Hebron
Settlers Take Their Fight
Into Israel
By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth
06 December,
2008
Countercurrents.org
Extremist
settler groups currently involved in violent confrontations with Palestinians
in the centre of Hebron have chosen their next battleground, this
time outside the West Bank.
A far-right group know as the Jewish National Front, closely associated
with the Hebron settlers, is preparing to march through one of the
main Arab towns in northern Israel. The march, approved by the Supreme
Court back in October, is scheduled to take place on December 15,
the group announced this week.
The police are expecting to deploy thousands of officers to prevent
trouble, and have limited the number of Front members participating
to 100. The march will not enter the heart of the city, say police,
though it is not yet clear whether Front members will be allowed to
carry the guns most have been issued as settlers.
The Front says it will wave Israeli flags in what the group has dubbed
a demonstration of “Jewish Pride” through Umm al-Fahm,
home to nearly 45,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel.
The Front’s main platform is the expulsion of all Palestinians
from what it calls “Greater Israel”, which also includes
the West Bank and Gaza. It skates close to illegality with veiled
suggestions that Palestinian citizens of Israel should also be ethnically
cleansed.
“We will march through Umm al-Fahm with flags to send everyone
a message that the Land of Israel belongs to us,” Baruch Marzel,
the Front’s leader, declared.
The move has aroused furious opposition from local residents and the
leadership of the Palestinian minority. Jamal Zahalka, an Arab member
of the parliament, called the court decision a “legitimization
of racism”: “We will use our right of protest and defend
Umm al-Fahm from these fascists and racists.”
It is not the first time that Umm al-Fahm has attracted the interest
of Israel’s far-right.
The Kach party – led by Rabbi Meir Kahane – held a similar
march in 1984, the year it won representation in the Israeli parliament
for the first time. A decade later the movement, which organised attacks
on Palestinians, was outlawed as a terrorist organisation.
However, the banning of Kach has been laxly enforced. Several former
Kach leaders, including Mr Marzel, himself a Hebron settler, have
reinvented the group as the Jewish National Front. Mr Marzel has made
several unsuccessful attempts to stand for parliament, and is due
to run again in February.
The march through Umm al-Fahm is partly intended as an election ploy,
according to Jafar Farah, of the Arab political lobby group Mossawa.
“The actions of the settlers from Hebron have not been generally
popular with Israeli Jews. Through this provocation in Umm al-Fahm,
the Front hopes that it can win greater sympathy from the public.”
Marzel has conducted similar stunts before against Palestinian citizens,
who constitute a fifth of the Israeli population. His supporters have
marched in the Arab town of Sakhnin in the Galilee and through an
Arab neighbourhood of the “mixed city” of Jaffa.
But Mr Farah believes Umm al-Fahm has been chosen this time because
it can be more easily marketed as an “enemy city”.
In recent years the town has gained a wide notoriety among the Jewish
pubic. Its residents angrily took to the streets in October 2000 to
protest the early stages of the army’s crushing of the second
Palestinian intifada. Clashes with police led to three local residents
being shot dead.
Located in an area known as the Little Triangle, a narrow strip hugging
the north-west corner of the West Bank, the town was once seen –
before the construction of the separation wall – as the gateway
for suicide bombers from Jenin.
Its Muslim population has successfully resisted official attempts
by the state to “Judaise” the area by bringing Jews to
settle it, as has occurred elsewhere in the country.
Politicians, who regularly refer to the Little Triangle as a threat
to the country’s Jewishness, have been devising ways to transfer
the area’s quarter of a million inhabitants to the other side
of separation wall in a land swap.
Umm al-Fahm is also the base of the radical wing of Israel’s
Islamic Movement. Its leader, Sheikh Raed Salah, a resident of Umm
al-Fahm, has earnt especial loathing from many Israeli Jews for his
campaign to protect Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque from Israeli
plans to tighten its grip on the Old City.
Last week, in a rally in Nazareth against government policy in Gaza,
the outspoken Sheikh Salah called cabinet ministers “murderers”
engaged in “war crimes”.
“The people of Umm al-Fahm resisted Kahane’s march more
than 20 years ago,” said Mr Farah. “Marzel expects that,
if there is a clash between the marchers and local people, the police
will turn on the residents of Umm al-Fahm again. He can then protray
his group as the victims of Arab brutality.”
The Front appears to have additional goals.
It hopes to weaken the authority of the Supreme Court, which is much
hated by the far-right because it is seen as curbing the excesses
of the settler movement.
During the hearing, the Front drew parallels between its right to
march in Umm al-Fahm and earlier court decisions protecting the right
of Israeli activists to demonstrate in Hebron against the settlers.
Both were a question of freedom of expression, the Front argued.
"If [the judges] do not approve our petition, it will cause serious
damage to the public’s trust in the courts and will send the
message that what is OK for Arabs and leftists is forbidden for us,”
another Front leader, Itimar Ben-Gvir, said.
In a possible sign of the court’s intimidation, the judges ignored
recommendations from both the police and Shin Bet security service
to ban the march because it could spark widespread violence between
Jews and Arabs, especially in the wake of the recent inter-communal
clashes in the town of Acre. When dealing with the West Bank, the
court rarely rejects security arguments.
The Front’s move, noted Mr Farah, is also part of a wider trend
among the settlers to take their struggle back inside Israel following
their failure to prevent the withdrawal of some 8,000 settlers from
Gaza in 2005.
A significant number of hardline religious Jews have chosen to relocate
to areas in Israel heavily populated with Palestinians, claiming that
they are there to stop Jews losing the demographic battle. In the
mixed cities, the settlers’ response has been to set up armed
encampments inside or close to Palestinian neighbourhoods, masquerading
as religous seminaries.
In Acre more than 1,000 extremist settlers have helped to establish
some 200 seminaries, according to a local journalist, Ala Hlehel.
A group calling itself “the Seeds of the Settlements”
has concentrated its efforts in other mixed cities, such as Jaffa,
Ramle and Lod.
The Front appears to want to increase the pressure on Israel’s
Palestinian citizens by taking the fight directly to one of their
largest towns.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in
Nazareth, Israel. His latest book is “Disappearing Palestine:
Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website
is www.jkcook.net.
A version of this article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae),
published in Abu Dhabi.