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Uri Avnery, now 86 years old, fought for the Zionist cause in the Irgun militia and was later elected to the Knesset. He has spent the last forty years campaigning for a just peace including an independent Palestinian state. He believes that after the Six Day War and the beginning of the occupation, the worship of holy places assumed a sinister character and became an instrument of conquest.

Holy Sites - where prayer and conquest meet

Using Holy Sites to justify conquest and massacres is by no means an Israeli, or Jewish, invention.

One of the most abominable examples is the First Crusade. Pope Urban II called upon the Christians of Europe to rise and liberate the Holy Sepulchre – not the country of Palestine, not the city of Jerusalem, but one specific site: the grave where, according to Christian tradition, the body of Jesus lay before his resurrection. For this grave, many thousands of Christians crossed immense distances to Jerusalem, murdering masses of people -mostly Jews- on the way, and after conquering the city, carried out a horrendous massacre. According to Christian chroniclers, they waded up to their knees in blood. The victims were Muslims and Jews, men, women and children.

But there is no need to go back 900 years to find fanatical or cynical leaders using holy places to justify monstrous deeds. When Slobodan Milosevic carried out the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo – an act of genocide – his central claim was that the country was sacred to Serbs. Indeed, in 1389 in a historic battle the Christian Serbs were beaten by the Muslim Ottomans, who took over the country for the next 600 years. During that time, the local population adopted Islam. But the Serbs sanctified the battlefield – a rare example of a people celebrating its defeat -as Jews do at Masada. If Binyamin Netanyahu’s favorite expression – “the Rock of our Existence” – existed in Serbian, Milosevic would surely have used it. He argued that Kosovo was the spiritual and religious centre of the Serbian people, in spite of the fact that the overwhelming majority of its inhabitants were Albanian Muslims. Until this very day, Serbia does not recognize the independent state of Kosovo, because of the ancient Serbian churches and monasteries located there.

And in Jerusalem? Since the beginning of the occupation, the “holy places” in the West Bank have served as weapons in the hands of the settlers. They go there, they say, to restore Jewish rule over Judaism’s holy places, obeying God’s commandment.

The stories of the Bible are set mostly in these territories. The settlers and the Israeli army call them “Judea and Samaria”. Place names can be acts of annexation. They confirm the ownership of the Jewish people from ancient times. The first settlement was established by a group of religious people who entered Hebron by deceit. Since the Israeli military governor forbade Jews to enter the city, they asked for permission to stay there for a few days in order to deliver their Passover prayers in the holy city.

Since then, the “Cave of Machpelah” in Hebron has become a holy battlefield. Near it, the most extreme Jewish settlers have established themselves. They are rabid Arab-haters and aim to drive out the 160 thousand Arabs, whose families have been living there for many generations. The most notorious mass murderer from among the settlers, the physician Baruch Goldstein, massacred Muslim worshippers in order to cleanse the holy place. Holy places serve now as justification for the robbing expedition called settlement. Pieces of land are stolen all over the occupied territories because of their sanctity. The most extreme leaders of the settlers, all of them “rabbis”, fight for the liberation of holy graves. One of them is leading a campaign to take possession of the “tomb of Joseph” in the center of Nablus, which would turn the city into a second Hebron. The Israeli army chauffeurs the settlers there in armored vehicles, so they can “pray” there.

But the settlers did not go there to pray. They came to conquer.

Even now I hope for the day when schoolchildren in both states, Israel and Palestine, will learn the annals of this country in all its periods, and not just Jewish history here and Muslim history there. The wonderful richness of this country’s history, from the time of the Canaanites to this day, could create a strong bond. However, the intentions of Netanyahu and his settlers are quite the opposite: to misuse history as an instrument of occupation.