Jewish Hebron Market Heir Opposes Settlers

The Jerusalem Post, Tovah Lazaroff, August 26, 2007
The descendent of the Jewish owner of Hebron’s disputed marketplace is left wing, secular and lives in Tel Aviv.

Unlike the Hebron Jews who were forcibly evicted from the marketplace on August 7, retired journalist Haim Hanegbi, 72, does not dream of returning to the city where his family lived for more than 200 years.

There, settlers have placed a large white banner over the empty shops in which they demand: “Return the stolen property.”

They believe that because this marketplace was once owned by Hanegbi’s grandfather, Haim Bejayo, and used by the city’s Jewish community, they have a right to settle the area situated at the entryway to their Avraham Avinu neighborhood.

It’s a claim Hanegbi rejects.

“I have more rights than the settlers and the army,” he told The Jerusalem Post last week.

He wants the marketplace to revert to the Palestinians who made use of it from the 1930s to 1994, when Israel forced them to shut down the shops after Baruch Goldstein, from nearby Kiryat Arba, killed 29 Palestinians as they prayed in a mosque attached to Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs.

For Hanegbi, the issue is greater than the shops that have made headlines over the last month.

He is among a group of 27 descendants of the original Jewish community who believe the government should evacuate all 800 Jewish settlers from Hebron.

“We have to throw them out of Hebron down to the last one,” said Hanegbi.

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Descendants of Hebron’s Jews Say Settlers Don’t Represent Them
WRMEA, 1997
Children and grandchildren of Jews who lived in Hebron before 1948 met with Arab officials in Hebron on Nov. 10 and expressed their solidarity with the estimated 120,000 Arabs who live there. During a meeting with Hebron Mayor Mustafa Natshe, the group’s spokesman, Yosef Ben Yacov Ben Ezra, accused the 450 fanatical settlers in the West Bank city of “smearing the name of the Jews of Hebron” and “harming our relations with our Palestinian neighbors.”

Another member of the group, Haim Hanegbi, whose grandfather was rabbi of the Jewish community in Hebron in 1932, declared that “authentic Hebron Jews have nothing to do with the fanatic settlers who are anti-Arab and anti-peace....We, the Jews of Hebron, declare that only through the people of Hebron, the municipal council and a future Palestinian state, will we be able to recover our rights and reclaim our property in Hebron,” Hanegbi said.