Republican News · Thursday 1 August 2002

Protecting Israel's unwelcome settlers

BY SILVIO CERULLI in HEBRON

When the peace process started back in 1991, there were 110,000 settlers scattered throught the West Bank; now they number 194,000 and there also approximately 200,000 settlers living in the Arab part of Jerusalem

Shaul Mofaz, the chief of staff of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) who retired last week, was a primitive and amoral commander. In the Talaba, Gaza, Nablus and Jenin refugee camps (about 1,000 alleged deaths since the start of last winter's Israeli offensive) he was termed "the executioner". Many human rights organisations believe he should be brought before a court of justice, alongside Ariel Sharon, for crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Within Israel's hierarchy, the chief of staff post is more important than the State president and second only to that of prime minister. In a society that has been militarised at every level, where after their terms of conscription every man and woman is recalled to serve for two months as reservists until they are 50, the IDF is more than an institution. The comparison drawn by Mirabeau, one of the fathers of the French Revolution, that "Prussia is not a state with an army but an army with a state", utterly fits with Israeli society. This huge military establishment forms a powerful political coalition, which is, by its nature, anti-Arab and therefore anti-peace process.

Mofaz's successor, former head of Israeli intelligence Moshe Yaloon, comes from such a coalition. He inherits one of the most powerful armed organisations in the world (the only one in the region to own nuclear weapons) which is already responsible for the deaths of at least 1,700 Palestinians - 312 of them children- since the start of the Intifada. The IDF is given 22% of Israel's annual budget and costs per capita to the Israeli people fifteen times more than the American army.

As soon as he was appointed, Yaloon wasted no time in making his mark in the city of Hebron, in the southern canton of the West Bank, where last weekend the IDF covered, protected and colluded with Jewish settlers. The violence erupted after the funeral of two parents and a child killed by the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade on Saturday. That was the revenge for the Gaza bombing a few days earlier, whose death tall has now reached 17 deaths, ten of them children. Among the victims was Saleh Shahade, the leader of Izzedin al Kassam, who has now been replaced by one of the most uncompromising figures within Hamas' armed wing, Mohammed Def.

The IDF allowed the settlers loose on the Palestinian districts of Hebron, where they proceeded to kill, wound, and set houses on fire. Ten year-old Mussa Jamjum leant out of her window and was killed by automatic gunfire with a bullet in her forehead. Every Saturday, after the Shabbath prayers, the settlers launch raids into Arab areas, searching for the Palestinians who breach the two month-old military curfew.

Hebron itself is a place apart. The word 'peace' means nothing here. Four hundred orthodox Jews live in the Qiriat Arba settlement, walled inside the old city and surrounded by 120,000 Palestinians. This is one of the most extremist Jewish settlements in the whole of the West Bank, built around holy historical sites claimed by both Jews and Muslims as their own. It was here that a settler, the American doctor named Baruch Goldstein, broke into the Ibrahimi Mosque, shooting at kneeling Palestinians. Those who tried to flee were shot by the IDF. Twenty-nine lives were lost in the attack, which happened a few weeks after the signing of the 1993 peace agreement.

The strategy of extending the settlements, despite the promise to reduce them, is a political weapon meant to ensure maximum Israeli territorial expansion and annexation of the Territories. Many Palestinian towns are ringed by the outposts (each one protected by thousands of troops) which reinforce the economic apartheid imposed on the Palestinians by making movements of people and goods almost impossible. When the peace process started back in 1991, there were 110,000 settlers scattered throught the West Bank; now they number 194,000 and there also approximately 200,000 settlers living in the Arab part of Jerusalem.

While millions of Palestinian refugees are still denied the so-called Right to Return, every Jew in the world enjoys the right to do so if they wish, being also awarded more than $20,000 on arrival.

According to the new international treaty for the protection of people under occupation signed in Rome, which became law on 1 July, Jewish settlers are now officially regarded as an illegal force of occupation. However, settlers' and soldiers' violence is in fact tacitly supported by the international community and rewarded with total impunity.

A few days ago the media reported an announcement from the minister of defence Benyamin Ben Eliezer (who is said to have been involved in the massacre of hundreds of captured Egyptian soldiers after they had surrendered in the Sinai Desert) "to close 12 settlements", yet they largely ignored the fact that ten of these outposts didn't even exist.

While some of the Jewish settlers might be willing to be relocated within Israel, the fundamentalists like those from Qiriat Arba will never accept the removal of the outposts. "There can be no peace untill they are dismantled," says Khaled, a local Palestinian journalist in Hebron. "Along with sovereignty, borders, refugees, security from Israeli aggression, water and Jerusalem, the settlers issue remains one of the thorniest for both the conflict and its peace process. Unfortunately, the reality is that once they have finished carving up Palestinians into bantustans they will only feel more besieged by the new Palestinian cantonisation. So they will keep fighting us, torturing and maiming Hebron's children, murdering innocent people. It's their policy, it's their culture."