By Rebecca Park, Contributor
The announcement was simple enough. On February 21, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu extended his government’s national heritage rehabilitation program to include two sites central to Jewish and Zionist history, Rachel’s Tomb near Bethlehem and the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Yet the Israeli attention to the West Bank monuments provoked an explosive reaction in Palestinian and international communities.
Particularly in Hebron, where 500 Jewish settlers live among a population of 170,000 Palestinians, violent rhetoric and actions followed the Israeli announcement. A week of demonstrations climaxed on Sunday at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a sacred shrine for both Jews and Muslims and the site of a mosque and a synagogue, when Palestinian demonstrators attacked tourists and were soon met with an Israeli police raid. No tourists were hurt, though 20 protestors and police officers were injured. Palestinian Cabinet members made a bold move Monday, relocating their weekly meeting from Ramallah to Hebron. The defiant action quelled a week of violence, offering reassurance to the large Palestinian population that political leadership will hold firm. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas generally prefers speaking to terms of diplomacy over mass protests, yet he has warned of the possibility of a “religious war.” Adding to these flames, stalled peace talks create a vacuum of apparent inaction that outside observers fear leave room for increasingly violent responses.
More surprisingly, traditional Israeli allies, including the United States, have spoken against this particular expansion of the Israeli national heritage program. Both the U.S. State Department and Senator John Kerry, on a recent trip to Jerusalem, have vocally deemed the national heritage announcement as provocative and insensitive. More strongly, Catherine Ashton, Foreign Policy Chief of the European Union, has condemned the Israeli action as “detrimental to attempts to relaunch peace negotiations.” This criticism proves especially dangerous as, without the strong support of its allies, Israel is unlikely to commit full-heartedly to another round of peace talks.
The central question, of course, is how and why Netanyahu and his government came to the decision to add these two sites to their national heritage list. Early hesitation on the part of the Israeli prime minister indicates awareness of the possibly volatile situation the announcement would create. Giving into the demands of far right-wing members of his coalition government, Netanyahu surely knew the political implications of the decision, despite his claims that he was more concerned with cultural preservation than nationalist sentiment. So close to resuming peace talks, the national heritage announcement exhibits, at best, political callousness, if not a broader agenda of asserting Israeli cultural homogeneity on the West Bank.
Beyond the realm of this particular moment of violent tension, the decision to extend Israeli national heritage sites indicates the failings of the country’s coalition party. With a moderate prime minister, Israeli-Palestinian peace talks have been a tangible possibility for the first time in years. But as Netanyahu allows the far right and its nationalist rhetoric, dominated by controversial Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman, to steer his country’s conversation with Palestinians and the rest of the world, in affairs cultural and otherwise, this hope is quickly dying.
