Silence? What Silence?

Michael Walzer, co-editor of Dissent magazine, has just written about a trip to the West Bank town of Hebron. He went with a group that calls itself "Breaking the Silence."

Breaking the silence? Really? As if the West Bank is not the world's least silent issue?

Walzer's article is built upon a complaint that some 800 to 900 Jewish settlers live near the Tomb of the Patriarchs in the center of Hebron's old city. Israeli soldiers protect these settlers and the surrounding Arab population from each other.

This protection is needed. Hebron Arabs have committed many acts of terrorism against Jews. A Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein, committed an atrocious crime against Arabs, massacring 29 worshippers in a mosque in 1994.

Yet Walzer laments that security protection comes at too high a price. Palestinian Arabs, he writes, "have been excluded from about a fifth of their city or allowed to live and move about within it only under severe restrictions."

Fair point. Yet if it's wrong to exclude Arabs from one portion of one town on the West Bank, why is it "progressive" to urge the expulsion of Jews from all the West Bank?

Walzer writes scathingly about the reactionary and xenophobic politics of some of the Hebron settlers. Again, fair point. Yet if the ugly politics of some of the settlers negates their land claims, do not the ugly politics of many Palestianians have at least some bearing on their claims?