Once upon a time, when the Labor government was still within the national consensus, Yigal Allon - one of its senior ministers and a member of the inner Labor Cabinet - had this to say:

"There have always been Jews in Hebron, the cradle of the nation, until they were violently uprooted. It is inconceivable that Jews be prohibited from settling in this ancient town of the patriarchs."

At the time, this statement was addressed to his own labor government, which created obstacles upon obstacles to prevent the return of Jews to their sacred city. It is for this reason that the Jewish population of downtown Hebron only numbers 450 today, with an additional 6,000 who reside in Hebron's neighborhood called Kiryat Arba. At the same time, the Arab population of Hebron grew from 25,000 in 1948 to 70,000 in 1994.

Hebron, which is mentioned in the Bible in connection with the purchase of the cave of Machpelah - as a burial plot - by Abraham, the first of the three Hebrew patriarchs, is regarded as one of the oldest cities in the world. The city is close to 4,000 years old and was at one point controlled by the Hittites. When Abraham separated from Lot, he "removed his tent, and came and dwelt by the oaks of Mamre, which is in Hebron, and built there an altar unto the Lord" (Genesis 13:18). Thus Abraham had firmly established his residence in the city of Hebron approximately 1,800 years before the Common Era.

The Jewish historian Josephus Flavius wrote in the 1st Century C.E. that Hebron "is more ancient than any town in the country - even older than Memphis in Egypt: It is reckoned as 2,300 years old." Josephus based his conclusion on the Book of Numbers, yet archaeologists claim that Jericho is the oldest city in the land.

The city of Hebron is also known in the Bible as Kiryat Arba because it is believed that Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah are buried there. Hebron has been a Jewish city for most of its existence. Joshua assigned Hebron to Caleb and it became a Levitical city and a city of refuge. Before Jerusalem was conquered, Hebron was the capital of Judah, the most powerful of all the twelve tribes of Israel. King David reigned there for seven and a half years before transferring his capital to Jerusalem in about 1000 B.C.E.

After the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E. by the Babylonians, King Nebuchadnezzar exiled the Jews of Hebron, together with much of the population of the Kingdom of Judah. Hebron soon fell into the hands of the Edumeans, who took advantage of Judah's defeat and weaknesses by plundering, looting and occupying the south of the country. Four hundred and fifty years later, the Edumeans were conquered by John Hyrcanus, who forcibly converted them to Judaism. Thereafter, the Edumeans who were also Semites and related to the Jews through their ancestor Esau (the twin brother of Jacob) - became an integral pat of the Jewish people.

The city of Hebron was destroyed by the Romans during the Jewish Wars in the first and second centuries of the Common Era. Yet a Jewish community continued to exist in Hebron during the Byzantine period as well as following the Arab invasions of the 7th century. Jews have been living there in the subsequent centuries during the Mameluke and Ottoman period. The importance of the city in Jewish life was underscored by the fact that Hebron was designated as one of the four sacred cities in the Land of Israel. The other three were Jerusalem, Tiberias and Safed.

In 1890, Hebron had a population of 1,500 Jews with an impressive number of yeshivot and religious schools. And in 1925, the famous Lithuanian Yeshivah of Slobodka was transferred to Hebron. The 38-century-old continuous presence of the Jews in Hebron was briefly interrupted following the 1929 brutal massacre by the Arabs of Hebron upon their Jewish neighbors. In this pogrom, scores were killed and wounded and the Jewish hospital Beit Hadassah was ransacked, together with the medieval Avraham Avinu synagogue, which was burned down with its Torah scrolls.

The surviving Jews fled for their lives, only to return two years later (1931) in an attempt to rebuild their shattered community. This attempt came to an end in the aftermath of the 1936 Arab riots, making it impossible for Jewish residents to live there for the next 32 years. Hebron was at long last liberated by the Israel Defense Forces in the Six-Day War of 1967.

On April 4, 1968, in defiance of the Labor government's policy, a group of Jews, led by Rabbi Moshe Levinger, returned to Hebron. At first, they stayed at the Park Hotel and later in a mobile home. By 1970, the government's opposition to settling Jews at the outskirts of hebron crumbled and the settlement of Kiryat Arba became a reality. In 1980, a number of Jewish women occupied the ruins of Beit Hadassah in downtown Hebron. That move was also initially opposed, this time by a Likud government. But the women held their ground and in the process succeeded in creating a nucleus for the revival of the Jewish quarter inside the city.

In May 1980, four PLO gunmen ambushed a group of yeshiva students who were on their way home from prayers at the Tomb of the Patriarchs. Six students were killed and 16 were wounded. A group of young Jews retaliated by blowing up cars of several prominent "West Bank" mayors, crippling two of them. In 1983, a yeshiva student was stabbed fatally in Hebron's casbah. In retaliation, some of the Jewish pioneers in the region, armed with Kalashnikov machine guns and grenades, stormed Hebron's Islamic College, killing three Arab students and wounded more than 30 others.

In 1988, Yonah Chaikin - an American-born Jewish pioneer - was knifed in downtown Hebron. Don Feder reported in The Boston Herald how the Orthodox-minded Chaikin, "holding his side to staunch the flow of blood. . . chased his assailant down the street, cornered him and, with barely enough strength left in him, shot the would-be assassin."

Arab intolerance toward the presence of Jews in their midst is legendary. In fact, their intolerance extends to all non-Muslims, be it the Christian Maronites of Lebanon, the Christian Copts of Egypt or the Christian blacks and Animists in the south of Sudan. The Arabs of Hebron are no exception.

On Dec. 6, 1993, Mordechai Lapid, 56, a pioneer of Kiryat Arba and a father of 13 children, stopped his minibus near his settlement and waited with his 19-year-old son, Shalom, who was taking a bus to Jerusalem. Palestinian Arab gunmen attacked the minibus from a passing car, killing both father and son, and wounding in the legs three other children: Yosi, 10; Bezalel, 11; and Haim, 17.

When the funeral procession for the Lapids of several hundred vehicles - including 90 buses - was attacked by Hebron Arabs from the rooftops with stones and cinder blocks, both the IDF troops and the civilian mourners fired shots in self-defense. In a related incident, three Palestinian Arabs were shot dead near Hebron by gunmen from a car with an Israeli license plate. The Jerusalem police received messages stating that the killings were in revenge for the murders in the Lapid family.

In another development that took place in the beginning of February 1994, 170 pioneers attempted to establish a new settlement near Bat Ayin and Kiryat Arba. The settlement was to be named Givat Lapid in honor of the father and son murdered by the Arabs. The group belonged to an organization called This Is Our Land. Fifty were arrested; among them were five of Lapid's 12 surviving children. Then the IDF evicted all the would-be settlers from an abandoned home near Kiryat Arba and declared the area a closed military zone.

Attacked by the Arabs, harassed and nearly abandoned by the IDF, and discriminated against and betrayed by the Labor government, it was only a matter of time before someone who holds Israel dear at heart would take the law into his own hands. It is against this background that the event of Feb. 25, 1994, in which an American-born pioneer of kiryat Arba opened fire on Arab worshipers at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, will be better understood.

That deed, to be recorded in history as the Second Hebron Massacre, was executed by Dr. Baruch Goldstein. When the carnage was over, 29 Hebronite Arabs were lying dead and scores were wounded. Goldstein, who during his 11 years' residence in Israel, During his 11 years' residence in Israel, Goldstein treated many Jewish victims of Arab terror, was known as an expert in emergency medicine. He also treated Arabs. Noam Arnon, a leader of the Jewish residents in Hebron, said Goldstein changed dramatically after the murders of Mordechai and Shlomo Lapid, who had died in his arms. "He looked like a ghost after that."

The continuous existence of the Jewish communities in Hebron/Kiryat Arba is threatened again, this time by members of a Jewish government, in the determination to pursue their "peace process" on Arab terms and at any price. In view of the fact that only some settlement leaders of Kiryat Arab advocate merely passive resistance, the 3,800 years of Jewish presence in the city of Hebron could be interrupted, in all likelihood, once more.

Unless the Jewish resident-pioneers employ the principle of self-defense and stay put, the City of the Patriarchs could revert again to foreign rule. For the time being, the battle over Hebron continues. As these lines are written (March 24, 1994) Israeli troops firing rockets and machine guns destroyed a Muslim fundamentalist hideout in Hebron, killing four of the most wanted Hamas bandits during a two-day fierce battle. Hamas - an acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement - claimed responsibility for most of the recent assassinations of Jews.

Dan Nimrod is the editor and publisher of Dawn Publishing Company Ltd., which states as its "continuous information policy guide: to set the record straight."