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Photo: Reuters
Amona evacuation
Photo: Reuters

It's the guns, stupid

Isolated outposts no threat to Israel; un-yielding criminals in Samaria are

The newspapers have been in an uproar this week about Defense Minister Amir Peretz's promise to tear down illegal Israeli outposts in the West Bank. One report said 12 such outposts would be destroyed, another reported 24, and a third quoted a "senior minister" claiming dozens of outposts would be evacuated.

 

But even the suckers amongst us have a tough time believing their declarations. A simple internet search of the words "evacuation outposts" yields more than 166,000 results.

 

Common promise

 

Just about every politician with anything to do with this issue has promised, in one way or another, to evacuate these outposts. Unfortunately, however, there is no evidence to suggest these are any more than threats. Quite the opposite: There are 102 outposts today, as opposed to about 50 in 2001.

 

The answer to the outpost propaganda is simple: When our leaders say they will evict illegal settlers – they really mean they will build. This conclusion is easily arrived at by one glance at the infrastructure map that enabled the outposts to be built.

 

Easy to break

 

Hundreds of kilometers of paved roads, electric and water connections have all been provided by the State of Israel itself. If the state wanted to put an end to the phenomenon, all it would have had to do was turn off the flow of money and resources.

 

Such a wide-spread phenomenon of outposts, such that a small navy of water tanks is required just to sustain the residents, at a cost of tens of thousands of shekels per day. If we turned off the tap and brought the residents of the outposts to their knees, it would take just a few weeks until some would break and would leave of their own accord.

 

Easy going

 

The really absurd thing about the outpost evacuation charade was revealed in September, 2004, when members of the "Courage to Refuse" and "Peace Now" organizations tore down an illegal outpost without spilling even one drop of blood, and even managed to place one of the empty houses opposite the Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv.

 

Just a few dozen people took part in the operation, and the only weapons they carried were two trucks and a lot of motivation. Turns out there's no real problem evacuation outposts. Where there's a will, there's a way.

 

But as mentioned above, the ministry of defense maintains no such will. Even if an outpost is symbolically destroyed every few months, it is done mostly to turn public attention away from the issue. The criminals then have time to get organized, call up their friends and barricade themselves inside the outpost.

 

At the end of the day, as we saw in Amona, they also get to hit police officers, whose bodies are a legitimate target for settler violence.

 

Cheap currency

 

The outposts have become a particularly cheap political currency, something to be thrown to the public when the polls have nothing better to offer (in the best case scenario), or to divert public attention from something else (in the worst).

 

Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, Shimon Peres, Ariel Sharon, Shaul Mofaz, Ehud Olmert and now Amir Peretz have all promised to evacuate. But while the media and the public concentrated on their empty promises, more than 30,000 new settlers have moved to the territories in the past six years, and the real building in large settlements continues at a murderous pace.

 

The good news is that if in the past the outposts represented a real threat, because every forsaken outpost eventually grew into a much larger settlement, today, as Israel prepares for realignment – they mainly pose a threat to the settlers themselves.

 

Take the guns away

 

Instead of concentrating their forces to save the large settlement blocs, the settlers have spread out to hundreds of flashpoints. It is clear that on the day of the great evacuation most isolated places will be abandoned. Therefore, they present no great threat to some future agreement, or even to a unilateral withdrawal.

 

The defense minister would do well to begin confiscating weapons from the settlers – residents of both isolated outposts and large settlements -, rather than concentrating on marginal outposts, in preparation for bringing them back into Israel.

 

The empty houses on the hilltops present no real threat to Israel's security. Guns in the hands of lawbreakers on the Samarian hilltops do.

  

Arik Diamant is a leader of the "Courage to Refuse" organization

 


פרסום ראשון: 05.31.06, 13:22
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