www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/26/africa/26settlers.php
YITZHAR, West Bank: A pipe bomb that exploded late on Wednesday night outside the Jerusalem home of Zeev Sternhell, a Hebrew University professor, left him lightly wounded and created only a minor stir in a nation that routinely experiences violence on a much larger scale. But Sternhell was noted for his impassioned critiques of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, once suggesting that Palestinians "would be wise to concentrate their struggle against the settlements." And the authorities found fliers near his home offering nearly $300,000 to anyone who kills a member of Peace Now, a leftist Israeli advocacy group, leading them to suspect that militant Israeli settlers or their supporters were behind the attack. If so, the bombing may be the latest sign that elements of Israel's settler movement are resorting to extremist tactics to protect their homes in the occupied West Bank against not only Palestinians, but also Jews who some settlers argue are betraying them. Radical settlers say they are determined to show that their settlements and outposts cannot be dismantled, either by law or by force. There have been bouts of settler violence for years, notably during the transfer of Gaza to the Palestinians in 2005. Now, though, the militants seem to have spawned a broader, more defined strategy of resistance designed to intimidate the state. This aggressive doctrine, according to Akiva HaCohen, 24, who is considered to be one of its architects, calls on settlers and their supporters to respond "whenever, wherever and however" they wish to any attempt by the Israeli Army or the police to lay a finger on property in illegally built outposts scheduled by the government for removal. In settler circles the policy is called "price tag" or "mutual concern."
Besides exacting a price for army and police actions, the policy also encourages settlers to avenge Palestinian acts of violence by taking the law into their own hands -- an approach that has the potential to set the tinderbox of the West Bank ablaze. Hard-core right-wing settlers have responded to limited army operations in recent weeks by blocking roads, rioting spontaneously, throwing stones at Palestinian vehicles and burning Palestinian orchards and fields all over the West Bank, a territory that Israel has occupied since 1967. They have also vandalized Israeli Army positions, equipment and cars. In Jewish settlements like Yitzhar, an extremist bastion on the hilltops commanding the Palestinian city of Nablus in the northern West Bank, a local war is already being waged. One Saturday in mid-September a Palestinian from the neighboring village of Asira al Qibliya climbed the hill to Shalhevet, a neighborhood of Yitzhar, set fire to a house whose occupants were away for the weekend and stabbed a 9-year-old settler boy, the Israeli Army said. Hours later, scores of men from Yitzhar rampaged through the Palestinian village, hurling rocks and firing guns, in what the prime minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, described as a "pogrom." Several Palestinians were hospitalized with gunshot wounds. "The army was complaining that we were bothering them in their efforts to catch the terrorist," said Ephraim Ben Shochat, 21, a resident of Shalhevet Ya, an illegal outpost consisting of three permanent houses and a trailer halfway down the slope between Yitzhar and Asira al Qibliya. "To us, deterrence is more important than catching the specific terrorist. As he spoke, soldiers were in the process of reinforcing a small army post at the end of the path with concrete slabs. "We would rather fight and kill the enemy," Ben Shochat said, adding scornfully that the army, which guards Yitzhar and its satellites from the lookout post, "would rather hide." Ten months ago in Annapolis, Maryland, Israeli and Palestinian leaders pledged to make every effort to reach a historic agreement for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza by the end of this year. The Palestinians further promised to dismantle all terrorist networks, and the Israelis agreed to freeze all settlement activity and immediately remove settlement outposts erected since March 2001. In practice, only a handful of the 100 or so outposts, at least half of which were erected since 2001, have been removed, and construction in the official West Bank settlements goes on. At the same time, the religious, ideological wing of the settlement movement has grown more radical. Those on the extremist fringe -- like Ben Shochat, who belong to the so-called hilltop youth -- are increasingly rejecting any allegiance to the state, backed up by an older generation of rabbis and early settler pioneers.
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