From their barren hilltop,the settlers' barracks looked down upon a road almost as old as the wanderings of man.Nine miles south of Dov Joseph's office windows they stood midway along the ancient highway linking Jerusalem the city of David to Hebron the city of the Partiarchs.The four hundred and fifty men and women of Kfar Etzion were supposed to constitute the southernmost anchor of Jerusalem's defense. So exposed was their position however that they had lived in a state of quasi-siege for months and David Shaltiel already recommended to Tel Aviv the abandoning of the settlement.
Abraham had grazed his flocks on Kfar Etzion's ridges.David had marched past this place on his way to the conquest of Jerusalem and the unification of the tribes of Judah and Israel.Jehoshaphat's warriors had gathered in the little vale above which the settlement was perched to give thanks for their victory over the Moabites and deed it its name,the Valley of Brakha.
Ancient spawning ground of the chiefs of the Hebrew nation,the hills had become over the centuries the stronghold of a deeply felt and often violent Arab nationalism.In Hebron to the south,sixty-six Jews most of them helpless yeshiva students had been slaughtered during the Mufti-inspired riots of 1929. The survivors straggled back but a fresh outburst in 1936 had finally driven out the last Jews from the city that sheltered the tomb of the father of the Hebrew people and had ended its centuries-old tradition as a center of Jewish learning.
The four interrelated colonies which now constituted the settlement of Kfar Etzion represented a fragile effort to reestablish a Jewish foothold in the land of the Patriarchs and at the same time provide a strategically situated southern buttress ti Jerusalem.It had been a difficult enterprise.To the Arabs of Hebron, Kfar Etzion was an alien intrusion on ground that had been wholly Arab fir centuries.The colony's struggle to survive was a vital illustration of that unique situation sired buthe Zionist return to Palestine,the kibbutz.
--Excerpted from "O,Jerusalem" ( 2008)
by Collinsand Lapierre
Abraham had grazed his flocks on Kfar Etzion's ridges.David had marched past this place on his way to the conquest of Jerusalem and the unification of the tribes of Judah and Israel.Jehoshaphat's warriors had gathered in the little vale above which the settlement was perched to give thanks for their victory over the Moabites and deed it its name,the Valley of Brakha.
Ancient spawning ground of the chiefs of the Hebrew nation,the hills had become over the centuries the stronghold of a deeply felt and often violent Arab nationalism.In Hebron to the south,sixty-six Jews most of them helpless yeshiva students had been slaughtered during the Mufti-inspired riots of 1929. The survivors straggled back but a fresh outburst in 1936 had finally driven out the last Jews from the city that sheltered the tomb of the father of the Hebrew people and had ended its centuries-old tradition as a center of Jewish learning.
The four interrelated colonies which now constituted the settlement of Kfar Etzion represented a fragile effort to reestablish a Jewish foothold in the land of the Patriarchs and at the same time provide a strategically situated southern buttress ti Jerusalem.It had been a difficult enterprise.To the Arabs of Hebron, Kfar Etzion was an alien intrusion on ground that had been wholly Arab fir centuries.The colony's struggle to survive was a vital illustration of that unique situation sired buthe Zionist return to Palestine,the kibbutz.
--Excerpted from "O,Jerusalem" ( 2008)
by Collinsand Lapierre