Yet as I approached my final year as chief of staff in early 1994, we were suddenly confronted by an appalling act of /sraeli violence: mass murder, committed by a West Bank settler. Terrorism, no less than the worst Arab attacks on Israeli civilians. The settler was named Baruch Goldstein, a physician, who lived in Kiryat Arba. One of the first post-1967 Jewish settlements, it sat on a hill outside the West Bank town of Hebron. At the heart of Hebron lay the burial place of the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish faith: Abraham and Sarah; Isaac and Rebecca; Jacob and Leah. Since Abraham is also revered as a prophet in Islam and a mosque had stood on the site for nearly a thousand years, our post-1967 arrangements set out separate times of worship for Muslims and Jews. Goldstein chose to attack during a holiday period for both faiths: Purim for the Jews and the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. He arrived shortly after the Muslims’ Friday prayers began on the morning on February 25. He was dressed in his reserve army uniform and was carrying an automatic rifle. He opened fire on a group of nearly 800 Palestinian worshipers. He had killed 29 and wounded 125 others by the time several of his intended victims knocked him unconscious and beat him to death.
I rushed to Sde Dov airport in north Tel Aviv, a few minutes from the kirya, and boarded a helicopter for the old British fort near Hebron, used by the Jordanians until 1967 and now Israeli headquarters. After visiting the scene of the killings, I sought out local Palestinian leaders, to voice my condolences and the sense of outrage I shared over what had happened, and to urge them to do all they could to maintain calm. I then went to Kiryat Arba and conveyed the same message.
Our immediate task was to prevent more deaths, on either side. It was a frustrating, and violent, week. Protests reminiscent of the first days of the intifada erupted around the West Bank, in Gaza, in east Jerusalem and in several Arab neighborhoods and towns inside Israel. While I had no trouble understanding the Palestinians’ anger, I also had a responsibility to prevent the violence spiraling out of control. We turned to the same tools we’d used at the beginning of the uprising — though with even greater emphasis on the need for soldiers to use the only the necessary force to restore order, and to avoid causing fatalities wherever possible. We closed off the West Bank. We imposed curfews
258 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011729