“We’re not going to be driven out. We’re not going to be scared out,” said Waldman, who helped re-establish the Jewish presence around Hebron by founding the nearby settlement of Kiryat Arba in 1968.
“We’re going to stay,” he added. “This is the essence of Zionism — Jews coming back and renewing Jewish life, and certainly in Hebron, where Jewish life began.”
Waldman, 59, visited the Bay Area last week as part of a national speaking tour. Before appearing at Beth Jacob Congregation in Oakland, he spoke to the Bulletin in no uncertain terms about his view of Hebron as a Jewish city.
“In our meetings and talks with the prime minister, we state this again and again: Hebron was always a Jewish city, and certainly it should always remain a Jewish city,” Waldman said of the site where Abraham, Sarah and other biblical figures are buried.
Waldman has been dedicated to a Jewish presence in the West Bank since Israel gained the land in 1967. He helped found Gush Emunim, a grassroots movement dedicated to settling the territories.
Waldman said that he and other Hebron settlers are generally pleased with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s performance to date. He said they recognize that it has been, and continues to be, difficult for the prime minister to emerge from what Waldman calls the “deep mud” left for him by the previous administration.
“I think he’s a very good leader. Certainly, he has the right Zionist ideals. He won’t sell us out,” Waldman said of Netanyahu. “At his first visit in Washington, he stood up very strongly with lots of courage and expressed quite clearly the mandate for continuing settlement.”
At the same time, Waldman said, “we would be much happier if he would say things more clearly,” for instance that Netanyahu would declare “the Oslo agreements are very negative and irresponsible. It is irresponsible and naive to think you can make peace with an entity that is not democratic.”
Recently, Israel’s Chief Sephardic Rabbi Eliahu Bakshi-Doron told the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv that Hebron’s hundreds of Jewish settlers should evacuate the West Bank town if Israel cannot guarantee their security.
Waldman believes Israel will undoubtedly afford such guarantees.
“The Israeli troops are not being taken out of the [Jewish] area of Hebron; on the contrary, greater numbers of Israeli troops will be in the Jewish areas,” he said, adding that settlers would naturally prefer that troops remain in all areas of Hebron.
“We don’t trust the Arabs,” he said.