If you get the reference, you’re already too immersed in Middle East politics. But regardless, the battle betewen Sharon and settlers in the West Bank looks like it’s heading for a major watershed. Israeli papers are abuzz with the orders that Sharon has handed down to uproot settlements in the West Bank.
Monday’s general evacuation orders left the Yesha Council and settlement supporters reeling. Over the past few years, these groups have successfully stonewalled or circumvented any effective settlement evacuation regime through the dogged use of the Israeli court system.
The level of detail in the evacuation order – which apparently had been long in planning – stunned the Yesha leaders who chortled at the fact that it even provides for the sale of animals, or livestock that might go astray during an evacuation.
But with legal avenue now effectively closed off, Lieberman and Wallerstein said they would petition the High Court on the very legality of Sharon’s order itself.
When asked by the Jerusalem Post how they view their new strategy for staving off the outpost’s invasion, the two said they would work the legal angles but also promised that they intend flood the outpost with “5-10,000 protestors, stripping the IDF of the power to evacuate the settlement.
“We will also fight this on in the parliamentary level, on the local level, and in the public sphere,” said Leiberman, but he gave no specific examples besides holding a mass rally sometime soon in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square.
The settlement leaders that turned out to the press conference at the outpost’s one room Yeshiva, even seemed conscious that the evacuation of Ginot Arieh, the only inhabited outpost on the list, might hold some historical significance.
“Yamit [Sinai settlement evacuated in 1982 by the Defense Minister Sharon] was evacuated upon a decision from the Knesset, and here he [Sharon] is bypassing the whole world.” The evacuation of Yamit encapsulated for many Israelis the wrenching redeployment from the Sinai Peninsula following the signing of a peace accord between Israel and Egypt in 1979.
The level of detail in the evacuation order – which apparently had been long in planning – stunned the Yesha leaders who chortled at the fact that it even provides for the sale of animals, or livestock that might go astray during an evacuation.
But with legal avenue now effectively closed off, Lieberman and Wallerstein said they would petition the High Court on the very legality of Sharon’s order itself.
When asked by the Jerusalem Post how they view their new strategy for staving off the outpost’s invasion, the two said they would work the legal angles but also promised that they intend flood the outpost with “5-10,000 protestors, stripping the IDF of the power to evacuate the settlement.
“We will also fight this on in the parliamentary level, on the local level, and in the public sphere,” said Leiberman, but he gave no specific examples besides holding a mass rally sometime soon in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square.
The settlement leaders that turned out to the press conference at the outpost’s one room Yeshiva, even seemed conscious that the evacuation of Ginot Arieh, the only inhabited outpost on the list, might hold some historical significance.
“Yamit [Sinai settlement evacuated in 1982 by the Defense Minister Sharon] was evacuated upon a decision from the Knesset, and here he [Sharon] is bypassing the whole world.” The evacuation of Yamit encapsulated for many Israelis the wrenching redeployment from the Sinai Peninsula following the signing of a peace accord between Israel and Egypt in 1979.
There remains much more to be discussed about this – coalition dynamics, international pressure, (my recuring theme of) Sharon as a Mapainik centrist, etc. I’ll write more on this later, but I wanted to put it on people’s radar because (a) this is going to be big and (b) major news sources and the blogosphere are both equally silent on this story despite it getting serious treatment from Israeli press.
