Region | Palestinian Territories
Hardest battle still to come for Israel
Militant colonists rampage across the West Bank defacing Palestinian homes and cars.
- AP
- Published: 23:25 December 2, 2008
Occuppied Jerusalem: Israel's hardest battle may still lie ahead, and it's not against an Arab foe.
Warnings are growing louder that evicting tens of thousands of Jewish colonists from the West Bank's heartland - a requirement for peace with the Arabs - will be bloody, and perhaps fail.
The defence minister says extremism is spreading among ultra-nationalist like "a cancerous growth," the intelligence chief warns of a growing readiness to take up arms to resist evacuation, and some colony rabbis are urging religious soldiers to refuse orders. Recently, the government has failed to dismantle unauthorised squatter camps, despite promises to the US to do so. Its resolve is now being tested by a few dozen militant colonists in a house in Hebron.
Some warn that running from the fight may condemn Israel to rule the Palestinians forever and end the dream of a Jewish and democratic state.
The colonists see the West Bank as the heart of Israel, and believe giving it up would harm their dream.
On Monday and yesterday, they went on rampages in a Palestinian neighbourhood in several parts of the West Bank. They slashed car tires, smashed windows of cars and homes, defaced a Muslim cemetery and in one village sprayed "Death to Arabs" on a local mosque, the military and witnesses said.
Minister under fire
Israel's Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has come under fire from EU lawmakers for allowing Jewish colonists to continue expanding colonies in the Palestinian West Bank territory. Livni says it is no longer official Israeli policy to expand colonies, and she's defended Israeli security policies to crack down on Palestinian extremists. Several lawmakers backed arguments made by Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad that the continuing expansion of colonies in the West Bank were threatening peace talks. Livni was in Brussels to meet with top EU officials on Tuesday.
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