PALESTINIAN POGROMS ~ HEBRON/WEST BANK

CBS DOCUMENTARY ~
IS PEACE OUT OF REACH?

Even by Zionist standards, the settlers in Hebron are extremists, intent on driving local Palestinians from their homes. But resident Palestinian families are equally intent on resistance.

Has peace in the Middle East become nothing more than a pipe dream? As Bob Simon reports, a growing number of Israelis and Palestinians feel that a two-state solution is no longer possible. You will meet some of the settlers and the besieged Palestinians. Most interesting and frightening are the words of Daniella Weiss who will be mentioned later in this article. It her goal to prevent, at all costs, the Two State solution refused by Israel for the past 20 years, accepted for this long time by the Palestinian people.

Violence on the West Bank has been on the rise and that ugly word POGRAM has been popping up in modern journalism. An awful word raising memories of the horrors perpetrated upon the Jewish people of Pre WWII Europe, no hope of escape from the ghettos they were forced to live in by the Nazi government. How then is it, we hear this word risen from the past now applied to behavior of the Zionist settlers of the West Bank towards the Palestinian people?

What planet does this fellow think he is living on?
Even scarier is who does he think he is?

First I present an article from Ha'aretz, the third main newspaper of Israel. Then I will present a piece from Ha'aretz printed December 19, 2008. The second posting will explain just what is going, why, who is behind it, and why, despite all denials to the contrary, these are pogroms, and labeled so by the country's leaders. Why? To halt all chances of the Two State solution that Israel has been declining for over 20 years and that Palestine is still more than willing to accept.

HEBRON SETTLER RIOTS
WERE OUT AND OUT POGROMS

By Avi Issacharoff
February 20, 2002

An innocent Palestinian family, numbering close to 20 people. All of Them women and children, save for three men. Surrounding them are a few dozen masked Jews seeking to lynch them. A pogrom. This isn't a play on words or a double meaning. It is a pogrom in the worst sense of the word. First the masked men set fire to their laundry in the front yard and then they tried to set fire to one of the rooms in the house.

The women cry for help, "Allahu Akhbar." Yet the neighbors are too scared to approach the house, frightened of the security guards from Kiryat Arba who have sealed off the home and who are cursing the journalists who wish to document the events unfolding there.

Angry young settlers out for blood after expulsion from an illegal squat.

The cries rain down, much like the hail of stones the masked men hurled at the Abu Sa'afan family in the house. A few seconds tick by before a group of journalists, long accustomed to witnessing these difficult moments, decide not to stand on the sidelines. They break into the home and save the lives of the people inside. The brain requires a minute or two to digest what is taking place.

Women and children crying bitterly, their faces giving off an expression of horror, sensing their imminent deaths, begging the journalists to save their lives. Stones land on the roof of the home, the windows and the doors. Flames engulf the southern entrance to the home. The front yard is littered with stones thrown by the masked men. The windows are shattered and the children are frightened. All around, as if they were watching a rock concert, are hundreds of Jewish witnesses, observing the events with great interest, even offering suggestions to the Jewish wayward youth as to the most effective way to harm the family. And the police are not to be seen. Nor is the army.

Ten minutes prior, while the security forces were preoccupied with dispersing the rioters near the House of Contention, black smoke billowed from the wadi separating Kiryat Arba and Hebron. For some reason, none of the senior officers of the police or the army were particularly disturbed by what was transpiring at the foot of Kiryat Arba. Anyone standing hundreds of meters away could notice the dozens of rioters climbing atop the roof of the Abu Sa'afan family home, hurling stones. Only moments later did it become apparent that there were people inside the home.

I quickly descend to the wadi and accost three soldiers. "What do you want from me? The three of us are responsible for the entire sector here," one said, his hand gesturing towards the entire wadi.

"Use your radio to request help," I said. He replies that he is not equipped with a radio.

A group of journalists approach the house. A dilemma. What to do? There are no security forces in the vicinity and now the Jewish troublemakers decided to put the journalists in their crosshairs. We call for the security guards from Kiryat Arba to intervene and put a halt to the lynch. But they surround the home to prevent the arrival of "Palestinian aid."

The home is destroyed and the fear is palpable on the faces of the children. One of the women, Jihad, is sprawled on the floor, half-unconscious. The son, who is gripping a large stick, prepares for the moment he will be forced to face the rioters. Tahana, one of the daughters, refuses to calm down. "Look at what they did to the house, look."

Tess, the photographer, bursts into tears as the events unfold around her. The tears do not stem from fear. It is shame, shame at the sight of these occurrences, the deeds of youths who call themselves Jews. Shame that we share the same religion. At 5:05 P.M., a little over an hour after the incident commenced, a unit belonging to the Yassam special police forces arrives to disperse the crowd of masked men. The family members refuse to calm down.

Leaving the home, one can hear a settler yell at a police officer: "Nazis, shame on you."

Indeed. Shame on YOU!!!

Typical graffiti. Knowing their history,
how can settlers even THINK such things?

HEBRON RIOTERS INSPIRED
BY RADICAL SETTLER LEADERS

Jerusalem ~ To the Jewish West Bank settlers who attacked Palestinian people and property in Hebron this month, it was Operation Price Tag ~ an attempt to increase the price to the Israeli government of evacuating them from ground they view as sacred. To the prime minister of Israel, it was a “pogrom.”

Watch this attack on an innocent farmer below.

For all concerned, the decision of the settlers to riot December 4 after Israeli security forces evicted them from a disputed Hebron property highlighted a new tactic by hot-headed young followers of some of the Israeli-occupied West Bank’s most extreme Jewish leaders: violent retaliation, along with a conscious disdain for secular law to stop further government-ordered evacuations on the West Bank.

The violence, which included setting a Palestinian home afire, left at least two Palestinians injured and shocked much of the Israeli public. But it was not the first time. Previous settler riots in the West Bank have gone less publicized, including one less than three months earlier that outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert also likened to a pogrom.

But even as Olmert condemned them, others cheered them on. And three in particular have risen to the surface as the prime figures from whom this loose, informally structured cohort of defiant young people take inspiration and encouragement, if not direction:

Daniella Weiss, a founder of the pioneering settlers movement Gush Emunim. According to Weiss,"The Arabs are a filter through which we find our way to land."

Weiss teaching a group of youngsters the history of land that
has just been stolen from a Palestinian family.
According to Weiss, the land has always belonged to the
Jews, but was "temporarily in the hands of the wrong people."

Rabbi Shalom Dov Wolpe, a messianic member of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement.

Baruch Marzel, a follower of the late right-wing Jewish leader Rabbi Meir Kahane, well known for his racist commentary.

The three have no formal links. But this merely underscores the loose, informal nature of the movement they embody.

It was the Israeli army’s evacuation of a settler base in Hebron that sparked the latest round of violence. Since March 2007, dozens of young activists and yeshiva students, as well as 25 families, have lived in a building they call, without irony, Beit Hashalom or the House of Peace. The Hebron Jewish community claims to have bought the building from its Palestinian owner, Faez Rajabi, for about $700,000, according to the community’s Web site. But he denies having sold it.

Last month, Israel’s Supreme Court decided that, pending a ruling on who owns the property, the settlers had to leave, and the State would become temporary custodian. On December 4, in a relatively smooth operation, the army evacuated the house and sealed the doors.

The backlash was swift and harsh. In Hebron, a nearby Palestinian home and several cars were torched, a Muslim cemetery was desecrated, and there were clashes between settlers and Palestinians, during which a Palestinian father and son were shot.

Reports on their condition are unavailable. Across the West Bank, roads were blocked.

The tactics reflect a feeling in the settler movement that resistance to Israel’s 2005 evacuation of settlers from Gaza was too weak, and that the stakes must be raised as the government considers territorial compromise in the West Bank.

It is “a sort of anarchist behavior,” said Danny Dayan, head of the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea and Samaria ~ the long-established West Bank settlers association that is despised by the young extremists for its willingness to negotiate with the government and, ultimately, obey its laws. “They don’t have an established leadership, but there are people who encourage them,” Dayan said.

This 6 part series "THE REAL JEWISH SETTLERS

OF HEBRON AND WEST BANK" is well done and shows
the life of average Palestinian women amongst crude Settlers.

Dayan singled out one of them as Weiss. Although she admitted that her followers have a nonchalant attitude toward the law, she sees that as a positive. “They are not afraid of prison, they are not afraid of trials, they just express loyalty to the land,” she told the Forward.

Wolpe, also interviewed by the Forward, also scorned the idea that the settlers had carried out a “pogrom.” Rather, he insisted that they were the injured party. While claiming that he does not endorse violence, Wolpe said this of those who perpetrated it: “I understand them, and you can blame only our government that brought them to this point.”

The settlers are cornered, he said, and controversial practices such as the Price Tag policy are a legitimate means to his overall aim ~ “that the disengagement should not happen again in Judea and Samaria.”

Despite their lack of formal affiliation, he described Marzel and Weiss as among the “real lovers of the Land of Israel.”

Marzel, a Hebron-based insists that he shuns violence; however, he strongly endorses the Price Tag policy. An government official who orders a settler evacuation, he said, “commits a crime against your people [and] they have to pay a price, and [with] a heavy price they will think twice about committing the crime.”

Though the political party he ran with Kahane was deemed racist, Marzel argues it is the government that is racist for hampering Jewish settlement. The Hebron evacuation, he claimed, was “pure racism. It is not legal and is part of the move by the liberal leftist people of Israel against those loyal to the land.”

The settlers harass and threaten local Palestinians living
in Hebron, now barred from parts of the old city.
This is often done by children encouraged by their parents.

“We have a cancer in our body capable of destroying the State of Israel: people who support terrorism, Hamas, the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization], and these people are in the heart of Israel, a force capable of destroying Israel from the inside. The Land of Israel is ours." ~ Daniella Weiss


Weiss, the third influential figure among far-right settlers, is a former mayor of Kedumim, a West Bank settlement southwest of Nablus, and mentor to the so-called Hilltop Youth. These are youngsters who live in small West Bank outposts that they refuse to protect with fences. It is a symbolic gesture to indicate that the whole West Bank ~ not only settler enclaves ~ is Jewish. Weiss claims that they number 10,000.

Senior political and military figures believe that Weiss, who lived in the Hebron building for three weeks, is responsible for much of the violence after its evacuation. Weiss, 63, is pleased that the new generation in the West Bank is more radical. “The adults are still prepared to forgive” the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea and Samaria, she said. “For the young generation, this is out of the question. They consider its failure to resist the evacuation an act of treachery.”

“It’s very easy to work with these people,” she said. “But there’s a criterion you have to work by: 100% loyalty to the Land of Israel. Deviation from that in action or words will make them revolt, demonstrate, and if you tear down their building, they will build it up even 50 times.”

Experts believe that attitudes such as these will make opposition to future territorial compromise far more violent than the Gaza disengagement.