Our new friends, Liz and Paul, recently took us on a tour of Gush Etzion.
Known as the southern gateway to Jerusalem, this strategic area comprises the block of communities that defended the southern approach to Jerusalem against the invading armies in the 1948 Israel War of Independence.”
Siege in the Hills of Hebron, by Dov Knohl, is a documentary account of what some have called a massacre and others a great victory. The capsule summary is this: in 1948, during the third attempt since 1920 to establish a Jewish community south of Jerusalem in the Hebron Hills, Kfar Etzion, the largest of the four communities in the settlement bloc, was besieged by the Arab Legion. All but a few of its defenders were eventually killed and the site utterly razed; buildings, trees, crops.
