Tel Rumeida
[16] Denys Pringle suggests that the site excavated 200–300 m (660–980 ft) east of the hilltop mosque represents the old Kiryat Arba described by the Dominican pilgrim Burchard of Mount Sion in 1293 as "vetus civitas quondam Cariatharbe dicta".
[19] A cuneiform economic text, with 4 personal names and a list of animals,[20] unearthed at the site and dated 17–16 century BCE indicates Tel Rumeida/Hebron was composed of a multicultural pastoral society of Hurrians and Amorites, run by an independent administrative system with its palace scribes perhaps under kingly rule.
[16] Neither Tel Rumeida nor the surrounding Hebron area show signs of a major settlement at this time, throughout this period, when the centre of the region was located in biblical Debir/Khirbet Rabud.
[9][18] The Israelite settlement at Tel Rumeida was destroyed in 586 BCE,[9] and the town's population city became predominantly Edomite throughout the subsequent Babylonian and Persian periods.
[25][26] In 167 BCE, this Idumean settlement, attested during Hellenistic times[9] was devastated by Judah Maccabee who wrecked its fortress walls, leaving only a gate tower.
It stands next to a mulberry tree bearing an Arabic inscription which refers to a certain Sayyid, or lineal descendant of Mohammad, by the name Muḥammad Ibn ‘Abdallah al-Ḥusayni, from whom a Hebronite clan, the Āl ash-Sharīf, claim descent, saying he was a Maghrebi Arab from the as-Sāqiyah al-Ḥamrā’, from which his nisba, or onomastic for place of descent, seen in the tomb's local name, Saqawātī, is derived.
[30][38] It is on the basis of the original lease taken out for 99 years by Haim Yeshua Hamitzri that the current Jewish settlers, none of whom is related to the original lessee, then asserted a claim to the land in Tel Rumeida, a claim dismissed by Haim Hanegbi, a founder of Matzpen, who argues that settlers in Hebron have no right to speak in the name of the old Jewish families of the city.
[41] In 2005, an Israeli settler company with Jordanian registration, Tal Construction & Investments LTD, took over a 0.75 acre property, whose owners, the Bakri family, had been forced to move out of during the Second Intifada.
[42] The Jerusalem District court rejected an appeal by the construction company, which was ordered to pay the Palestinian owners 579,600 shekels ($166,000) in usage fees.
[12][45][49][59] The Dir al-Arba'in mosque, where Hebronite Palestinians had prayed until the mid-1990s, was declared a closed military zone, and converted into a synagogue, renamed by settlers Tomb of Ruth and Jesse, and thenceforth all access to it by Muslims was forbidden ostensibly for security reasons.
[9] According to Karin Aggestam, attempts to convert the mosque into a Jewish shrine, including painting its door blue, are in violation of the Hebron Protocol, which committed both Israel and Palestine to preserving and protecting the historic character of the city without harm or changes.
[64] Long curfews, restrictions on Palestinian movements in the area, and the difficulty of sending children to school like the local Qurtuba (Cordoba) elementary school whose main entrance was sealed with razor wire by the IDF in 2002 and whose students are subject to settler stoning,[65] have, according to one testimony, forced residents in the Palestinian neighbourhood to abandon their homes, and a grocery business and a small hospital to close.
[57] A Palestinian resident who refused lucrative offers for her home, has stated that settlers have used home-made napalm to poison their fields, continually burn their cars, and destroy their agricultural tools.
[71] Settlers reportedly uprooted roughly 100 olive-tree saplings planted with the help of a Jordanian NGO in the yard of a Palestinian school in Tel Rumeida.
[72] In 2012 an Israeli court ruled that settler claims to have purchased a house in Tel Rumedia in 2005, which had been abandoned by its owner Zechariah Bakri in 2001 when restrictions were imposed on Palestinian movements, were based on forgeries.
[73] At 6 a.m. on 6 November, Israeli forces occupied several Palestinian homes and the Beit Sumoud headquarters of the Youth Against Settlements, detaining residents while declaring that their occupation of the dwellings would continue for 24 hours.
[77] In July 2016 an attempt by local Tel Rumeida Gandhian-style peace activist Issa Amro, and Jawad Abu Aisha, the owner of an old factory to clean up the site and establish infrastructure for a cultural cinema project was blocked by soldiers.
Amro had called on Jewish activists to help them, trusting that their presence and privilege would ensure them the few hours require to clear the area and set up a film center.
[78][79] Nobel Prize winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa made a tour of Tel Rumeida in 2005, during which he chanced to meet the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy.
[91] What struck Llosa was the resilience of the 50 Palestinian families, out of 500, who had managed to remain in Tel Rumeida in the face of 'a ferocious, systematic persecution by settlers'.
The latter: throw stones at them, toss rubbish and excrement on their homes; organize raids to invade and devastate their houses, assault their children as the latter return from school while Israeli soldiers look on with total indifference.
I possess a video which shows a hair-raising scene where the boys and girls of the Tel Rumeida settlement hurl stones and kick Arab students and their schoolmistresses at the local Cordoba school, who, to give each other protection, return to their houses in groups, never alone.
[92]The American Jewish writer Peter Beinart described one joint Jewish–Palestinian attempt to create a small cinema on an abandoned Palestinian factory in Tel Rumeida.
[93] In the wake of Israel's capture of the West Bank in the 1967 Six-Day War, and concomitant occopation, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin authorized archaeological digs on Jewish lots, reportedly to preempt the expansion of settlements there, and these were conducted by the Judean Hill Country Expedition under Avi Ofer.
[93] In 2014, after a lapse of over a decade, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) renewed excavations in the lots with attested Jewish ownership, which extends over a 6 dunam area.
[9] The new excavations began as a result of a settler initiative, which had been turned down by several prominent Israeli archaeologists, but was accepted by Emanuel Eisenberg of the IAA and David Ben-Shlomo of Ariel University, in a project that secured state funding.
[95] Archaeologist Yonathan Mizrachi argues that settler pressure to create an archaeological park in Tel Rumeida is a technique for taking over the terrain and asserting their power and legitimacy in the area.
[96] Dr. Ahmed Rjoub, the Palestinian Authority's director of the Department of Site Management, claims that the excavations have removed artifacts attesting to both the Roman and Islamic heritage.
