The NYT has a great piece of reporting by Isabel Kershner on radicalized settlers and the war they promise inside Israeli society over withdrawal from the West Bank. The piece begins with the Sternhell pipebomb attack in Jerusalem. Kershner's fundamentalist Jews are nuts; and Israeli government is, as always, stymied and does nothing:
hilltops commanding the Palestinian city of Nablus in the northern West
Bank, a local war is already being waged…
[At Annapolis] the Israelis agreed to freeze all settlement activity and immediately remove settlement outposts erected since March 2001.
In
practice, only a handful of the 100 or so outposts, at least half of
which were erected since 2001, have been removed, and construction in
the official West Bank settlements goes on.
Further evidence of the war within Israeli society: The tragedy of the occupation has brought about "an unprecedented number of young people who are choosing to go to jail rather
than serve in the Israeli army," says a Refuser Solidarity group. And the government of Israel is trying to shut down New Profile, a leftwing feminist group that supports these young "shirkers," New Profile reports. The group describes the spiritual despair that the occupation, and the Nakba before that, has caused inside Israel. And mentions soldier suicides as the leading cause of death:
unending "military solutions" have engendered an expanding movement of young
people who experience and express excruciating inner struggles and rifts in face
of the legal duty to serve. … For some
young people, [these crises] involve highly dangerous levels of personal distress and
indeed, in recent years, suicide has claimed the lives of more Israeli soldiers
than all other causes-of-death combined.
Rather
than listening to the voice raised by these future citizens, rather than
fathoming the social change it reflects and responding with changed, innovative
policies,
Israel 's state institutions have
chosen to wage a "war" against these youths and the developments they represent.
