It was during the summer of 1995 that a fateful encounter took place in the Knesset, outside the office of then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Rabin’s government was putting the final touches on the second Oslo agreement that was to hand over a further tranche of West Bank towns to the new Palestinian Authority. This included Bethlehem, site of Rachel’s Tomb, at which Jews have prayed for thousands of years. National Religious Party member Hanan Porat realized that the tomb was slated to fall into “Area A,” that is, under full Arab civil and military control. He decided he must speak with Rabin and try to change his mind.
Another MK, Jewish Press columnist Rabbi Menachem Porush, happened to walk by and saw his friend standing outside the prime minister’s office carrying a large aerial photograph of the tomb compound and the Bethlehem-Gilo border. “What are you doing here?” asked Porush. “I have come to lobby for Rachel’s Tomb,” Porat responded. Porush asked if he could join him at the meeting and Porat agreed.
For the greater part of the meeting, Porush sat in silence. He listened to Porat, who drew lines on the aerial photograph and illustrated how short was the distance and shooting range between Gilo and Bethlehem. Porat also asked Rabin if he would be willing to give the Palestinians the grave of Ben Gurion or that of his Palmach commander, Yigal Allon.
Rabin was preparing to respond when Porush stood up and embraced him. Addressing him as “Reb Yitzchak,” Porush tearfully beseeched him not to give up Rachel’s Tomb.
“It was beyond words,” Porat recalled in a later interview. “Reb Menachem sobbed, crying real tears onto the prime minister’s shirt. Rabin begged him, ‘Reb Menachem, please calm down.’ Reb Menachem retorted: ‘How can I calm down? You are planning to give away Mama Ruchi’s grave. The Jewish people will never forgive you if you abandon Mama’s tomb.’ ”
Rabin relented and promised the two Knesset members that he would re-examine the issue. Just a few days later, the 463 meters separating Bethlehem from Jerusalem were restored to their “Area C” status under complete Israel security and civil control. The Palestinians agreed to be compensated with other territories.
A few months later, Rabin was assassinated. It happened on the eve of Rachel’s yahrzeit, according to Jewish tradition, the 11th of Cheshvan. When asked where they had been on the night of Rabin’s assassination, almost all the National Religious Party’s leaders and other Religious-Zionist public figures answered: “We were in the traffic jam on the way to Rachel’s Tomb.”
At this time of the year, the weekly Torah readings are about the story of Rachel’s son Joseph and how his envious brothers threw him into a pit and sold him to Arabs. About how, miraculously, he emerged from the pit to become the most powerful man in Egypt and kingdoms far beyond that sought his salvation in the seven years of famine. We also read about his dying wish not to be abandoned in Egypt and how he foreswore his children to carry his bones into Israel to be buried in a part of Shechem that his father Jacob had bought from the sons of Hamor for 100 pieces of silver.
Three-and-a-half thousand ears later the children of Israel, militarily stronger than they’ve ever been – a nuclear power with satellites in space and the most feared army and air force in the region – stand guilty of again abandoning their brother Joseph to a mob of Arabs.
This is exactly what happened on October 7, 2000, just five years after the “rescue” of Joseph’s mother’s tomb. These were the opening weeks of the second intifada and after persistent rioting near Joseph’s Tomb, the small IDF garrison was withdrawn in exchange for Arafat’s promise to protect the site. Within hours our patriarch’s tomb was overrun by a rioting mob that attacked it with pickaxes and jackhammers and set it ablaze. When the fire finally burned out, the cheering Arabs daubed what was left of the dome in green paint and declared it a Muslim shrine.
