Jonathan Cook took us on a tour of the newly finished museum dedicated to Hebron’s Jewish heritage, which focuses on various acts of violence done to Jews there and their triumph over them, which in his narrative, lead to the reality today.
Though the conflict between the state of Israel and the displaced Palestinian people is often characterized as a religious one, I found that religion was only one aspect of an incredibly complex and multifaceted issue. The basic premise of Israel — that the Jewish people need a state of their own in order to protect themselves from the possibility of another Holocaust — was first linked to religion when early Zionists (pre-WWII) chose this region to “settle” based on religious text and geographical references in the Old Testament.