By Steven Erlanger
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
JERUSALEM: Pelted by rocks and metal, hundreds of Israeli riot police officers forcibly removed Jewish settlers on Tuesday from houses in the West Bank city of Hebron that they had been occupying illegally for months.
About 15 people were hurt, 11 of them police officers, according to the police. The settlers said that 26 of their protesters had been treated. Five settlers were arrested for forcibly resisting the carrying out of a court order.
The scenes were reminiscent of some of the more violent incidents during the evacuation of Israeli settlers from Gaza in 2005, with settlers and their supporters, many of them teenagers in masks, hurling abuse, large rocks, chunks of metal, soda bottles, slippers, shoes and pots of cooking oil at Israeli police officers in riot gear.
The confrontation began at dawn, and grew more heated with the sun, as the police forced their way into the occupied buildings, which the inhabitants and their 200 or so supporters had welded shut and barricaded.
Two families had moved back into Hebron's former Arab market, which the Jews there say had been privately owned Jewish property before 1948 but which is now owned by Palestinians. A third apartment was occupied overnight by protesters who barricaded themselves inside with flammable oxygen tanks.
When the mayhem was over, other police officers stripped the apartments, putting furniture in moving vans and then dismantling walls, windows and doors to try to prevent a reoccupation. A small part of Hebron is occupied by 650 Israeli settlers, living protected among thousands of Palestinians, under a 1997 deal with the Palestinian Authority.
In contrast to the way the Israeli Army carries out quiet raids to arrest Palestinians during the night in the cities of the occupied West Bank, the Israeli government gave the settlers significant notice. A relatively fierce confrontation served both the settlers and the government, creating heroes among the settlers and allowing the government to show to the world that dislodging the nearly 80,000 settlers who live beyond the separation barrier will not be an easy task.
The government can also show Washington and the more moderate supporters of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, that it is willing to confront settlers if necessary.
But more than the evacuation, Israelis on Tuesday debated the meaning of the refusal of a group of religious soldiers who decided to disobey orders to participate in the operation. Members of a program that allows them to serve in the army and also study in yeshivas, or religious schools, these soldiers consulted their parents and rabbis, who counseled many of them to call in sick or to otherwise refuse orders to evacuate the settlers. These rabbis say, as they did over Gaza, that it is wrong to evict a Jew from his home in any part of the Biblical land of Israel.
In the end, 12 members of the Kfir regiment of religious soldiers, including two company commanders, refused their orders and were immediately court-martialed, getting sentences of up to a month in military jail.
Major General Gadi Shamni, head of the central command, said bluntly: "This phenomenon endangers the foundations on which" the Israeli Army "operates, being the people's army in a democratic state, which is obligated to carry out any mission given to it."
Defense Minister Ehud Barak, former chief of staff, said: "Any state that wishes to live can have only one army. Soldiers are given orders from their company and regiment commanders only and not from any other person, as respectable as he may be."
The liberal newspaper Haaretz warned that the "ideological refusal to evacuate settlers is no longer a marginal phenomenon," suggesting that more parents and more rabbis are telling their students to refuse, with support from some conservative politicians.
One of them, Aryeh Eldad of the National Union Party, said that the incident was a warning to the government that "if they try to harness the army for expelling Jews, they will remain with no army."
All Israeli settlements beyond the 1967 boundaries are considered illegal by much of the world, although Israel disputes this view.
However, there are more than 20 settler outposts created since March 2001 that are illegal under Israeli law and that the government has promised Washington to dismantle. And there are many more Israeli outposts, many built on private Palestinian land, like Migron, which currently has at least 50 families and is subject to a court case that may force the government to dismantle it, as well.
Rina Castelnuovo contributed reporting from Hebron.
Abbas expects improvements
The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, promised Palestinians on Tuesday that their lives would improve as a result of his talks this week with the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, Reuters reported from Ramallah.
Palestinian officials said they had received assurances from Olmert that Israel would approve as early as next week the removal of some of the hundreds of checkpoints, roadblocks and barriers that restrict Palestinian travel in the West Bank.
While doing IDF (Israel Defence Forces) reserve duty on a mountain overlooking the 
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