The hidden threat of the outposts

The entire settlement enterprise began 35 years ago with an incident similar to this week's - an illegal settlement, which the government then retroactively legalized at the urging of several misguided intellectuals. The battle over Havat Gilad is reminiscent of that beginning, which has since, together with Palestinian terror, pushed the state into a political and spiritual blind alley. Ten years after 1967, there were still only 31 settlements with 4,400 inhabitants. Now there are more than 120 "legal" settlements with almost 50 times as many settlers. There are also some 90 illegal outposts containing 700 to 1,000 zealots obsessed with rocks. The battle against the removal of these outposts has become one of the most dangerous of all the settlement tactics. The threat they constitute is far greater than one weekend's rioting.
[more]

Israeli retaliation targets olive harvest and waterholes

"If they apply this thing, that means most of the Palestinian farmers in the north of the West Bank and the Jordan valley will not be able to pump water for their fields. Some of those wells are also used for drinking," he said. "If it is allowed to go on, most of the land in the north will be under threat of desertification and then people will have to leave. That's what the Israelis want, of course."
[more]

Excuse Me?
Israel's Justification for Killing Palestinians

According to an Israeli journalist, a check by Israeli army intelligence three weeks into the intifada revealed that "the IDF had shot, in the first few days of the Intifada, about 700,000 different shells and bullets in the West Bank and 300,000 more in Gaza. All together about a million shells and bullets. Someone in the Central Region Command later termed the project 'a bullet for every child.' An astronomic number that provides evidence as to what happened on the ground . The IDF had been preparing for this Intifada for years, and when it broke out, it unloaded its prolonged frustration on the Palestinians . In the [Israeli] political as well as military systems there is a view that it was perhaps the IDF destructive reaction and the blow the Palestinians took in the first weeks that made the situation deteriorate and escalated it . In the beginning of October, the balance was 75 Palestinians dead with only four Israeli victims." ["The Intifada's Second Anniversary," by Ben Kaspit, Maariv, September 6, 2002]

During the first month of the intifada, through the end of October 2000, 117 Palestinian civilians were killed, including 32 kids under the age of 18 (18 under the age of 16). The killing of these 117 Palestinians was not inadvertent, and it was not a response to Palestinian terrorism. Except for the horrible lynching of two Israeli soldiers (whose perpetrators were arrested and were not among the Palestinians killed during this first month), there was no Palestinian terrorism in this period.
[more]