Yes, I just came back from Hebron. There is an ugly blockade of newly built buildings surrounded by barbed wire dropped bang in the middle of the main (Arab) market. The settlers have put up a billboard with the slogan 'This settlement built upon land stolen from the Jews'. As the local Palestinians in Hebron see it they are accused every day of being thieves.
There was a pogrom against Jews in 1929. Arabs were increasingly hostile to Jews as Zionist immigration into Palestine increased throughout the interwar years. When I visited the headquarters of the observers, the Temporary International Presence in Hebron, they said that a few months earlier they had invited some of the original surviving Jewish inhabitants of Hebron to give a talk about their lives in old Hebron. They said then that despite the horror of 1929, they had largely gotten on well with their neighbours, but that they did not want to return because they wanted no part of the new Israeli settlements, which they deplored.
So generally, yes, I agree with Nathan's view that the occasional attacks on Jews prior to 1948 were indeed deplorable, but no justification for the subsequent ethnic cleansing against Arabs. I picked up a good book out there on Jerusalem in 1948 that made the point that there were two ideological versions of Jewish-Arab relations prior to '48. The first was the Zionist one of unremitting persecution of Jews, but the second was the secular Palestinian nationalist story of harmonious relations. The authors argued instead that the inter-war immigration pursued by Zionist organisations did indeed provoke greater conflict on religious lines.
As to the comparison with Kosovo, I tend to disagree with some of Nathan's views on that, but I did notice that the Israeli press, generally pretty critical of Islamic movements in Palestine, was generally supportive of them in Yugoslavia. And the press was thrilled to report joint fund-raising for Albanians between Muslims and Rabbis (though on closer reading, the Muslims, generally conservative clerics, had declined the assistance of the Rabbis, whose support for the scheme was verbal only).
-- Jim heartfield