Gush Etzion

On Friday, we visited the municipality of Gush Etzion. Gush Etzion has a decades-long history of Jewish settlement in an area that was originally purchased (in the 1930s) from Arab landowners. It has a centuries-long connection with the area through Abraham. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob all lived in these hills and, in fact, Abraham purchased a hillside tomb to bury his wife Sarah that was also later used for the burial of his offspring.

Before meeting with one of the residents, we stopped by the Gush Etzion memorial museum. This was a moving experience as we watched a video that outlined the history of the community. How to summarize? Basically, Jewish settlers have a solid history of a presence in the area since 1934 when the land was purchased from Arabs for settlement purposes. The museum is specifically dedicated to the settlers who lived there from 1943-48. In the preceding months before the independence of Israel was declared, these settlers suddenly switched from being agriculturalists to soldiers as they were besieged by the Arabs surrounding them. A few months before independence the mothers and children were transferred to Jerusalem and two days before independence a final massacre of the remaining settlers took place—including the lobbing of hand grenades into a bunker where the wounded and off-duty were taking shelter. Following the short video, the screen raised and we found that we were in fact sitting above the bunker. We looked down upon the area where dozens died. Upon the walls were stone slabs with the names of the fallen carved into them. I traced the carved letters and could feel the spirit of those settlers in the air. The whole idea of this new municipality really made sense—through its prosperity it upholds the ideals and spirit of the many settlers who came before.

In Tekoa, one of the villages in Gush Etzion, we met Shani Abram Simkowitz—a Jew from Brooklyn who moved to Israel in 1971 when she was 15 years old. She said she grew up in a family in which it was impressed upon her that a Jew’s place was in Israel. She attended a summer camp before 10^th grade and she was so happy to be in Israel that she convinced her parents that she could move back by herself, which she did the following year. In 1973 she was inducted into the Israeli Defense Services (all Israeli citizens are required to complete military service). She is now Director of the Gush Etzion Foundation.

Tekoa was a beautiful, idyllic place and this impression was enforced by Shani who spoke proudly of the 80,000 citizens of the Gush Etzion municipality. The community was beautifully laid out with a park at its center, a school nearby and plenty of modern housing. She said that every profession was represented and that a number of residents were immigrants from North America.

She took us on a tour of the area and pointed out the youth farm where children from urban areas are plucked out of a bad situation and given a second chance at education and an opportunity to make something of themselves. The farm was along the left-hand side of the road and on the right-hand side was a fence that separated them from their Palestinian neighbors and who lived under the control of the Palestinian Authority. Shani repeated many times that she loved her neighbors and got along well with them. At the same time, she occasionally leaned toward condescension. I’m not sure what to think because, of course, Tekoa was beautiful and seemed like an ideal place to live and raise a family. On the other hand, it seemed as if it might be glossing over and supporting official systems and issues of inequality.