Last settlements evacuated as resistance folds without major incident
By Rafael D. Frankel
SA-NUR, West Bank—On the roof of the three-story art gallery here, where six Palestinian towns and a series of mountains make-up the 360-degree panorama, barrels of canned food, stacks of bottled water, and enough mattresses to accommodate dozens of people were piled amongst gas masks, megaphones, and ladders.
They were supplies for a long-awaited battle that never happened.
The last pocket of resistance to Israel’s disengagement plan fell with a whimper here Tuesday despite long hyped fears that this hill-top enclave of religious Zionists might put up a real fire fight against the Israeli Defense Forces which came to remove them.
The settlers of Sa-Nur proved good to their word of non-violent resistance. No shots were fired, no acid was thrown on police, and though nearly all of the residents and protesters who were removed today had to be carried out, most did not struggle against it when the time came.
Still, officers from Israel’s SWAT team, the Yassam, were forced for the second time in a week to storm a roof top in two modified cargo crates lifted by separate cranes. Though it took them more than 20 minutes to gain the roof in the Gazan town Kfar Darom, the Yassam did it here in less than one.
As the crates were heaved into position, Yassam officers inside them sprayed fire extinguishers at protesters on the roof wearing gas masks and brandishing long wooden beams in an effort to prevent the crates from landing. Simultaneously, three officers perched in a fire ladder used a high pressure hose to move the protesters back, and the combination of the two allowed the crates to land.
Once the Yassam were on the roof, the resistance ended and the protesters began praying the traditional afternoon Jewish service.
“It seems we couldn’t prevent [the evacuation] from being performed,” said right-wing Knesset Member Arieh Eldad who moved to San-Ur nine months ago. But “we will return and rebuild every settlement that was destroyed.”
After the service, the protesters fell to the ground, laying on top of each other and locking their limbs together. As the Yassam struggled to untangle one from the other and carried them to the crates, they sang “The Nation of Israel is one” and “The eternal people are not afraid of the long path.”
Despite the cage landings, the most difficult army operation came in the middle of the day when female soldiers were charged with removing around two dozen women from the court yard of the art gallery. Many of them had children and refused to hand them off to the female officers while they were being carried away.
One boy around a year old started crying when soldiers moved to carry him and his mother away together. The woman kept her eyes on her boy the whole time, refusing to speak to, or even acknowledge the soldiers. “Don’t look at them, look at mom,” she smiled at her son as the soldiers moved in and hoisted them away.
Earlier in the day, Israeli soldiers cleared out the main synagogue where around 30 men and teenagers had dug an eight-foot trench around the side of the building, strung razor wire around the side walls and welded metal bars across the doorway and windows.
With sparks flying, army engineers cut through the bars at the doorway using two large circular saws. Soldiers then allowed the protesters to finish their prayers before carrying them out. They were also sitting on the floor, limbs locked together and singing, when the soldiers came for them.
The day began in earnest at 5:30am when long columns of busses streamed down the road from the north carrying around 10,000 soldiers. Though youths lit tire fires and scattered the road to Sa-Nur with tables, chairs, mattresses, and metal spikes, it was easily cleared out by an army bulldozer which first uprooted the settlement’s locked entrance gate in a matter of seconds.
After police moved in to secure the town, soldiers quickly broke down dozens of unoccupied tents (the people had locked themselves in other buildings) which were home to hundreds of visitors who came to support the residents here who chose to stay. At the same time, protesters on the roof sang a traditional Jewish prayer which beings: “How beautiful are your tents, oh Jacob.”
Soldiers then moved methodically from house to house, forcibly removing families, some of whom were wearing six-pointed orange stars on their shirts.
One family had “barricaded” their house with a tricycle, a toy car, and kid-size chairs. Upon leaving the home, a girl around five years old jumped down their one stair with a bag of graham crackers in her hand and a wide smile.
At a quarter after seven, an announcement came over the town’s loud speakers for everyone who wanted to, to come into the art gallery together before the doors were welded shut. Along the roof, settlers had strung up a large sign which read: “Damned is he who expels his brother from his home.”
But after using circular saws to cut through the art gallery doors, soldiers and police met minimal resistance in clearing out the town’s largest building.
“I think [the prospect of] violence was very much a media created notion,” said IDF Spokesman Marcus Sheff. “Our working assumption was that people would resist but wouldn’t cross any red lines.”
©2005 Rafael D. Frankel
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Monday, August 22, 2005
In West Bank, a 'Masada mind-set'
In West Bank, a 'Masada mind-set'
Israeli troops worry about armed extremists in the last two settlements.
By Rafael D. Frankel and Ilene R. Prusher
HOMESH, WEST BANK – When more than 5,000 Israeli troops arrive here and in nearby Sa-Nur Tuesday, they anticipate a more violent opposition to evacuation than in Gaza, including the possibility of being fired on by young extremists.
From Gaza's seaside settlements - the last of them evacuated Monday - to the hills of northern West Bank, more changes than topography. There is a clear difference in the types of protesters drawn to the two final enclaves to be evacuated in Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan.
There are Israeli extremists who say that they haven't made a strong enough statement yet about the morality of uprooting settlements, and some are driven by a "Masada mentality" - the desire to do something so extreme as to make that message unforgettable.
In AD 74, 1,000 Jewish zealots held off the Roman army in a mountaintop siege, before committing suicide.
"I lost faith. I don't believe in the government, the laws, the police, the army," says Eitan Felsenstein, who is from another West Bank settlement. He doesn't directly threaten violence, but says that they are planning "something serious."
Just how serious has become a major concern. According to various reports, some infiltrators holed up in the two settlements, which have far more agitators than original residents, are arming themselves with weapons.
Officials are hopeful that many will only want to put up a tough fight but most won't turn to bloodshed. "We prepare for the worst and hope for the best," says Superintendent Sharon Brown of the Israel Police, "but we are definitely preparing for the worst."
Physically, the mountainous settlements are harder for the army to close off. But ideologically, for settlers who only refer to this region by its biblical name, Samaria, this land is on an even higher ground. Jewish tradition holds that the patriarch Joseph is buried in nearby Nablus, and over the past three decades, some of the most ultranationalist settlers have been drawn to this area.
Since the late 1990s, the Israeli government has attempted to rein in vigilante settlements. In these, a group of young settlers would find an uninhabited peak, plant a flag and a few mobile homes on it, and declare it a new community. The activists were dubbed the "hilltop youth."
In the years since, some of the hilltop youth have become further radicalized. They tend to be second- and third-generation settlers, most of them children of the Gush Emunim, Hebrew for "Bloc of the Faithful," founded in the early 1970s. Although this religious-national group was viewed as radical in its day, with leaders pushing to strike roots all over the West Bank and Gaza, it maintained a close relationship with state institutions.
By comparison, says Prof. Ami Pedahzur, an expert on Israel's far right and a political scientist at the University of Haifa, many in the next generation are not serving in the army - either by religious exemptions or because some of them have profiles with Israel's security forces that kept them out.
As a result, many of the hilltop youth have eschewed their parent's patriotism. Their beliefs hold that every settlement sits on sacred ground, leaving no room for compromise.
"They wear biblical clothes, and there's some element of new age behavior there. You can see them walking with sheep and goats. They try to be close to nature," as if living in the ways of their forefathers, Mr. Pedahzur says, "but actually they're very extreme."
Most of these groups, says Pedahzur, have no centralized leadership structure. As such, fears of what could transpire here stem from the fact that even if more mature voices - such that of Aryeh Eldad, a far right-wing parliament member who is also camped out here - send out a message encouraging nonviolence, it might easily be ignored.
"We know that some of the boys up in the hills there are not following orders of the mainstream leadership," says Pedahzur, "and there are small cells of people that can try to push for a more militant attitude."
Still, he estimates, there is no widespread desire for another Massada. Pedahzur says it's likely that the swift evacuation of Gaza will weaken the resolve of some of the holdouts here, causing a "domino effect" that will let any rational person know that Israel's armed forces are more than capable of overcoming the holdouts. They number around 2,000, according to Maariv newspaper.
©2005 The Chrisitian Science Monitor
Israeli troops worry about armed extremists in the last two settlements.
By Rafael D. Frankel and Ilene R. Prusher
HOMESH, WEST BANK – When more than 5,000 Israeli troops arrive here and in nearby Sa-Nur Tuesday, they anticipate a more violent opposition to evacuation than in Gaza, including the possibility of being fired on by young extremists.
From Gaza's seaside settlements - the last of them evacuated Monday - to the hills of northern West Bank, more changes than topography. There is a clear difference in the types of protesters drawn to the two final enclaves to be evacuated in Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan.
There are Israeli extremists who say that they haven't made a strong enough statement yet about the morality of uprooting settlements, and some are driven by a "Masada mentality" - the desire to do something so extreme as to make that message unforgettable.
In AD 74, 1,000 Jewish zealots held off the Roman army in a mountaintop siege, before committing suicide.
"I lost faith. I don't believe in the government, the laws, the police, the army," says Eitan Felsenstein, who is from another West Bank settlement. He doesn't directly threaten violence, but says that they are planning "something serious."
Just how serious has become a major concern. According to various reports, some infiltrators holed up in the two settlements, which have far more agitators than original residents, are arming themselves with weapons.
Officials are hopeful that many will only want to put up a tough fight but most won't turn to bloodshed. "We prepare for the worst and hope for the best," says Superintendent Sharon Brown of the Israel Police, "but we are definitely preparing for the worst."
Physically, the mountainous settlements are harder for the army to close off. But ideologically, for settlers who only refer to this region by its biblical name, Samaria, this land is on an even higher ground. Jewish tradition holds that the patriarch Joseph is buried in nearby Nablus, and over the past three decades, some of the most ultranationalist settlers have been drawn to this area.
Since the late 1990s, the Israeli government has attempted to rein in vigilante settlements. In these, a group of young settlers would find an uninhabited peak, plant a flag and a few mobile homes on it, and declare it a new community. The activists were dubbed the "hilltop youth."
In the years since, some of the hilltop youth have become further radicalized. They tend to be second- and third-generation settlers, most of them children of the Gush Emunim, Hebrew for "Bloc of the Faithful," founded in the early 1970s. Although this religious-national group was viewed as radical in its day, with leaders pushing to strike roots all over the West Bank and Gaza, it maintained a close relationship with state institutions.
By comparison, says Prof. Ami Pedahzur, an expert on Israel's far right and a political scientist at the University of Haifa, many in the next generation are not serving in the army - either by religious exemptions or because some of them have profiles with Israel's security forces that kept them out.
As a result, many of the hilltop youth have eschewed their parent's patriotism. Their beliefs hold that every settlement sits on sacred ground, leaving no room for compromise.
"They wear biblical clothes, and there's some element of new age behavior there. You can see them walking with sheep and goats. They try to be close to nature," as if living in the ways of their forefathers, Mr. Pedahzur says, "but actually they're very extreme."
Most of these groups, says Pedahzur, have no centralized leadership structure. As such, fears of what could transpire here stem from the fact that even if more mature voices - such that of Aryeh Eldad, a far right-wing parliament member who is also camped out here - send out a message encouraging nonviolence, it might easily be ignored.
"We know that some of the boys up in the hills there are not following orders of the mainstream leadership," says Pedahzur, "and there are small cells of people that can try to push for a more militant attitude."
Still, he estimates, there is no widespread desire for another Massada. Pedahzur says it's likely that the swift evacuation of Gaza will weaken the resolve of some of the holdouts here, causing a "domino effect" that will let any rational person know that Israel's armed forces are more than capable of overcoming the holdouts. They number around 2,000, according to Maariv newspaper.
©2005 The Chrisitian Science Monitor