De Israelische Terreur 475

Jewish settlers throw stones at a Palestinian home in the West Bank city of Hebron, 4 December. (ActiveStills)

Hebron settlers take their fight into Israel

Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada,

7 December 2008

Extremist settler groups currently involved in violent confrontations with Palestinians in the center of Hebron have chosen their next battleground, this time outside the West Bank.A far-right group know as the Jewish National Front, closely associated with the Hebron settlers, is preparing to march through one of the main Arab towns in northern Israel. The march, approved by the Israeli high court back in October, is scheduled to take place on 15 December, the group announced this week.The police are expecting to deploy thousands of officers to prevent trouble, and have limited the number of Front members participating to 100. The march will not enter the heart of the city, say police, though it is not yet clear whether Front members will be allowed to carry the guns most have been issued as settlers.The Front says it will wave Israeli flags in what the group has dubbed a demonstration of "Jewish Pride" through Umm al-Fahm, home to nearly 45,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel.The Front's main platform is the expulsion of all Palestinians from what it calls "Greater Israel," which also includes the West Bank and Gaza. It skates close to illegality with veiled suggestions that Palestinian citizens of Israel should also be ethnically cleansed."We will march through Umm al-Fahm with flags to send everyone a message that the Land of Israel belongs to us," Baruch Marzel, the Front's leader, declared.The move has aroused furious opposition from local residents and the leadership of the Palestinian minority. Jamal Zahalka, an Arab member of the parliament, called the court decision a "legitimization of racism": "We will use our right of protest and defend Umm al-Fahm from these fascists and racists."It is not the first time that Umm al-Fahm has attracted the interest of Israel's far-right.The Kach party -- led by Rabbi Meir Kahane -- held a similar march in 1984, the year it won representation in the Israeli parliament for the first time. A decade later the movement, which organized attacks on Palestinians, was outlawed as a terrorist organization.However, the banning of Kach has been laxly enforced. Several former Kach leaders, including Marzel, himself a Hebron settler, have reinvented the group as the Jewish National Front. Marzel has made several unsuccessful attempts to stand for parliament, and is due to run again in February.The march through Umm al-Fahm is partly intended as an election ploy, according to Jafar Farah, of the Arab political lobby group Mossawa."The actions of the settlers from Hebron have not been generally popular with Israeli Jews. Through this provocation in Umm al-Fahm, the Front hopes that it can win greater sympathy from the public."Marzel has conducted similar stunts before against Palestinian citizens, who constitute a fifth of the Israeli population. His supporters have marched in the Arab town of Sakhnin in the Galilee and through an Arab neighborhood of the "mixed city" of Jaffa.But Farah believes Umm al-Fahm has been chosen this time because it can be more easily marketed as an "enemy city."In recent years the town has gained a wide notoriety among the Jewish pubic. Its residents angrily took to the streets in October 2000 to protest the early stages of the army's crushing of the second Palestinian intifada. Clashes with police led to three local residents being shot dead.'

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