http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/10/24/hebron-always-and-for-eternity/
Forty years ago I was invited to participate in a journey to Israel that transformed my life. Ironically, it was sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, which had once been resolute in its opposition to a Jewish state. But Yehuda Rosenman, a Polish refugee who became a Committee executive, believed that even disaffected American Jewish academics might discover something about themselves in Israel. It was birthright before Birthright.
Midway during the two-week trip, we were bussed to Hebron to meet with Mayor Ali Ja-abari. Driving through the city, I glimpsed a massive rectangular stone structure topped by twin turrets. What is it, I asked our guide Tuvia. Me’arat haMachpelah, he responded. I had never heard of it. After Mayor Ja-abari’s talk, Tuvia whispered to me: “Ask him what his family did in 1929.” I didn’t understand the significance of the date, but dutifully asked. The mayor gave me a sharp glance and turned away.
I left Hebron with unanswered questions, eager to return for answers. During my Fulbright professorship in Israel the following year I spent endless hours wandering through Jerusalem’s Old City, determined to overcome my ignorance of Jewish history. Along the way, a friendship of sorts, fueled by my burgeoning collection of ancient Israelite pottery, developed with an Arab antiquities dealer.
When Ibrahim sold me an ancient pot from Hebron, I casually suggested that I would love to visit the city. The following week he closed his tiny shop for the day and drove me there with my two young children. We walked through the crowded shuk near the abandoned Jewish Quarter and climbed the steps to Machpelah. By then I knew that Muslims, in an early example of Jewish identify theft for which Palestinians have become notorious in the modern era, had converted the revered burial site of the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs into a mosque that Jews were prohibited from entering for seven centuries before 1967.