Evacuation proceeds in Hebron stolen land case
Two weeks ago, as we read Abraham purchase Sarah’s tomb in Hebron in Parshat Chayai Sarah, thousands of settler protestors filled the modern day city of Hebron, a jail of a city, to protest the Israeli Supreme Court’s order to evacuate a house built on disputed land.
Today, they were removed.
The pictures are markedly different from the Gaza pullout, a painful but mostly peaceful affair. This time settler extremists began rioting, using their children as human sheilds, setting fire to Palestinian neighbors, calling Ethopian soldiers “Olmert’s niggers”, and unrepentantly cursing death upon the soldiers. The stories and images are just outrageous.
This is a taste of what will grow worse and worse the longer Israel puts off the issue of the settlements. The largest settlements are suburbs of Jerusalem for average Israelis, likely to be kept by Israel in land swap deals, such as Maale Adumim and Gush Etzion. Blocs of smaller settlements will be a case by case basis. But the majority of individual settlements and “illegal” outposts (as if they all aren’t illegal) where the extremist Greater Israel settlers reside, will have to be evacuated.
Israel has made a bold step today in drawing a line in the sand, and in the rule of law. (Which is under civil assault as Israel’s High Court issues orders which the military ignores, and right-wing political parties propose legislation to strip its powers.) It will be hard. But if you want a two-state solution (thereby a Jewish majority in Israel), or the apartheid accusations to drop, it’s necessary.
This comes at the same time as Palestinian security forces begin their first week of confiscating weapons on the Palestinian side of the city. Peace Now offers a powerpoint on why the house is disputed.
It’s progress.
Has this been negotiated? Or was this once more unilateral? If there were some deals made with the Pals not disclosed to the public, this could very well advance the peace process. If it’s the latter, we may unfortunately see a repeat of aftermath of the Gaza disengagement.
It’s just one building, on a road between two bigger settlement compounds.
Check the powerpoint, page 6, it has maps of the whole thing. I’d cut out and post the map in question, but I can’t do it till morning.
the noble experiment
is now the failed experiment.
let’s resign ourselves to that uncomfortable truth, and pool our resources toward evacuating the supposed “holy land”. doesn’t our civilization, our culture, our religion, our people hold more worth than some third rate real estate the size of New Jersey? Hell, it would be easier for us to fuckin buy New Jersey than to try and hold on to our current homeland.
If we are to believe what we read in the Israeli press (at least if we are to believe Ehud Ya’ari), the Palestinian leadership feared Sharon more than any politician since Ben-Gurion.
Why? Because of his military successes? Brutality? Deceitfulness?
Other Israelis leaders displayed such traits. We can conjecture that Sharon was feared because he removed the settlers from Gaza and likely would have removed settlers from the heart of the West Bank.
The settler community, at least our generation of that community, is the PLO and Hamas’s dream come true.
We really need to ask ourselves if Sharon’s illness signaled the death knell for Zionism.
The map shows the physical size of the building and it’s location relative to the other settler enclaves. Kiryat Arba is home to 7,000 settlers and the other downtown Hebron buildings contain (reputedly) 300 settlers.