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Orange chocolate cowboys: a resister's hand are covered with chocolate spread to make them more slippery. (AP)
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| By Jerusalem Newswire August 24, 2005 |
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A collaborative effort to misrepresent as violent extremists the Jews resisting expulsion from Gaza and northern Samaria has failed.
The past 9 days has seen these concerted attempts by foreign and Israeli journalists -- apparently aided by left-wing elements in Israel's police force and Internal Security Service (Shin Bet) -- come to nothing.
News reports in the run-up to the withdrawal on August 15 had warned darkly of violent resistance planned against the Israeli evacuation forces. These "settlers" were armed, squawked television news anchors, and there was no knowing what levels they would stoop to to prevent being uprooted.
But while many residents and their supporters resisted with determination, interlinking arms and bucking their bodies as they were being taken away, less than a handful resorted to violence, the overwhelming majority obeying the instructions of their leadership to not lash out physically against their uniformed countrymen.
Isolated incidents were reported of individuals losing their cool under extreme duress -- one soldier was stabbed with a syringe, and paint thinners was poured onto the heads of a few policemen; here and there stones were thrown -- but virtually every one of the multitudes confronted by hordes of soldiers and police passively resisted, weeping, praying, shouting their anger, and then allowing themselves to be carried out.
In the estimation of some observers, the thousands of Jews who have over the past nine days been forced to abandon their communities, to watch as bulldozers grind their beloved homes into rubble, and who now wait to see the Arabs who hate them dance gleefully on the remains of their towns have shown themselves to be extraordinarily well restrained.
When the violence failed to materialize in Gaza ? the residents voluntarily handing over their weapons and mostly going quietly, with prayers, cries and tears -- "warnings" came pouring in of a "last stand" in northern Samaria.
As close on 10,000 troops prepared to move up to the communities of Sa-Nur and Homesh Monday, rumors ran riot that "hardliners," "rejectionists" and "infiltrators" had holed up in the settlements with piles of weapons which they could resort to using against the soldiers and police.
The pro-expulsion Jerusalem Post, using the adjective "extremist" in three consecutive sentences, shrieked: "Hundreds of extremists ousted from the Gaza Strip have fled to the northern Samaria settlements of Homesh and Sa-Nur to oppose the evacuations set to begin Tuesday, according to security officials."
Quoting unnamed Shin Bet sources, The Post said "the extremists had joined others who had already infiltrated the two settlements. The extremists were inciting violence and an unknown number of them were believed to be armed."
Journalists and police repeatedly tried to drive a wedge between the residents slated for expulsion and those who came to stand with them. These "infiltrators" had "no business" being in those places and would be dealt with more severely than the residents.
What was almost universally not reported, however, is that most of the "infiltrators" were themselves from other towns in Judea and Samaria, many believing their communities to be next in line and seeing the expulsions now as a front-line battle to preserve their own homes in the future.
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