Israeli extremists march to set up new outposts in West Bank
MAALE ADUMIM, West Bank (AFP) — Hundreds of hardline Israeli activists fanned out across the occupied West Bank on Sunday, setting up eight wildcat outposts to protest possible evacuations of Jewish settlements.
By sundown at least 300 demonstrators remained in the outposts, but Israeli security forces were expected to disperse them in the coming hours.
Their action came on the 20th anniversary of the first Palestinian intifada, an uprising that eventually led to mutual recognition between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and that passed quietly on Sunday without commemoration on either side.
Carrying orange flags and signs reading "The Land of Israel for the people of Israel," around 200 mostly young activists climbed a hill outside the walls of the massive Maale Adumim settlement as several dozen police looked on.
Organisers said the activists did not intend to stay at the sites but were staging the action in order to send a message to the government.
"We didn't come here to build, but to protest," Arieh Eldad, an MP from the right-wing National Union party, told AFP.
According to Arieh Itzhaki, one of the event's organisers: "If E-1 falls into Palestinian hands it will be dangerous for the future of the state of Israel."
The E-1 corridor, stretching from the edge of Jerusalem east to Maale Adumim, is mostly uninhabited but is part of the West Bank, territory occupied by Israel in the 1967 war.
The Palestinians have said that if Israel makes good on plans to construct in the area and thereby link Jerusalem to Maale Adumim, it would effectively split the West Bank in half and separate the territory from east Jerusalem, which they want as the capital of their future state.
"The settlers wish to isolate Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank and prevent Palestinians living in the north of the territory from travelling south in order to bury the vision of two states for two peoples," Yariv Oppenheimer, the head of Israel's anti-settlement group Peace Now, told AFP.
An extreme-right group called "The Land of Israel Faithful" had announced it would establish several new outposts throughout the West Bank on Sunday to add to the more than 100 such settlements already dotting the territory.
The move comes three days before the first meeting of an Israeli and Palestinian steering committee that is to oversee the revived peace negotiations that the two sides relaunched at a US conference in late November.
Ahead of the US conference, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert pledged to dismantle the West Bank outposts. Previous Israeli governments have made similar promises without keeping them.
Under international law, all Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are considered illegal.
