Moshe Levinger, the brazen ‘sheriff’ who brought Jews to the West Bank, dies at 80
Unfazed by Israeli law, the rabbi who renewed the Jewish presence in Hebron saw deterrence as key to political sovereignty
Elhanan Miller is the former Arab affairs reporter for The Times of Israel
Two Jewish men walked into the Palestinian Park Hotel in Hebron on the last day of March 1968. Not nine months after the city was taken by the IDF from Jordan in the Six Day War, the men presented themselves as Swiss tourists seeking to rent the entire building for the upcoming festival of Passover, and perhaps beyond.
The name of one of the men first appeared in print weeks earlier. Newspaper ads commissioned by the National Religious Party’s Young Guard asked those interested in “going up” to Hebron to contact Moshe Levinger via a Tel Aviv post office box, writes Gershom Gorenberg in his 2006 book “The Accidental Empire.” Levinger died Saturday at the age of 80.
The 1968 Passover Seder organized by the young, irreverent rabbi of Moshav Nehalim would become the core of Hebron’s renewed Jewish settlement, which had been destroyed in the Arab massacre of 1929.
Levinger, a man described by Gorenberg as someone who “measured the world on the vertical axis running from weak to strong,” would become Hebron’s symbol and its leading ideologue. After living in the military governor’s compound in Hebron for three years, Levinger and his supporters relocated to the new Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba just outside the ancient city in 1971.
Levinger and his Gush Emunim movement would go on to spearhead settlements across the West Bank, sparking clashes with Palestinians and the IDF. Today, the territory is dotted with established Jewish towns, constituting a thorn in Israel’s international standing but a centerpiece of the national-religious theology Levinger espoused.
The son of German-Jewish immigrants to Jerusalem and one of the leaders of the Gush Emunim settlers’ movement, Levinger was a man of action, not of words. Gruff, ideologically uncompromising, and unkempt in his scruffy beard, heavy dubon parka and Uzi submachine gun, the Hebron rabbi would become the negative stereotype of West Bank settlers in the eyes of their Israeli and international detractors.
“We are not scared to walk around Hebron, because the Arabs know we make no concessions,” he stated in a TV election ad for his political party The Torah and the Land, which garnered just 3,708 votes in the 1992 elections.
“Immediately after any security incident we react properly. We don’t give up,” continued his narration, as the advertisement showed him firing his pistol at a shooting range.
Indeed, Levinger was hardly trigger-shy. In 1988 he fired sporadically at Palestinian shops in Hebron after his car was pelted with stones that injured his son, killing Kayed Hassan Salah and wounding Ibrahim Bali. A plea bargain accepting an argument of self-defense reduced his sentence to five months in prison, of which he served three.
At that point in time he was already known as a troublemaker, having been indicted by Israeli courts for physically assaulting a six-year-old Palestinian in 1985 and tearing up a military arrest order in 1977. Levinger used the self-defense argument once again during a criminal case leveled against him for a rampage at the Hebron market in June 1991, where he overturned Palestinian stalls and fired his pistol in the air.
‘Rabbi Levinger is behaving like a sheriff,’ said the judge as he fined the rabbi NIS 300 in September 1986 for assaulting a soldier at the Tomb of the Patriarchs
“Rabbi Levinger is behaving like a sheriff,” stated Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court Judge Emanuel Dinur as he fined the rabbi NIS 300 in September 1986 for assaulting a soldier at the Tomb of the Patriarchs. “He may be a sheriff, but he was never appointed as one.”
Levinger was unfazed by his recurrent brushes with the law when he ran for political office in 1992. In his brazen behavior and disregard for Israeli law, he became the representative of a new generation of religious extreme right-wingers post-1967: no longer a submissive minority, but a Zionist vanguard redefining the meaning of uncompromising love for the land.
“Civilians and soldiers facing life-threatening situations are scared to open fire for fear of the prosecution, the trials and the arrests,” he said in his election ad. “When I’m in the Knesset, God willing, things will change.”
Levinger understood that the key to lasting Israeli control in the West Bank lay with full political annexation. “The commandment … [is] that the Land of Israel must be in the hands of the Jewish people — not just by having settlements, but having it under Jewish sovereignty,” he was quoted by Gorenberg as saying.
Government backing for Levinger’s initial drive to settle Hebron (Labor minister Yigal Alon implored prime minister Levi Eshkol to allow for the reestablishment of a Jewish presence in the city as early as January 1968) drove the rabbi to publicly call for the city’s annexation to Israel at a conference in March 1971.
“Given the government’s decision regarding the continued Jewish settlement in Hebron, it’s time to officially annex the city to Israel,” he said during a symposium on Jewish settlement in the West Bank at Kibbutz Kfar Ruppin.
Levinger’s dream of full Israeli annexation of the West Bank never materialized. Hebron, however, remains the sole West Bank city with a Jewish community and divided Israeli-Palestinian sovereignty.
Under the Hebron Protocol, signed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in January 1997, the city was to be partitioned in two: H-1, comprising 80% of the city, would be controlled by the Palestinian Authority, and H-2, where the Jewish neighborhoods are located but also where over 40,000 Palestinians reside, would be controlled by Israel.
Many parts of H-2 are closed to Palestinian pedestrian and vehicle traffic, with daily friction between the two national communities.
Levinger died after suffering from failing health since 2000, and was buried in Hebron on Sunday. His son Malachi serves as head of the Hebron and Kiryat Arba municipal council.
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