On a February day in 1994 a terrorist fired an assault rifle into a crowd of
worshippers at one of Israel's holiest sites. When the shooting was over, 29
people lay dead, not including the attacker, and more than a hundred were
injured. The perpetrator was an American-born Jew; a medical doctor by
the name of Baruch Goldstein. His victims were Arabs worshipping at the Cave of
the Patriarchs in Hevron, a place holy to both Muslims and Jews. Jews around the
world were quick to condemn Goldstein's horrific and indefensible act but they
couldn't fully distance themselves from it. Goldstein was an Israeli citizen, a
proud Zionist, and someone who identified with the religious community.
Now, we'll never know exactly what drove Goldstein to do what he did, but his
actions demanded a reckoning from the nation he considered himself a part of.
Did they bear some sort of responsibility as Jews for what
Goldstein did and after a murderous act that shocked the national conscience,
where were they supposed to go from there?
Baruch Goldstein was born in 1956 in Brooklyn New York to an Orthodox Jewish
family. He received a Jewish education and
eventually earned a medical degree from Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
Later he joined the Jewish Defense League or JDL a radical organization
founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane whom Goldstein had known since childhood. The
JDLs stated purpose was to combat anti-semitism but their methods were
sometimes violent and often illegal. In 1982, Goldstein emigrated to Israel. There
he served as an emergency physician in the Israeli army and settled in Kiryat
Arba a small Jewish community bordering Chevron. He also reconnected with Kahane
and the two developed a close relationship.
Goldstein became an active member of Cach a political party Kahane had founded
about a decade earlier. In Israel Kahane found an audience among ordinary Jews.
Some Jewish Israelis were convinced that Palestinians and Arabs in the
surrounding countries would never agree to live in peace with a Jewish state.
They appreciated Kahane's tough stance against territorial concessions and his
plain talking style, but for many his zeal to achieve his goals by any means
necessary went too far. For example he was implicated in conspiracies to kidnap
a Soviet diplomat and bomb the Iraqi embassy in the U.S. In Israel, Kahana was
arrested dozens of times for a variety of offenses including planning attacks
against Palestinians in response to terrorist assaults on Israelis. In 1990
an Egyptian American terrorists assassinated Kahane in New York his
funeral was attended by about 150,000 people which made it one of the largest
in Israel's history. Kahane and Goldstein who viewed the rabbi as his teacher
shared some prominent ideas. Like Kahana, Goldstein rejected the notion that
Israel should be a democratic state. Goldstein argued that if at some point
the Arab vote outnumbered the Jewish vote Israel wouldn't be a Jewish state
anymore. He also thought Arabs considered the
Jewish people to be their enemies and felt that the government was not doing
enough to protect the Jewish people and the Jewish state from
both internal and external. In the highly-charged atmosphere of Israeli
society in the early 1990s many other Israelis felt the same about their
security. In 1987 Palestinians began a popular mass uprising against Israeli
rule in Gaza and the West Bank a conflict that came to be known as the
First Intifada. Now we have a whole episode on this that you can watch if
you want to learn more about the details. But the terror attacks against Israel
took the lives of approximately 270 Israelis. Israel's attempts to quell the
terror and riots also resulted in the deaths of about 1200 Palestinians. The
First Intifada ended in 1993 with the signing of the Oslo Accords, a set of
agreements between Israel and the Palestinian organization or PLO that
were supposed to lead to an eventual peace treaty. In the past, the PLO had
been a terrorist organization and some feared that even though they had said
they would change their ways these agreements would only lead to an
increase in terror attacks. The fact that the newly created Palestinian Authority
was given limited governance over parts of the West Bank and Gaza only
heightened their concerns. Now we don't have time here to explain the Accords in
detail, but it's worth noting that although many Israeli citizens supported
the Oslo peace process the Oslo Accords faced significant opposition from a
minority of Israelis who felt that no matter how much land was given he would
never result in peace with Palestinians. Now some of those fears were realized
during the years of negotiations when there was a wave of Palestinian terror
attacks against Israel. As time went on, and the attacks continued Israeli
opposition to the Accords increased. The year before Goldstein's rampage, 1993,
saw 26 terror attacks against Israelis the largest number in almost 15 years
and the second highest total in the history of the state. Forty-five people
were murdered, and 1994 was even more deadly with a record of 42 terror
attacks against Israeli citizens. Fear and terror gripped Israeli society. As a
medical doctor, Goldstein was exposed to the trauma of these attacks firsthand
and saw a close friend murdered in 1993. Like I said earlier we're not here to
try and analyze what exactly drove Goldstein to do what he did.
But the political climate and terror gripping the country would only have reinforced
his beliefs in Kahane's more radical ideas, and ultimately he took those ideas
beyond their farthest extremes and turned to violence. The night before he
killed the arab worshipers in the Cave of the Patriarchs, Goldstein himself
prayed in the cave on the Jewish side of the shrine. The holiday of Purim had begun
that evening, and according to those who were there with him Palestinians on the other
side of the partition began to taunt the Jews interrupting their prayers and
screaming that the Jews should be slaughtered. Witnesses said Goldstein
appeared distraught. The next morning Goldstein arrived at
the Cave of the Patriarchs wearing his army uniform and entered a room where
many Palestinians were praying. He began shooting killing 29 and injuring more
than a hundred others before he was overcome by the crowd and beaten to
death. In June 1994 a government inquiry into the massacre concluded the
Goldstein acted alone. It also concluded that Israeli police
had no reason to be suspicious of his presence there. They knew him as a doctor
and the reserve officer saw him often at the site for morning prayers and had
received no prior intelligence suggesting the possibility of a Jewish
attack. The inquiry did cite poor coordination between the IDF, the police,
and Chevron's civil administration, as well as faulty security equipment as
contributing factors in the failure to prevent the massacre. Immediately after
the shooting there was widespread rioting and protests by Palestinians.
Youth at the al-aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem threw rocks at
police stationed below hundreds of rioters attempted to attack Jewish worshippers
at the Western Wall with police firing tear gas and rubber bullets to push back
the crowd. During the following week 26 Palestinians and 9 Israelis lost
their lives in the violence. Muslim religious leaders in Israel and across
the Arab world issued calls for revenge attacks against Jews and many such
attacks were carried out against Israeli civilians over the next few months.
Meanwhile the Israeli government and the entire Jewish world didn't hesitate to
immediately condemn the Chevron attack. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin
called Goldstein an embarrassment to Judaism
and in a telephone call to PLO leader Yasser Arafat he referred to the attack
as a loathsome criminal act of murder. The government also took swift and
decisive action against Jewish extremist groups in the West Bank. It arrested
followers of Kahane, issued detention orders against individuals deemed
threats to public security, demanded that certain settlers turn in their weapons,
and barred those same settlers from entering Arab towns. In addition, Cach and
Kahane Chai, the two branches of the Cach party that emerged after Kahane's death
were now officially designated as racist and outlawed. As for the city of Chevron
itself a policy was put into place that separated the 450 israelis who lived
there from the 120,000 Palestinian residents. The Israeli government also
offered financial assistance to Goldstein's victims. Among the Jewish
religious community the overwhelming response was one of condemnation
revulsion and shame. Dozens of Israeli rabbis, many from the settlement
communities themselves, signed a letter saying that there can be no forgiveness
for the murder of people at prayer. The chief rabbi of Great Britain
Jonathan Sacks wrote that it was an obscenity and a travesty of Jewish
values saying that violence against those engaged in worshiping God is
unspeakably evil. But the response also revealed an uncomfortable divide in the
religious Jewish world. Although the overwhelming majority condemned
Goldstein's actions, there were still a thousand people who attended his funeral,
and the heads of the Yeshivas in Kiryat Arba eulogized him with full honors.
The mainstream leaders protested this vehemently. One prominent rabbi, Rav
Aharon Lichtenstein wrote there should be a clear protest which expresses not just
disassociation but also disgust and shock. We must do so not to protect our
public image but to preserve our self image. In other words it's not about how
others will think of us after this horrific attack
it's about our own conception of who and what we are and more importantly what we
are not. No matter what precipitated it, the
massacre was a crime beyond comprehension and both the memory and
the legacy of this episode have proved to be enduring. In the short term there
were more terror attacks against Israel in response. Little more than a month
after the Chevron Massacre a Palestinian drove a vehicle filled with explosives
next to a crowded bus stop in Afula Israel. As the passengers began to board
the bus he detonated an explosive device killing himself and eight others. Hamas
claimed responsibility calling it retaliation for the Chevron Massacre.
Goldstein's actions challenged those who said that the problem of terrorism was
exclusively on the Palestinian or Arab side. One year later Yigal Amir, a Jew who
like Goldstein also identified with the religious Zionist movement, assassinated
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. These alarming incidents raised the specter of
Jewish terrorism and begged the question: were the murders an indication of a
serious problem in Israeli society, perhaps a breakdown of communication
between different communities, or a failure to take note of radicalism and
deal with it decisively? Goldstein's grave in Kiryat Arba has long
served as a pilgrimage site for his supporters and his tombstone describes
him as someone who was blameless and upright. But those supporters are very
much a tiny minority and at least one thing is clear: Jewish terrorism as a
phenomenon is very rare and typically a reaction to some major external threat
such as waves of Terror against Israel. It has also been effectively stopped in
most cases by the work of Israeli intelligence services. It is difficult to
say if national extremism in Israel is a peripheral issue or not because we can't
definitively measure the influence and the activity of extremists. What we can
say though is this: when a Jew carries out an act of terror Israeli officials
condemn it in the strongest terms and most Israelis are ashamed if not
outraged. They don't celebrate even if others have celebrated attacks against
Israel. The Israeli community doesn't make the terrorist a martyr and they
don't call for more attacks. Earlier on we quoted Rav Aharon
Liechtenstein who said that our protest at terror attacks like this must be so
powerful that it expresses the total revulsion that we feel. In his words,
disgust and shock. In the end that's one of the most important ways to make sure
tragedies like this never happen again. To be willing to confront evil even when
it's beyond comprehension. Thanks for watching, see you guys next week.