Palestinian laws and abide by them.” When Faisal Husseini died, basically no Palestinian leader has publicly supported the notion that they can stay.

What we are saying is the following: We need to separate. We have to separate. We are in a forced marriage. We need to divorce. After we divorce, and everybody takes a period of time to recoup, rebound, whatever you want to call it, we may consider dating again.

So, you think it would be necessary to first transfer and remove every Jew—

Absolutely. No, I’m not saying to transfer every Jew, I’m saying transfer Jews who, after an agreement with Israel, fall under the jurisdiction of a Palestinian state.

Any Jew who is inside the borders of Palestine will have to leave?

Absolutely. I think this is a very necessary step, before we can allow the two states to somehow develop their separate national identities, and then maybe open up the doors for all kinds of cultural, social, political, economic exchanges, that freedom of movement of both citizens of Israelis and Palestinians from one area to another. You know you have to think of the day after.

I’ve been traveling to the region since I was a child, and one of the things that I’ve noticed is that in the 1970s and 1980s Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs knew each other much better than they do now.

Following the Israeli occupation in 1967, the police station in my hometown of Jericho was headed by an Israeli police commander. I remember one time I went with two of my friends to a nearby Israeli settlement in Jericho, back in the ‘80s, to visit some Israelis who used to come to the shop and buy things from us. We’d have coffee and tea. The struggle was not crystallized yet.

I remember when I traveled to Europe in the late ’70s, and to the United States in the early ’80s, yes, we thought of ourselves as Palestinians, but we were traveling with Jordanian passports. Publicly we are Jordanians, but deep inside we are Palestinians.

That’s how many Jews feel about the passports that they carry.

I understand. When I talk to people about Israel’s obsession with security, I say I believe it’s genuine. I know that the Israelis exaggerate it. But I believe in many aspects it is genuine. I understand the horrific experience that Jews had during the Holocaust, but then I sit and say—

Your father didn’t do it.

Exactly. I am not the one. It was Germany. Germany was part of the Western community. I don’t want to get into religion, but they were Christians, not Muslims. Why should I pay the price for the political movement called Zionism, which said, “It’s time to reclaim parts of Palestinian territory that at one point were home for the kingdom of David, of Israel”—which you and I know was concentrated in the northern part of the West Bank. It never was in Jerusalem, it never was on the coast, it never was in Hebron.

Of course it was in Jerusalem.

No.

The City of David is right there.

No, I mean, it was from Shechem to the outskirts of Jerusalem. It was never the Palestine that they claim.

Continue reading: rockets, refugees, and “the idea that me and my family will come and live in your house.” Or view as a single page.

• Speaking of which, the United States is reportedly pressuring President Abbas not to leave the talks even should West Bank building start up when the freeze expires later this month. [Haaretz]

• Meanwhile, the problem with Hamas’ attacks (and pledged attacks), beyond them themselves, is that they represent broader division among the Palestinian people over the attractiveness of peace talks, including among Palestinian Authority leadership. [WSJ]

• Want your West Bank microcosm? It’s Hebron. [LAT]

• Influential columnist Ari Shavit asks whether we should be aiming for an interim deal rather than a comprehensive, final one. [Haaretz]

• Four Orthodox members of a Shomrim Patrol were shot last night in Boro Park; all survived. [NYT]

At one point in my recent interviews with Israeli President Shimon Peres, I ask him why his mentor David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, in choosing among many promising young men of his circle, selected Peres as his aide. Perhaps motivated by modesty, the 87-year-old Peres doesn’t offer a clear explanation. But without doubt, the “old man,” as Ben-Gurion was often called, had spotted the youngster’s oratorical and intellectual brilliance, which has entranced world leaders, though not always the Israeli public.

At home, Peres’ persona was shrouded for decades in a pall of popular distrust. He lacked credibility among many Israelis—which explains, in part, his inability to win general and internal Labor Party elections. Rabin repeatedly beat him, in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, in contests for the Labor leadership. One result of the bad blood between the two was that Rabin called Peres an “indefatigable underminer” (hatran bilti nil’eh), a description Peres thought unjustified. But the charge stuck and thereafter shadowed his political career. Though the two men apparently worked well together during Rabin’s second premiership, in 1992-1995, when Peres served as foreign minister, Peres proved unable to shake off their troubled history. Rabin’s martyrdom reinforced what he had left behind as his legacy. Peres eventually, only on his second try, won the presidency—not by popular majority but by Knesset vote.

How deeply he believes in his oft-proclaimed vision of a “new Middle East” after a decade of disappointment and terror is anyone’s guess. The hard core of “Mr. Security” surely remains: Hamas rocketeers and Turkish “peace flotillas,” and, possibly, Iranian nuclear madmen need to be forcibly contained and faced down. Beneath his polished, world-weary exterior, he is still the ex-defense minister who believes that for a stable Israel, security concerns must take the highest priority and that any chance of peace is ultimately contingent on Israel’s strength, and he seems to carry considerable clout as adviser and elder statesman with the current brood of politicians, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Despite his repeated failures to win election as prime minister, Peres is now a highly popular president, distanced from the daily toil of politics in the largely ceremonial head-of-state role, with a steady 78 percent public approval rating.

I interview Peres in his office, seated around a coffee table. He wears a suit and tie, about which he complains (“I meet diplomats all day”). His media adviser, Ayelet Frish, and her assistant sit with us throughout the two interviews, which were conducted in the Presidential Mansion in Jerusalem’s Talbiyeh quarter in early July and lasted for approximately 80 minutes each. Ayelet occasionally interjects, “That’s off the record,” when she feels her boss has said something excessively revealing. I’m not sure he remembers that I had interviewed him in the past, when I worked at the Jerusalem Post in the 1980s and he was Israel’s foreign minister. I can clearly picture a briefing he gave to journalists accompanying him to Alexandria, where he was to visit Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak. Peres had sat in an armchair in the center of his hotel room, and the journalists were draped over assorted chairs or seated on the carpet. I remember that he was brilliant. A quarter of a century on, he appears more tired, his voice weaker; perhaps altogether not quite as sharp.

I ask him about the 1948 war, in which some 700,000 Arabs fled or were driven out of the area that became the Jewish state. (Over the past three decades, I have written extensively about the war, devoting three books to the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem in 1947-1949. Peres, as far as I know, has never publicly commented on my books—though I have sensed, over the years, a certain displeasure on his part with my findings, which many viewed as critical of Israel and Ben-Gurion.)

A few months ago, I was pleasantly surprised to receive a handwritten letter from him praising a highly critical review I had written of a book by an anti-Israeli British historian. (At the start of our first interview earlier this month, Peres commented on my recent book, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, saying it highlighted for him the failings of personal memory. But he did not elaborate.) The war ended with Israel having an Arab minority of some 160,000, representing 15-20 percent of its citizenry. Today, Israel’s Arab minority, 1.3 million strong, identify themselves as Palestinians, occasionally riot, and support Israel’s enemies during bouts of hostilities (as when Israel fought Lebanon’s Hezbollah in 2006 and Hamas in Gaza in 2008-2009).

Morris: Perhaps ending the 1948 war with this demographic was a mistake?

Peres: No, moral considerations took priority over demographic considerations. Ben-Gurion knew that every war and conflict takes place twice—once on the battlefield and then in the history books. He didn’t want things to be written in the history books that were in dissonance with the foundations of Judaism. He really believed that without a moral priority there is no existence for the Jewish people. To expel he saw as contrary to his moral values.

But in 1948 he sometimes gave orders to expel.

He did not give orders to expel.

I suggest that Ben-Gurion did in fact give such orders, as when, on July 12, 1948, he authorized the expulsion of Arab inhabitants of the towns of Lydda and Ramleh on the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road. Peres shakes his head. “I remember sitting in the room, when the matter of the expulsion of the Arabs from Haifa began, when Ben-Gurion telephoned [Labor Party strongman, later Haifa mayor] Abba Khoushi and told him to do all he could to get the Arabs to stay [in Haifa]. I heard this myself. I was there.” (It is worth noting that the Arabs of Haifa were not expelled but fled the city at the end of April 1948, due in part to a decision of the local Arab leadership.)

Next: The first decade of the Jewish state

• Israel’s plans to landmark two Biblical sites in the West Bank led to further skirmishes, as well as the Israeli police entering al-Aqsa mosque in the Temple Mount. [WSJ]

• Dubai police officials disclosed that Hamas weapons man Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, who was killed January 19th (by, most believe, the Mossad), died after being injected with a powerful muscle relaxant and asphyxiated. We’ll have much more on the Dubai Murder Mystery later today. [NYT]

• A rift between Hamas’s Syria-based leadership and its Gaza branch has been exacerbated by disagreements over the negotiations for Gilad Shalit, the captured Israeli soldier. [Haaretz]

• David Bankier, a Holocaust scholar at Yad Vashem, died. The 63-year-old had pioneered the study of ordinary Europeans’ cooperation with the Nazis. [NYT]

• A glass ceiling at a Manhattan hotel collapsed during a Purim party, injuring 10 guests. “Omg roof just collapsed at the purim event!” Tweeted Jersey Shore star Snooki. “We thought the dj was beatin the beat hardcore but nope, the roof couldn’t handle snooki and vin.” Welcome back from the weekend, folks! [NY Post/Vos Iz Neias?]

• U.S. Adm. Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress that no military strike could completely halt Iran’s nuclear weapons program. [Haaretz]

• Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman dodged E.U. questions over Mossad’s suspected assassination of Hamas’s chief weapons man, which involved the use of forged European passports. A complete update of the story will follow on The Scroll today. [AP/WSJ]

• Defense Minister Ehud Barak heads for America today for security discussions with senior U.S. officials as well as a meeting with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. [Haaretz]

• Rabbi Menachem Porush, head of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism political party, died at 93. [AP/NYT]

• Roman and Alexandra Zaretsky, the Israeli ice dancing duo, finished in 10th place in the Vancouver Olympics after skating, last night, to the theme from Schindler’s List (here’s video). [JTA]

Frankel was born in Berlin in 1918, the daughter of an affluent family of assimilated Jews. She lost her mother when she was two years old and her father, a textile manufacturer and an officer in the German army, shortly thereafter. Sensing the looming catastrophe, concerned relatives sent her to Palestine in 1933.

She arrived there, an angry and confused 15-year-old, and found solace in Hashomer Ha’tzair, the socialist youth movement, and the Palmach, the pre-army Jewish militia fighting for the nascent state’s birth. When the War of Independence broke out in 1948, Frankel, then a woman in her thirties, rushed to join in the battle. “I shot,” she reminisced to an Israeli newspaper later in life, “and I killed.”

After the war, Frankel settled down on a kibbutz, spending half of her week working in the fields and the other half writing. She had a husband, a home, and a nation she’d helped deliver, but her mind wandered back to the broad boulevards of Berlin. Her first novel, a multi-volume opus titled Saul and Johanna, was an attempt to reconstruct the world that was ravaged by Hitler, a universe of Jews unburdened by the spiritual yoke of millennia and of Germans grasping for a path back to greatness after the ravages of World War I.

Frankel traveled to Berlin, revisited her childhood streets, spoke to old friends. She was devastated to learn that even some of those who weren’t overtly anti-Semitic found solace and hope in the Nazis’ pomp and parades. It was all the insight she needed into the human psyche, and it infused her novel with a steely, if elegant, determination. By the book’s end, Germany becomes less a specific nation grounded in a particular reality and more a metaphor for Jewish history itself, a tidal wave of hatred and persecution that can only be contained by the forces of Zionism and the borders of a strong and free Israel.

When it was published in 1957, the first installment of Saul and Johanna enjoyed critical praise, and many expected Frankel to become a force in the nation’s burgeoning literary scene. She never did. For the most part, her contemporaries had little use for the tragedies of German Jewry; they needed authors like Moshe Shamir or poets like Haim Guri, chroniclers of Israel’s home-brewed bravery, mythmakers who enshrined the here and the now. No one wanted to hear about Germany. No one cared for the Diaspora.

Soon enough, then, Frankel shifted her focus, and began writing about Israel’s warriors, the brazen, bronzed men whose military antics were the stuff of legend. In a way, it was a logical step to take—having put the embers of Europe behind her, she now concerned herself with the raging fires of Israel. Impressed with her commitment to military affairs, the Israel Defense Forces offered her a position; at 41, a recent widow, she put on a uniform and began covering the army’s operations during the late 1960s and early ‘70s.

Her new job had a profound effect on Frankel. The socialist ethos of the kibbutz movement, in whose ideological glow she comforted herself since childhood, began to fade in her mind. Communal living and left-wing politics began to seem strange, misplaced, too reminiscent of the same brand of universalism to which so many German Jews subscribed before the fall. She left the kibbutz, moved to Tel Aviv, and made the army her life.

It, too, let her down. Witnessing the near-debacle of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, she became disillusioned with the state of the nation. Israelis, she wrote, were “a people gnawed by destruction and decay,” led by aging leftists who had lost sight of Zionism’s true meaning. Having witnessed one community of self-deceiving Jews en route to ruin, she refused to witness another, and sought solace in religion. Israelis, she thought, were as guilty as German Jews of abandoning Judaism in favor of more modern ideologies, an original sin for which a nation was usually punished by death.

“I think that something very difficult is happening to the Jewish people in the land of Israel,” she said in an interview in the early 1980s. “This secular state won’t be around for a long time. I don’t believe in it. I see it slowly unraveling.”

Tel Aviv, of course, was no city for anyone turning her back on secular Israeli life. Frankel left town, resigned her position in the army, and moved to Kiryat Arba, a Jewish settlement near Hebron. There, she gradually became both religious and a right-wing ideologue. In 1988, for example, after the first Palestinian intifada erupted, Frankel gave a speech stating that because Palestinian women and children participated in the hostilities against the IDF, they should be seen “not as women and children but as those who come to kill us” and must therefore be preemptively killed themselves.

That last sentence, a paraphrase of a well-known rabbinic dictum, demonstrated just how far the daughter of the enlightenment and the author who sought insight in psychological motives had traveled. From that point on, whenever Frankel wrote or spoke, she did so, most often, with the fiery passion and the loaded language of the biblical prophets.

“My spirit and my soul were set ablaze,” she wrote in one typical passage, “and the spark that burned within me was stronger than fear itself. I was awarded a pure moment that shall never again wither away. The sunlight shone bright through the fog and the heat, and it was my own rainbow, the sign of the covenant between Hebron and myself.”

More than anything, the universalist-turned-socialist-turned-Zionist craved roots, and she found them in the town where Abraham was buried. For all of its discord and contention, life in Hebron gave her what Berlin and the kibbutz and Tel Aviv never could, a sliver of sacred earth, a sense of place.

It came at a price. For the most part, the Israeli literary elite, predominantly secular, saw Frankel’s transformation as a slow descent into fanaticism and the false comforts of dogma. She was now considered a settler, not a writer, and very few bothered reading her later work. They missed much. Her last book, published in 2003, is a history of the Jewish community in Hebron, ending with the massacre of 67 Jews, in 1929, by vengeful Arab militants; researching the book, Frankel, by this point an octogenarian, interviewed survivors of the old community in Hebron and wove together a rich and artful tapestry of daily life in one of history’s most ancient Jewish towns. Subtle as it was, the book’s context was hard to escape: in Hebron, Frankel discovered a town that existed before Zionism and that, taking its strength from its adherence to the Bible and its covenants, would exist long after the secular Jewish state collapses.

But she was destined to move once again. Her request, upon her death, was to be buried back in the kibbutz, next to the long-deceased husband she had loved. Being near him mattered to her more than any of the ideologies that attracted and disappointed her in life. In dying, Naomi Frankel finally found a home.

As soon as the visitors arrive in the city, they are instantly ringed by more than one hundred police officers, who buffer them from local Jewish settlers harassing the group.

“The gay pride parade isn’t here,” shouts a boy in a tee shirt, yarmulke, and tzitzit.

“You say you are humanists, but you’re fascists,” a bearded man screams into a megaphone.

Manekin and Shaul don’t answer; instead, Shaul keeps talking to his small group, his voice barely rising above the crowd of settlers heckling him.

The West Bank city of Hebron has long been notorious for the brutality between Jews and Palestinians, numbering 1,000 and 166,000 respectively. But lately the city has become a battleground between two groups of Israelis led by Orthodox Jews, waging what each sees as an epic struggle over the physical and moral borders of the future Jewish state. Instead of truncheons and guns, the weapons are tour buses and megaphones.

“Our state has to decide to be here or not,” say Shaul, who is twenty-five. “But one of the things we think can’t happen is this injustice.” He’s talking about the restrictions on Palestinian life, the focus of the eleven-dollar tours of Hebron, which depart from Jerusalem once a week, led by Shovrim Shtika.

After a walk down the main avenue of Jewish Hebron, a silent street that was once the commercial center of the city, Manekin and Shaul take groups to visit a Palestinian family, and then to the grave of Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli-American settler who, in 1994, shot twenty-nine Muslims in the city’s Tomb of the Patriarchs before being killed by a mob.

Mikhael Manekin of Shovrim Shtika in Hebron

I met Manekin in a café in Jerusalem’s Talpiyot neighborhood, where he lives with his wife and infant daughter. Earnest and quick to smile, Manekin, who is twenty-nine, wears a yarmulke over closely trimmed black hair and a neat, short beard. He grew up in Maryland, with an American father and Israeli mother, and moved to Israel in time to be drafted in 1998. He began to question Israel’s treatment of Palestinians during his four years as a soldier.

“You can’t be a benevolent occupier,” says Manekin. “Most of [Shovrim Shtika's] soldiers were the people who came in to do things differently, who had moral qualms. And all of them failed. We are not [in Hebron] to make the situation more calm, we’re in there to make it known.”

Manekin says his group tries to reach Israeli teenagers who will soon be drafted. The organization also caters to other Israelis – journalists, parliamentarians, and ordinary citizens, with additional days for foreign media and politicians. In 2007, Shovrim Shtika brought three thousand visitors to the city. “We target the Jewish audiences because we think they have a stake in this conflict,” he says.

Yet, to the settlers who choose to live in Hebron, these activists are putting sympathy for the Palestinians above the plight of the city’s Jews, past and present.

On a warm Wednesday in May, New York transplant Simcha Hochbaum speaks to a group of twenty-four tourists beside a yellow plastic jungle gym in Jewish Hebron.

“Let’s forget about politics,” Hochbaum, who is forty-one, tells the group, as behind him a settler leaves a caravan clutching a small boy, two bike helmets, and a machine gun. “Let’s talk about Abraham.” He speaks rapidly, peppering his spiel with jokes about Ruth collecting food stamps and young King David taking Ritalin.

Hochbaum guides these tours through the settlement’s fundraising body, the Hebron Fund. Tours cost forty dollars and depart from a Jerusalem hotel once a week during the year and twice a week in summer. But those aren’t the only differences from the tours led by Shovrim Shtika.

Hochbaum paints Hebron as a place where Jews have always lived, were brutally evicted, and finally bravely replanted themselves. His itinerary includes the Tomb of the Patriarchs, built on land Abraham bought in the Bible and said to contain the remains of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and their wives. The group also visits a memorial room for the 1929 massacre of Hebron, in which the city’s Arabs slaughtered their Jewish neighbors. And Hochbaum visits a wall dedicated to Shalhevet Pass, an infant shot by a Palestinian sniper in 2001, and says he named his daughter after the slain child.

Hebron is the only Palestinian city with an Israeli settlement inside it. In addition to being Abraham’s first purchase in Biblical Israel, Hebron also served briefly as King David’s capital, and Jews are said to have lived there peacefully since. However, after sixty-seven Jews perished in the 1929 massacre, the rest of the community left and in 1948, Hebron passed to Jordan.

When Israel won the Six-Day War, and with it Hebron, religious Israeli nationalists saw a chance to renew the Jewish community. They moved first to the adjacent town of Kiryat Arba, and eventually into the historic Jewish quarter of the city in 1979.

Noam Arnon, spokesperson of the Hebron settlers, protesting the Shovrim Shtika tour

Hebron Spokesperson Noam Arnon is a prime example of the pull of the city. As a twelve-year-old in a secular suburb of Raanana, Arnon was captivated by Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War and the many religious artifacts dotting the newly-conquered West Bank. Six years later, he moved to Kiryat Arba, and finally settled in Hebron, where today he lives with his wife and eight children.

“We came here to Palestine only because of the history,” says Arnon, who is fifty-three and has a master’s in Jewish history from Hebrew University. “And history begins in Hebron.”

“All the Jewish sites were destroyed. The Jewish quarter was a dump and public toilet and a cattle path,” says Arnon, who led excavations in the synagogue. “Everything stank. The Jewish cemetery was destroyed, and on it was a garden for trees, and grapes and vegetables.”

The settlers of Hebron rededicated the synagogue and moved into formerly Jewish buildings. But the animosity from 1929 never wore off, and Jews and Arabs continued to inflict such brutal casualties on each other that in 1997, Israel and the Palestinians divided the city, assigning eighty percent to Palestinians, twenty percent to Israel, and forbidding each side from entering the other.

But this plan has a serious catch: the Jewish section’s borders included thirty-five thousand Palestinian residents. Since 2000, the IDF has declared parts of this area “sterile,” meaning Palestinians cannot drive, open shops, or sometimes even walk on sections of the main road”known to Jews as King David Street and to Arabs as the Street of the Martyrs”in the place where they live.

Although he has seen it hundreds of times, Manekin says the Street of the Martyrs still shocks him. It’s a long, dusty road, lined on either side by old stone two-story apartment buildings, where rusting green steel awnings hang over shuttered green steel doors that are spray-painted with Jewish stars and the Hebrew word for revenge. Up above, Palestinians sit on second-story balconies enclosed with metal netting, which Manekin explains is defense from settlers who throw rocks their way. Because the IDF welded their front doors shut, these families must clamber out their windows and walk across rooftops until they reach the section of the street where their feet may touch the ground.

“There’s something about that Star of David on that door which is very sickening,” says Manekin. “The idea that [Jewish] people walk around freely and other people are caged up on their second floor and that’s being upheld by the Star of David . . . That’s the point where no excuse can excuse it.”

Arnon doesn’t see things that way.

“The rebuilding of Hebron is the most right and just idea in the world,” Arnon says, and mentions that he regularly gets stones thrown at his house and car, including one that shattered his living room window three months ago. For him, evacuating Hebron is not option.

Anyone who tries to evacuate Jews from the city “will not get out alive,” Arnon says. “And they don’t have the right to do it. The Jewish community of Hebron had existed here before the state of Israel. Jews lived here under Herod and under the Crusaders and under Mamluks and under Byzantines, and Jews will live here anyhow and anyway under any condition.”

Street of the Martyrs/King David Street, Hebron

On his tours, Hochbaum refers to Palestinian Hebron as “the eighty percent unfortunately given away,” and laments that Jews must share the other twenty percent with thousands of Arabs. Manekin and Shaul, for their part, speak of Hebron’s slain Jews, but mostly on the bus ride in.

The target audience for the settler tour is North Americans who are sympathetic to the Jews of Hebron. One Christian minister says she is outraged by large Palestinian homes within a stone’s throw of cramped Jewish caravans. A Jewish father and daughter are regulars to the city’s annual Passover celebrations; the family’s thirteen-year-old girl recently asked Bat Mitzvah guests to contribute to Hebron. Hochbaum’s tour is in English, and emphasizes this fundraising aspect.

“We are here every day putting ourselves on the line as messengers and emissaries and it’s not easy,” he says to his group.

The Shovrim Shtika trip, by contrast, is in Hebrew. Although there are a few Americans, the majority of participants are young Israelis from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, mostly well-dressed and erudite. Several Israelis are home on vacation from European universities.

“You can’t help being shocked and disgusted by the violence that is present in every sentence [the settlers say],” says Itay Snir, 33, a high school philosophy teacher from Tel Aviv. “It’s racism all the time toward the Palestinian residents.”

Hebron is just one part of the rift between Israel’s right and left, who are carrying out a modern-day incarnation of a decades-old debate about how to be a Jew.

The first Zionists who moved to Israel were eager to shed their weak and pale personas in favor of a strong New Jew, embodied by the charismatic, fictional Ari Ben Canaan in the film Exodus. Ben Canaan helps defeat Arab enemies and shepherds Holocaust survivors to safety in the new land, operating in a world of clear right and wrong. Arnon sees the world in a similar way.

“To make propaganda against the Jewish people and against the Jewish community in Hebron, and against the army, which is the Jewish state, and to make this propaganda and to bring here foreign journalists and diplomats, this is anti Jewish,” he says of Shovrim Shtika.

“I know the Jewish history from the beginning, and I know that every generation is writing a new page in this very old book,” Arnon adds. “I try to do my best that the page our generation writes will be a page of continuing the heritage and not a page of betrayal and abandonment of our roots and nationhood and history.”

But Manekin, who refuses to give his ideas for how to solve the problems of Hebron, sees a world with fewer clear answers.

“I don’t feel like what bothers me is nationalist questions,” he says. “Religion is very much a part of my life, and being a Jew is very much part of my life. And it bugs me. It bothers me that Judaism is used to promote hate, forcefulness, and callousness. The Judaism of my family is one of being gentle.”

And the fact that he and Yehuda Shaul are Orthodox only exacerbates the conflict between them and the settlers. “We’re all religious zealots,” he says. “We all think that we know what’s right.”