Home > Olives & Thorns > Archives > 2008 > October > 27 > Entry
‘Like a pogrom’
They came in the middle of the night, like a river of black-clad troops, she said. They smashed the windows, barged through the door and handcuffed the occupants. Then, the bulldozers came and crushed the house.
“Like a pogrom,” Elisheva Federman, 36, mother of nine, told me today. “I just couldn’t believe my eyes.” In an interview with Israeli media, she invoked the Holocaust.
In the latest chapter of a simmering conflict between the Israeli government and religious nationalist Jewish settlers, the rhetoric has reached new levels.
In response to the government evacuation of an illegal Jewish outpost near Hebron, in the occupied West Bank, settlers rampaged in a nearby Palestinian neighborhood early yesterday morning, vandalizing dozens of cars and overturning gravestones in a Muslim cemetery.
They also threw rocks at Israeli police and one protester said on Army Radio: “The Jews need to carry out a revenge attack against the security forces … We hope they will be defeated by their enemies, that they all become Gilad Shalit, that they are all killed, all slaughtered because that is what they deserve,” referring to the captured Israeli soldier who has spent more than two years in captivity in the Gaza Strip.
That drew a response from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert yesterday at the weekly cabinet meeting: “We will show no tolerance toward such expressions and actions. … In no way will I allow this to continue in the future and we will see to it that it stops forthwith.”
Today, however, several dozen volunteers, mostly high school-age boys, apparently taking a break from their school work, were busy clearing the debris from the demolished home and had already erected a small one-room tin house for the Federman family.
Two clutches of Israeli border police stood by impassively and said they did not have orders to stop the work.
“We love this land. We have spent years here and we will not leave this place,” Federman said quietly. “I believe the Land of Israel is mine. (It) is my place and my home, so here I am.”
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