Netanyahu vows to annex Hebron, Kiryat Arba

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said for the first time on Monday morning that if re-elected on Tuesday, he would annex Kiryat Arba and the Jewish areas of Hebron.

Speaking to Efi Triger on Army Radio’s Good Morning Israel program, Netanyahu went farther than he did just 11 days ago, when he visited Hebron.

On a September 5 visit to the city, Netanyahu said Jews will remain in Hebron forever, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday during an historic visit to the West Bank city that threatened to spark a religious war and failed to ensure the right-wing support needed to secure his re-election in two weeks.

“Hebron will not be devoid of Jews. It will not be ‘judenrein,’” Netanyahu said.

The Israeli leader spoke as he stood in front of the Tomb of the Patriarch at a ceremony marking 90 years since the 1929 Hebron massacre in which 67 Jews were killed. It was the first time that a sitting prime minister had delivered a public address in Hebron.

Prior to Netanyahu’s visit, Hebron’s Jewish community and the Yamina Party had called on him to authorize Jewish building on the site of the abandoned market stalls in the Avraham Avinu neighborhood. The stalls are located on property that was owned by Hebron’s pre-1929 Jewish community. 

Politicians in Netanyahu’s own Likud party and the Yamina party had set a high bar of expectations for his speech.

Knesset speaker Yuli Edelstein and Sports and Culture Minister Miri Regev, both of the Likud, called on Netanyahu to use the platform the ceremony provided to announce the application of sovereignty on Hebron. “Ninety years after 1929, we have to say in a clear voice, ‘It’s time, Hebron. It’s time for sovereignty in Hebron. It’s time for the Jewish community to grow by the thousands in Hebron. It’s time that visiting the Tomb of the Patriarchs will become the easiest and most natural thing to do,’” Edelstein said. He spoke during a ceremony for the 1929 victims held earlier in the afternoon in Hebron’s Jewish cemetery. 

Netanyahu must stop procrastinating, Yamina Party head and former justice minster Ayelet Shaked said.   

Hebron resident and former MK Orit Struck, who is on the Yamina Party’s Knesset slate, called Netanyahu’s remarks “an embarrassment.”

“The lands on which so many were murdered have been waiting for you for too long…. What are you waiting for?” Struck asked in a tweet.