By Stan Goodenough
Aug 08, 2007
Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert walked in the ways of his predecessor, Ariel Sharon, Tuesday, sending hundreds of IDF solders and policemen to tear two Jewish families from their Hebron homes.
The forces moved in before dawn and, after a protracted struggle against those slated for eviction and hundreds of their supporters, managed to force them from their apartments, which were subsequently razed to the ground.
A number of the Jewish resistors were lightly injured in the scuffles, and a handful were arrested. According to young women at the scene, male policemen manhandled them in a humiliating way.
The protest leaders instructed their people to resist strongly, but without violence.
Some journalists, whose slant supports the evictions, reported that the protestors had hurt a few of the security forces.
The government's action was observed approvingly by members of the anti-Israel "monitoring" group known as the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH).
Also applauding the uprooting were left-wing Israeli Knesset Members and those in the so-called "peace camp" - a euphemism for liberal Israelis.
Right thinking groups, like the Women for Israel's Tomorrow (Women in Green) and Professors for a Strong Israel (PSI) strongly condemned the expulsion.
The demolished homes had been built "on the ruins of Hebron's Jewish Quarter, whose residents were murdered and their property looted exactly 78 years ago," PSI said in a statement.
"The expulsion of Jews once again from property that is Jewish is the fulfillment of the intentions of the rioters who sought to uproot any Jewish presence in Hebron as the first step in ridding all of Israel of Jews."
It was the second eviction of Jews perpetrated by the Olmert government. In February 2006 the then newly installed Olmert used ten thousand security forces to evict familes and their supporters from nine homes in the Samarian community of Amona.
Six months earlier, Sharon sent tens of thousands of troops and policemen to tear 9000 Jews out of their homes, farms and communities in the Gaza Strip.
Sharon fell into a coma in December 2005 and remains unconscious till today.
Tuesday’s clash underscored the ongoing and once-again escalating tensions between representatives of Israeli governments which have chosen to go along with the dictates of the international community, and those Jews who resolutely maintain it to be their God-given right, and a heavenly directive, to settle the land given to their nation as an everlasting inheritance nearly 4000 years ago.
That land - known by God-fearing and historically-precise people as Israel's biblical heartland, Samaria and Judea, the Mountains of Israel and the Arab-occupied territories; and by the liberal-minded as the Israeli-occupied territories and the West Bank - is the land out of which the world wishes to forge a Palestinian state.
Hebron is one of Israel's four holy cities, and contains the graves of the Patriarchs of the Jewish people - Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, as well as Abraham's wife Sarah and Isaac's wife Rivkah (Rebecca).
The Islamic nations are working to sever the Jews’ physical ties to their land and to their spiritual inheritance, and in this endeavor they have the eager support of the secular-humanistic world.