The House of Dispute
A house in Hebron has become the site of the latest battle over settlements in the West Bank. In a ruling last week, Israel's Supreme Court gave residents three days to clear out voluntarily, or face eviction.
Gershom Gorenberg @ "The American Prospect" | November 25, 2008 | web only
The House of Dispute is a long, rectangular, four-story building on the east edge of Hebron. The street-level rooms are built as storefronts, facing the road leading to the Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba. Upstairs are living quarters. As I write, the people living in those quarters are settlers who moved in one night in March of last year.
How much longer they will live there is known only to a few top-level Israeli officials -- assuming that those officials have overcome their own trepidations and decided when and how to evict the settlers. In a ruling last week, Israel's Supreme Court gave the building's residents three days to clear out voluntarily, or face eviction by the government. The settlers and their hard-line supporters -- in the fortified Jewish enclaves in Hebron, in Kiryat Arba, and beyond -- say they won't let it happen.
"We shall defend [ourselves] against this injustice with our bodies," Noam Arnon, spokesman of the Hebron settler community, has declared. At a meeting to galvanize resistance, one rightist rabbi showed up with helmets for young people intending to struggle with soldiers at the site and said that the "the state of Israel's greatest enemy" is its own government. That was low-key compared to the response of the settlers, who vandalized a Muslim cemetery, sprayed "Mohammad the pig" on the wall of a mosque, and reportedly splashed turpentine in an Israeli soldier's face, injuring him..........
ENTIRE ARTICLE - http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_house_of_dispute
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