Israel evacuates two W. Bank outposts

Defense forces were evacuating two unauthorized outposts in the West Bank on Wednesday, Israeli defense officials said.

Police and army forces arrived at the first outpost, Harchivi, near Nablus, and the five people there fled at the sight of the forces, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said. No arrests were made.

At the second outpost, Shvut Ami, also near Nablus, around 20 teenage protesters gathered at the scene before forces arrived, laying down barbed wire and rocks on the road and posting signs with slogans reading, "The land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel."

Some protesters lay down on the floor of one of the two incomplete structures at the site and were carried out by police.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1200308099926&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

If the law was enforced in all the cases it should be enforced, how long would it take, at this rate,
to deal with all the outposts in the OPT? Would it be months, years, decades or millenia?

i say never. That's good for the Israel regime. Fine by the Bush regime. If any one has a problem with that, well that's tough. Palestinians have no rights that Israel (or the US) are bound to respect.

Jewish population in West Bank continued to grow in 2007 in both religious and secular settlements

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3496699,00.html

<snip>

"The Jewish population in West Bank settlements grew by 5.2% in 2007, rising by 14,000 residents from 268,000 at the end of 2006 to 282,000 at the end of 2007.

According to the Interior Ministry, which provided the data, the increase should be attributed both to natural growth and to internal migration from communities within the Green Line to settlements.

Naturally, the statistics do not include illegal outposts in the region.

A substantial part of the growth in Israeli population was registered in the large haredi settlements, including Beitar Illit, Modi'in Illit and Immanuel, where the birthrate was exceptionally high."

The whole move by the Israeli regime is to show that they are "moving toward peace" by removing settlements, while the reality is just the opposite, they are moving daily, without a moments rest, toward consolidating their hold on large parts of the West Bank.

They then will be obliged to offer Palestinians nothing more than a state that resembles Swiss Cheese.

It does seem like that once we actually get everyone talking again, the long-term compromise will result in some sort of 1:1 exchange of territory.

<snip>

"No sooner had the Israeli border police gone than the young Jewish settlers were back, to rebuild the unauthorized outpost that had just been evacuated and torn down for the ninth time in recent months.

First was a group of teenage girls, who clambered over the mounds of dirt piled up by an army bulldozer to block access. The girls went to the roof of the vacant, Palestinian-owned home they had taken over and got to work, clearing debris from a demolished second story the settlers had been building.

Next came groups of teenage boys. They climbed over earth pushed up against doors and windows to prevent re-entry, squeezed back in and surveyed the damage.

"They destroyed it, and we'll fix it. Come in two weeks and you'll see everything built," said Elad Sela, 17, from the neighboring settlement of Yitzhar. "In the end, they'll run out of steam."

The scene at Shvut Ami last week demonstrated the challenge that unauthorized settler outposts in the West Bank pose to the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as peace talks with the Palestinians resume. It also was a display of what many see as the ineffectual response by Israeli authorities to lawbreaking by militant settlers."

more

Many Answer Bush's Demand For End to Illegal Settlements By Starting New Construction

By Jonathan Finer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, January 13, 2008; Page A18

SHVUT AMI, West Bank -- With a pellet gun in his jeans pocket and a hammer in his hand, Dani Landesberg and a crew of teenage Jewish settlers began adding a second story to what has become their new home. They stole occasional glances down the winding access road in case the police came by to evict them, again.

Last Sept. 30, a dozen settlers moved into the small stone house at the base of a gentle hill in the northern West Bank and turned what was once a barn for donkeys into a synagogue. Two weeks later, Israeli security forces banished them for the first of eight times from land that a Palestinian family says is its property, a claim backed by legal documents and an Israeli human rights group.

The settlers returned the next day, so police sealed the windows and doors with metal siding and plowed a berm across the driveway, all to no avail.

"They can drag us away a hundred times and we'll come back," said Landesberg, 18, who like many religious Jews wears a yarmulke and long, curled sideburns. "And if the army wants to stay and guard it, then we win, because if the Israeli army is here, the land is being occupied by Jews."

In the incremental struggle for land in the West Bank, this "outpost," or Jewish settlement unauthorized by the Israeli government, and about 100 others like it, have emerged as a front line.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/12/AR2008011202409_pf.html

gotta catapult the propaganda out there.

I have no doubt that even the very few settlers who were protesting here will likely remain in the illegally occupied West Bank. Even if they have to move a few kilometers.