Being cut off from the regular news flow during my miluim reserve service last week, I wasn't aware of all the details of the eviction of the two Jewish families from the Hebron marketplace. Of course I heard about the clash between settlers and security forces and the decision of a number of religious soldiers to disobey orders rather than carrying out a minor role in the operation, but only upon reading the weekend papers did I realize that what seemed to me as relatively small detail of the saga had gathered momentum and turned into the main event.

I mean of course the way Bar Ilan University Professor Hillel Weiss cursed the local brigade commander Col. Yehuda Fuchs. Why has that particular scene captured both the media and public imagination in such a way? After all there was a lot of cussing and swearing going on between settlers and soldiers at that moment, so why zero in on that particular verbal attack.

The answer should be clear, Weiss is no cursory curser, his age and academic position set him aside from the rest of the young hot-headed and loose-tongued youths fulminating around him. Also the precise wording of the curse - "your mother should be bereaved, your wife a widow, your children orphans and you should be decimated in the next war and no memory of you remain" - was not a mere slur thrown out instinctively on the spot, it was well crafted and designed for maximum insult. The Professor's curse is something else. I know, I have also been cursed by him.