There have been some pleasant surprises this week. For instance, the Supreme Court ordered the state to explain why it isn’t removing the outpost of Migron, built on other people’s land. The state – meaning Defense Minister Ehud Barak, for practical purposes – wanted an indefinite delay, based on a supposed agreement with the Council of Settlements to move the outpost to the settlement of Adam. The court finally ran out of patience with such nonsense.
Meanwhile, Barak has yet to move on evicting settlers from the so-called House of Dispute in Hebron. This is no surprise – it fits the pattern of settlement in Hebron for the past 40 years. Then again, there’s a particular ferociousness in the settlers’ statements and actions against eviction. My new piece in the American Prospect explains what’s happening:
…the militancy in Hebron is part of a wider mood among the most ideologically committed settlers. They want Israeli leaders and the public to be too scared to think about evacuating whole settlements as part of a peace agreement with the Palestinians. They seek strategic deterrence that will eliminate the political option of giving up land and of returning to a smaller and more democratic Israel. And they could be succeeding.
Read the full article here, and come back to SoJo to comment.
Gershon says:
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The settlers claimed a Jewish company had bought the building, but the supposed seller denied a deal was ever completed.
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Gershon neglected to mention that the buyers have videos of the seller acknowledging receiving the money and carrying out improvements in the building for the buyers. That the seller is trying to retract the sale is no suprise..there is a death penalty for Arabs who sell property to Jews. What would Gershon say if Jews threatened to kill other Jews who sold property to Arabs?
Gershon says:
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Eventually, Israeli police concluded that the purchase documents might be forged
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On the other hand, they might NOT be forged. Nothing conclusive in this statement. The buyers say they are not forged and have supplied proof.
Gershon says:
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One long-term resident is reportedly ex-terrorist Uzi Sharbaf,
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I don’t recall Gershon referring to Uri Avnery as an ex-terrorist (I have actually heard him refer to himself as such), nor Arafat, nor Palestinian leader Abbas (who is also a Holocaust denier), no the many other Palestinian leaders who carried out atrocities for the PLO. Simply because Shimon Peres has befriended these peope doesn’t automatically remove the moral stain from them.
Gershon says:
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That pullout involved removing 9,000 settlers who had lived in the area for years. At Kfar Darom, one of the main settlements, young protesters barricaded themselves in the main synagogue, hurling acid at police and soldiers climbing ladders to reach them. Yet most families left peacefully.
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Our fellow commentor at this site, Yisrael Medad has posted information showing the “acid throwing” was not true.
Gershon says:
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Yet any two-state agreement with the Palestinians would require an evacuation on a scale much larger than the Gaza pullout
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Where is this agreement? The Palestinians know they can get rid of all the settlements with a stroke of a pen…if they agree to make peace with Israel. Olmert offered them a withdrawal to the pre-67 lines and yet they refused. Leftist Ha’aretz columnist Ari Shavit wrote in Ha’aretz today that the “2-state solution” with the Palestinian is dead. SO WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE? If the Palestinians refuse to make peace, what’s the problem if Jews live in Beit HaShalom?
Here is the link to Shavit’s column:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1041346.html
Gershon says:
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At a cabinet meeting in early November, Yuval Diskin, the head of the Shin Bet domestic security agency warned of “a very high willingness among [settlers] to use violence — not just stones, but live weapons — in order to prevent” withdrawal.
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What evidence does Diskin have for this outrageous slander? If it is true, why isn’t making arrests? This is political propaganda, pure and simple.
If you recall the excellent article Evelyn Gordon wrote in the Jerusalem Post about why the Left has over and over subverted the democratic process in order to ram its golden calf of the so-called ‘peace process” down Israelis throats and how this has caused a dangerous alienation of pro-settlement segment of the population. Sharon promised in 2003 election not to destroy Gush Katif and he won on that platform. He then called a Likud members referendum in order to get a public mandate and he lost it. He went ahead anyway. We warned you that you were playing with fire…that you were educating the public that there is no point in participating in the democratic process, but you all laughed at us telling us that you have the police, the army to beat us over the head (Amona) and they can throw us in jail and lie about is in the media (the mythical acid at Kfar Darom). So now, many of us have lost faith in the regime in power and the Establishment that runs the country. These kids who are protesting have learned the lesson. Just as Arabs disobey the law with impunity, with their massive illegal building and taking over state lands, particularly in the Negev and Galilee, not to mention their riots in Akko and Pekiin where the police just stood aside and allowed them to rampage, Jews are getting the same idea. This should be no surprise to you.
The removal of Migron, should it happen, is certainly welcome, but what sense does it make to move the settlers to Adam, of all places? AFAIK, Adam sits east of the wall, and is thus, by Israel’s own rationale, “temporary”. In this sense, the removal would strengthen, not weaken the overall settlements enterprise.
YBD: “What evidence does Diskin have for this outrageous slander? If it is true, why isn’t making arrests?”
Your complaint about the settlers not yet getting a dose of the medicine the Palestinians have been receiving for decades rings a little hollow, to say the least. Diskin’s warning isn’t evidence of a crime, although we all know that in the case of Palestinians such is entirely optional – there’s always administrative detention to fall back upon.
Mahmoud Abbas has long ago corrected himself about the shoah:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=297637
On Migron, this article (which I hadn’t read until now) by Lara Friedman and Hagit Ofran of Peace Now emphatically agrees with me 😀
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1041752.html
Diskin is following a familiar bureaucratic trick: warn about danger which requires a greater degree of effort which means a larger budget for the GSS. This has nothing to do with reality.
And Lara Friedman used to be the Political Officer of the US Consulate-General in Jerusalem.