Word: qiryat
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Israeli towns were under heavy rocket attack. By the time the onslaught ended, almost two hours later, Palestinian guerrillas in southern Lebanon had fired as many as 120 Katyusha rockets across the border, concentrating on the Israeli coastal resort town of Nahariya (pop. 30,000) and the settlement of Qiryat Shemona (pop. 20,000). The attacks killed three Israelis and injured 25. The assault had been well aimed and well timed to maximize casualties; salvo after salvo of rockets, fired at tenor 15-minute intervals, fell on the two communities at an hour when many of their residents were homeward...
...campaign had exploded in anger and resulted in new and disquieting ethnic rifts in the population. Sephardi Jews, predominantly a working-class constituency in the new immigrant cities of Beersheba and Qiryat Shemona and the grimy slums of greater Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, rejected the traditional socialism of the Labor Party in favor of the radical right-wing nationalism of the Likud. In turn, the more affluent Ashkenazi Jews from northern Europe backed Labor. Ironically, Begin, an Ashkenazi from Poland, was idolized by his more extremist Sephardi followers, who proclaimed him "King of Israel" in campaign slogans and songs...
...military curfew did not include the 4,000 Jewish settlers of Qiryat Arba, on the outskirts of Hebron. Following the funeral of one of the attack victims, gangs of Jewish settlers, many carrying automatic weapons, rampaged through Hebron, firing into the air, smashing windows in homes and cars owned by Arabs, and attempting to break into stores. Israeli soldiers on the scene made only intermittent attempts to curb the violence...
Even some Israelis blamed the Begin government's settlements policy for igniting the troubles. Earlier this year, Begin's Cabinet approved the construction of Jewish settlements in major Arab urban centers such as Hebron. For more than a year, squatters from Qiryat Arba have illegally occupied the former Hadassah clinic in Hebron, where the attack took place. Israel's former Army Chief of Staff Haim Bar-Lev, who is now secretary-general of the opposition Labor Party, argued in the Knesset last week that the Hebron attack would never have occurred if Begin's government...
Hebron itself-and the occupied Hadassah clinic, in particular-has lately become the unhappy focus of Israel's controversial settlements policy. Relations between the city's 50,000 Arabs and the 4,000 Jews in the nearby settlement of Qiryat Arba took a turn for the worse after militant followers of Rabbi Moshe Levinger took over the Hadassah clinic in 1979. Levinger, a zealot who advocates the "divine right" of Jews to settle anywhere in territory that belonged to biblical Israel, used the squatters' presence in the old Jewish quarter to pressure the government of Premier Menachem...