raharris1973
Well-known member
I appreciate the importance of Hebron, for its historic and Biblical reasons, and I am not surprised. But wherever in the newly occupied territory there was a great emotional or personal connection, it was a big deal, and there were spontaneous actions racing ahead of any specific General Staff or Eshkol government plan. The picture IDF soldiers kneeling in prayer at the Wailing Wall was an electrifying image for Israeli Jews and Diaspora Jews, and sympathizers, worldwide. Pulling teeth is an insufficient metaphor for what it would have taken to get any withdrawal of the Israelis from the Old City after that. Within 48 hours, certainly no more than a week, of the occupation of East Jerusalem, former, pre-1948 Jewish East Jerusalemites showed up to reclaim some homes and street corners, and this was accompanied by bulldozing some Arab homes built in the meantime, according to Gershom Gorenberg's 'Accidental Empire'. In total, there was not *much* continuity restored of specific Jewish families expelled in '48 who returned to East Jerusalem in 1967, but they were the initial wedge for Jewish Israeli resettlement in general in the reunited, and extended, municipality. Similarly, within a very short time, former residents of the Etzion bloc of kibbutzim/settlements which had been evacuated or destroyed in 1948 petitioned to go back and rebuild. So, these, along with the Hebron effort, and some "strategic" settlement outposts in the Jordan Valley, consistent with the "Allon Plan" were part of the demographically and geographically small footprint of the first decade or so of the Israeli settlement effort, that expanded more later.