Posted on 01/16/2006 11:09:17 AM PST by avile
Army declares City of Patriarchs a "closed military zone" By Israel Insider staff and partners January 16, 2006
A Jewish girl is taken into custody by security forces.
The army declared Hebron, the City of the Jewish Patriarchs, a closed military zone forbidden to non-resident Israelis.
Israeli police seized buildings and rooftops in a Jewish settler enclave in the holy city of Hebron on Monday, restoring order after three days of riots sparked by plans to evict Israeli squatters from an abandoned Palestinian market.
The closure and scuffles could signal the opening salvo in a battle over the West Bank, if Israel follows its pullout from the Gaza Strip last summer with further withdrawals from territory that has far more biblical resonance.
Settler leaders and rabbis demanded that acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert back down and abandon his plan to dismantle the outpost in a Hebron market and several other unauthorized settlements across the West Bank slated for destruction in the coming weeks.
Olmert stood his ground, saying he ordered security forces to deal sternly with the defiant settlers.
"There will be no forgiveness or compromises with this unacceptable behavior," he said Monday. "There are red lines that we will not allow to be crossed."
The fight over Hebron, where tradition says the biblical Jewish patriarchs are buried, has special resonance for the settlers. Many of the settlers here are extreme, religious nationalists and the city has been the scene of harsh fighting during the five years of Israel-Palestinian violence.
Hebron is the only West Bank city divided between Palestinian and Israeli zones. Israeli forces control the center of the city, where about 500 settlers live in several compounds. Settlers often clash with local Palestinians.
Olmert spoke about Hebron after being named acting head of the centrist Kadima Party in place of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who suffered a massive stroke Jan. 4. Sharon formed Kadima last year after rebellious lawmakers from his hardline Likud Party tried to torpedo his pullout from Gaza and four isolated West Bank settlements. Many Israelis assumed Sharon planned further withdrawals, if his party won March 28 elections as polls indicate.
The New Yorker magazine reported Monday that Sharon's National Security Council had been considering four different West Bank evacuation plans: dismantling isolated settlements, removing a whole settlement region, evacuating 88 percent of the West Bank and evacuating 92 percent of the territory.
At the same time, Sharon's aides were discussing withdrawing to Israel's separation barrier -- which includes major settlement blocs on the Israeli side -- in exchange for U.S. recognition of the barrier as Israel's permanent border, the New Yorker reported.
Sharon spokesman Asaf Shariv said several pullout options had been considered by the National Security Council ahead of the Gaza withdrawal, but "I don't know about anything since then that is new."
The Maariv daily reported Monday that Labor leader Amir Peretz also was considering calling for a large-scale unilateral pullout from the West Bank. Peretz spokesman Tom Wegner would not confirm the report.
Hoping to show the government that future withdrawals will not be as painless as the Gaza pullout, hundreds of protesters flocked to Hebron _ where the settlers live among 170,000 Palestinians _ to fight eviction orders given to eight settler families.
The families moved into an empty Palestinian market four years ago after Palestinian gunmen killed a 10-month-old Jewish baby and they ignored an Israeli court order that gave them until Jan. 15 to voluntarily leave. The army said it would remove them within a month.
"It's important to say 'No,"' settler spokesman David Wilder said. "You can't let them chop up your land and give it to your enemy."
The protesters, many of them teenagers and some of them masked, began rampaging through the area Friday, torching empty Palestinian shops and a home, throwing stones at Palestinian houses and trying to rush off-limits areas of the city.
On Monday, hundreds of youth milled about the market and ate fruit and bread left out for them in huge crates. Many wore T-shirts left over from the Gaza protests, reading: "We won't forget, we won't forgive." One wore a set of dog tags listing all the dismantled settlements.
Suddenly, riot police, border police and officers on horseback charged through the market and into the nearby Avraham Avinu settlement enclave, where many of the youth had camped out on mattresses scattered across the floor of a guest house.
The police stormed the buildings and forced the youth to evacuate the rooftops where they had fled. The protesters hurled curses at the police, shoved them and called them American lackeys. Three girls were arrested, police said.
Israel's police commander in Hebron, Avi Harush, said the operation targeted "those same lawbreakers especially the masked people ... who are throwing rocks, paint and other objects at us, and the goal is to bring them down from the rooftops and restore control to the police and the army."
"We have a zero tolerance policy against people who use violence against police and soldiers and vandalize Palestinian property," he said.
Authorities were discussing whether to declare the settlement a closed military zone, which would bar anyone who is not a resident from entering, Harush said.
Two separate groups of rabbis sent letters to Olmert on Monday demanding he cancel the plan to evacuate the market and other outposts. One letter, signed by 20 rabbis, warned Olmert that he courted personal tragedy if he withdrew from any of "the Land of Israel."
The second letter, sent by a group of settler rabbis, called the eviction orders "a war against God and his Messiah."
You don't see Reform Jews trying to live there. They are too busy with important issues like providing abortion doctors and civil rights for the transgenderd.
We all know that if Israel pulled back to the 67 line the demographic problem with the 22% arab population would end because 1million reformers will come and just like the AA community becoming the most philosemitic ever because of the reform jewish social worker do gooders, the Arabs will become the Israeli ambassadors to the muslim world.
I don't have a lot of sympathy for them.
A lot of them are extremists, that's true. But it's amazing that Israel can call out all this force against them. I suspect it's basically just a move to impress the Palestinians, who won't be impressed and don't give a darn anyway, since they simply want Israel to disappear. (And disappear including the secular Jews, which is something the latter have yet to understand.)
Extremist because they desire to live where it is recorded Abraham bought a grave site.
Extremists because when the Arabs riot and murder a Jewish community- as the they did to the Jewish community in Hevron in 1929- the Jews should know never to return?
Say bye-bye to Olmert...
I don't have a lot of sympathy for them.
How dare you?
If they can't be extremists" in their own country where can they be?
I don't see many Jewish extremists blowing up buildings and airplanes and school buses and children in their sleep in countries other than their own.
Do you think that if the savages, the knuckle-dragging mass murdering arabs and other muslims limited their thing to their own country that I would care?
Would you?
I don't see many Jewish extremists squatting in Saudi territory in and around Mecca...
If Jews can't protect and cherish the land of their patriarchs, what possible rational justification is there for that?
If muslims can't practice their primitive rites peacefully in other host countries, observing their host's laws and customs, they can just leave.
Yes. So what? Why should it matter even if you are living right on top of Abraham's bones?
I know what happened in 1929 was wrong. I think these people are taking resources away from the IDF that could be used to defend people in Israel, not a handful af people who insist on breaking the law.
They are not in their own country.
I don't see many Jewish extremists blowing up buildings and airplanes and school buses and children in their sleep in countries other than their own.
So that makes it okay?
I will not defend Muslims either, I don't like extremists on any side.
Why should Arabs live there and not Jews?
1929 was wrong? Bravo for that acknowledgement.
So?
Kill Jews, make area too costly to defend. Would work in Tel Aviv too.
You a big IDF supporter?
I sure am. With my thoughts and my tax money.
I think the IDF needs to spend more time defending people that live within the laws and don't insist on making matters worse.
Who's country are they in?
When did it become a country? Who was the first leader? What do the coins look like? What is their religion? Language? History?
Then you should be glad.
When the IDF acts against Arab terrorists, it may be the only time you are getting your money's worth.
I know what happened in 1929 was wrong. I think these people are taking resources away from the IDF that could be used to defend people in Israel, not a handful af people who insist on breaking the law.The settlers in Kiryat Arba have turned the grave of the perpetrator of the Second Hebron Massacre (1994) into a virtual shrine and monument.
The current settlers in Hebron are even more extreme.
Long term, the solution is a large permanent Israeli consulate near Patriarchs, with the Palestinian government retaining the normal diplomatic right to declare individuals persona non grata for cause.
But the current bunch is like a bunch of Klansmen moving into Harlem and demanding close and aggressive NYPD protection.
-Eric
Just like they took care of Josephs Tomb?
Come on. you can do better then that.
How about a Hope for a Holocaust Museum. With rides, cotton candy, models of blown up buses, models of Jewish blood splattered pizza parlors, a booth where pregnant mothers can dedicate their unborn to Jihad. All the stuff that those "Palestinians" you champion, you know, the misunderstood, non extremists, love so much. How are those peaceful folks you love so much handling Gaza? Vacation there yet?
They all share the guilt of GOLDSTEIN!
They must be PURGED!
How's my "Eric" impression?
You know the rule.
Where ever an Arab donkey urinates. The land a thousand miles in any direction forever belongs to Islam.
Maybe we should kill all the donkeys.
Should read: Arab's donkey
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