JTA: The Global News Service of the Jewish People

Hebron’s new settlement

By Uriel Heilman · July 29, 2008

Jewish settlers in the West Bank city of Hebron apparently have found a new location for expansion of Jewish settlement in the city: an IDF base.

An Israeli Channel 10 report, translated by Ha'aretz, shows residential caravans complete with backyard playgrounds set up inside an Israeli military base. In the video, little girls can be seen slipping in and out of the base.

Meanwhile, Ha'aretz has an editorial slamming the government's lax treatment of settler scofflaws:

The generations come and go - settlers, lawbreakers, yeshiva students, soldiers who guard them and get treated contemptuously, teachers drawing salaries from taxpayers, settlers' sons and grandchildren who do whatever they like. And some of them constitute an infrastructure for Jewish terrorism in the territories. Palestinian generations, meanwhile, also come and go as the settlers, their children and grandchildren rampage and plunder unhindered in a state that has seemingly given up...

Evacuating a mobile home gives the right-wing activists a chance to exercise their forces. The extremist yeshiva students gather by means of a communications network, they block roads, beat up passing Palestinians, snatch soldiers' weapons, burn orchards and plantations and throw stones - faced by defeatist, helpless defense forces.

This absurd spectacle is everyday routine in the West Bank - one in which illegal yeshivas, operating in illegal settlements, whose teachers' wages are paid by the state, halt studies to enable their students to engage in illegal activity. No Israeli government has even tried to deal with the settlers' violence.