Hundreds of Israeli settlers fanned out across a hillside to block the army from tearing down trailer homes at Amonah, stalling Ariel Sharon’s pledge to dismantle dozens of illegal Jewish outposts in the West Bank.
The soldiers were sent in after the army command failed to persuade settlers to voluntarily tear down outposts as part of Sharon’s commitment at last week’s summit with President George Bush and the Palestinian prime minister.
But it was apparent at Amonah that the troops were half-hearted and the settlers forewarned. Loudspeakers in the neighbouring established settlement of Ofrah called on residents to climb the hills in defence of Amonah, which is home to dozens of settlers. Among them was Rifkah Ben-Meir with her five-year-old son in tow.
”Once they start pulling this down, it’ll go on and on until we all have to leave,” she said. ”The people who live here are here to defend Israel. We are here for idealistic reasons so we cannot just give up.”
A few hours earlier the military bulldozed two uninhabited shacks on another hillside, at Neve Erez.
Soldiers pulled down a disused water tower on a neighbouring hill at Amonah. But the military showed an unusual restraint, that would come as a surprise to many Palestinians, when confronted by large numbers of teenagers, mothers with babies in their arms and a few dozen well-armed men.
One American settler was overheard to say that if the army had been serious about tearing down the outpost it would have sent ”10 times as many soldiers, and not these reservists but real riot police”.
Earlier in the day the Israeli defence minister, Shaul Mofaz, presented settler leaders with a list of 15 outposts the army planned to dismantle, four of them inhabited. But a spokesperson for the settlers, Yehoshua Mor-Yosef, said they refused to cooperate.
”If we are evacuated we will return the night after and establish 10 new outposts,” he said.
Sharon said he would not be diverted from his commitment. ”This is the policy I have decided on and I will implement it.”
The Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, dismissed the dismantling of a few outposts yesterday as largely irrelevant so long as Israel continues to say it intends to hold on to established settlements that are home to about 200 000 Jews living in the West Bank and Gaza.
”Our position is clear: no settlements on our land within 1967 borders,” he said.
Abbas, who is better known as Abu Mazen, was fighting to stave off a barrage of accusations that he made too many concessions at the summit in Aqaba to kick-start the US-led road map to a Palestinian state.
The most vocal criticism has come from Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which launched a rare joint attack on Sunday, killing four Israeli soldiers at the crossing from Israel into the Gaza strip and another in Hebron.
Hamas said the attacks were a rejection of Abbas’s speech at the summit because he declared an end to the intifada.
The Palestinian prime minister yesterday accused Hamas and the other groups of playing into Israeli hands by trying to provoke a military confrontation. But he said he would not stray from seeking dialogue.
”The suffering of the Palestinian people is not a subject for propaganda. Our suffering needs a solution and not incitement,” he said. ”For us, there is no alternative to dialogue. Dialogue is our choice.”
However, Abbas was evidently less concerned with the threat from Hamas than with the political impact of unrest within Fatah and the Palestinian leadership at the tone of his statement in Aqaba and the lack of commitment from Israel in return.
There has been criticism of his renunciation of the armed intifada and his description of it as terrorism without balancing his comments by justifying resistance to occupation.
”The Israelis really wanted the word ‘terrorism’ in the statement. Abu Mazen could have used ‘killing of civilians’, but the Americans pressed him,” said one PLO official.
”The problem is that in the next breath he calls for an end to the armed intifada. It sounded as though he was delegitimising the intifada, comparing it to terrorism rather than exerting the Palestinians’ legal right to resist a very brutal occupation.
”There are senior people in Fatah who are very unhappy about this. It’s Oslo all over again. We jump through the hoops like trained circus animals while the Israelis wheedle out of their commitments.” – Guardian Unlimited Â