The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, June 3, 2024

Editorial Notebook: At 5:05 a.m. on Feb. 25, 1995, Benjamin Goldstein, also known as Baruch Goldstein, the Brooklyn physician who migrated to live in the illegal Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba, a hothouse of Gush Emunim and other vigilantist anti-Palestinian extremism, entered the Ibrahimi Mosque, also known as the Cave of the Patriarch, in Hebron, where some 800 Muslim worshippers had gathered for prayer. “I’m in charge here and I have to go in,” he said, shoving the sentry aside. He had often been to the mosque to cause trouble. So he was not a stranger there. First he threw a hand grenade into the crowd. Then, with his Israeli-issued Uzi, he emptied four magazines into the crowd until, at 5:15 a.m., while he was loading his fifth magazine, a worshiper smashed his head with a fire extinguisher, knocking him to the ground. Others stomped and beat him until he was dead. He had killed 29 people and wounded 125 in the single greatest act of an Israeli’s mass murder of Palestinians, at least by a single Israeli (the figure pales compared to state terrorism), since 1967. Rabin and Arafat were solidifying the Oslo Accords at the time, with Bill Clinton pretending to help. “The murderer from Hebron opened fire on innocent people, but intended to kill the making of peace. His aim was political,” Rabin said in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, three days after the massacre. He pledged to stick to the peace accords. He said Goldstein “emerged from a small and limited political sector in the people. He grew up in a swamp that has its sources in foreign lands as well as here; they are alien to Judaism, they are not part of us. To him and his ill we say today: You are not part of the community of Israel. You are not part of the national democratic camp to which all of us here in this house are partner, and very many in the nation loathe you. You are not partner to the Zionist deed. You are a foreign body, you are pernicious weeds. Sane Jewry vomits you from its midst. You have placed yourselves out of the bounds of Jewish law. You are a disgrace to Zionism and a blot on Judaism.” Now, I ask you: what, of the words of Rabin, could not be said today of Benjamin Netanyahu, or Itamar Ben-Gvir, or any of those applauding the genocide in Gaza? Incidentally, until Goldstein’s mass murders, Hamas had abided by a prohibition on harming civilians. As Zaki Shehab writes in Inside Hamas, “Raed Zakarneh became the first Hamas suicide bomber. He drove a bomb (wired up with explosives by [Yahya] Ayyash) to a bus stop at Afula and detonated it, killing eight Israelis and injuring forty-four. Ayyash, who was sad to lose Raed for the cause, promised that this was just the tip of the iceberg for what he had planned.” Ayyash was Hamas’s chief bomb-maker. His bombs took the lives of some 90 Israelis before Shin Bet assassinated him in 1996. 

—P.T.

 

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… Ben-Gvir, who had been convicted multiple times for supporting terrorist organizations and, in front of television cameras in 1995, vaguely threatened the life of Rabin, who was murdered weeks later by an Israeli student named Yigal Amir. […] One ultranationalist settler who went regularly to Goldstein’s grave was a teenage radical named Itamar Ben-Gvir, who would sometimes gather other followers there on Purim to celebrate the slain killer. Purim revelers often dress in costume, and on one such occasion, caught on video, Ben-Gvir even wore a Goldstein costume, complete with a fake beard and a stethoscope. By then, Ben-Gvir had already come to the attention of the Jewish Department, and investigators interrogated him several times. The military declined to enlist him into the service expected of most Israeli citizens. After the massacre at the Cave of the Patriarchs, a new generation of Kahanists directed their anger squarely at Rabin for his signing of the Oslo agreement and for depriving them, in their view, of their birthright. […] Days after assuming his own new position, Ben-Gvir ordered the police to remove Palestinian flags from public spaces in Israel, saying they “incite and encourage terrorism.”

–From “The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel,” by Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti, New York Times Magazine, May 16, 2024.

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