JERUSALEM – Embattled Israeli forces struggled to boot hundreds of illegal Jewish settlers from a West Bank outpost over the weekend in the worst clash ever between the sides.
More than 2,000 soldiers and police dragged the settlers kicking and screaming from the tiny site near Nablus, which was home to only a handful of them but which had drawn about 800 extremists from nearby areas to camp out there in a show of solidarity.
The soldiers, unarmed and without helmets, were met with stones and fists.
“Don’t do this! Aren’t you Jewish?” one settler screamed at an Israeli cop.
About a dozen soldiers and 10 settlers suffered slight injuries in the clashes.
The fact that troops were mobilized during the Sabbath on Saturday – a religious period of rest under Israeli law – heaped fuel on the political fire, with the government’s most vocal conservative members calling for the ouster of Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, who ordered the crackdown.
An infuriated Ben-Eliezer later threatened to quit over the uproar.
Tensions were so high, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called an emergency meeting with both sides today to fight to keep the peace and prevent what one of his top aides said threatened to become “a civil war.”
Small, violent skirmishes continued into the night at the farming site, which was initially set up more than a year ago as part of a memorial to the slain son of one of the area’s founding settlers. Only a few homes and a tiny synagogue had been established on it.
“There is no issue which justifies violence against soldiers and the security forces,” Sharon said of the settlers. But he apologized over its Sabbath timing.
The illegal outpost is one of dozens that have cropped up in and around Palestinian-controlled lands. Ben-Eliezer vowed to begin removing them last month.
The Palestinians claim the outposts are illegal because they are on land that Israel took from them in the 1967 war.