Hebron illegal Israeli settlers take their fight into Israel: Far-right plans march into Arab town

By Jonathan Cook

ccun.org, Redress, 6 December 2008

Jonathan Cook describes how the Israeli far-right, in the form of the fascist Jewish National Front, is planning to expand its campaign of racial incitement from its present hub in Hebron in the occupied West Bank to towns in Israel where there is an Israeli-Arab population.

Extremist illegal Israeli settler groups currently involved in violent confrontations with Palestinians in the centre of Hebron have chosen their next battleground, this time outside the West Bank.
 
A far-right group know as the Jewish National Front, closely associated with the Hebron settlers, is preparing to march through one of the main Arab towns in northern Israel. The march, approved by the Supreme Court back in October, is scheduled to take place on 15 December, the group announced this week.
 
The police are expecting to deploy thousands of officers to prevent trouble, and have limited the number of Front members participating to 100. The march will not enter the heart of the city, say police, though it is not yet clear whether Front members will be allowed to carry the guns most have been issued as settlers.
 
The Front says it will wave Israeli flags in what the group has dubbed a demonstration of “Jewish Pride” through Umm al-Fahm, home to nearly 45,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel.
 
The Front’s main platform is the expulsion of all Palestinians from what it calls “Greater Israel”, which also includes the West Bank and Gaza. It skates close to illegality with veiled suggestions that Palestinian citizens of Israel should also be ethnically cleansed.
 
“We will march through Umm al-Fahm with flags to send everyone a message that the Land of Israel belongs to us,” Baruch Marzel, the Front’s leader, declared.
 
The move has aroused furious opposition from local residents and the leadership of the Palestinian minority. Jamal Zahalka, an Arab member of the parliament, called the court decision a “legitimization of racism”: “We will use our right of protest and defend Umm al-Fahm from these fascists and racists.”
 
It is not the first time that Umm al-Fahm has attracted the interest of Israel’s far-right.
 
The Kach party – led by Rabbi Meir Kahane – held a similar march in 1984, the year it won representation in the Israeli parliament for the first time. A decade later the movement, which organized attacks on Palestinians, was outlawed as a terrorist organization.
 
However, the banning of Kach has been laxly enforced. Several former Kach leaders, including Mr Marzel, himself a Hebron settler, have reinvented the group as the Jewish National Front. Mr Marzel has made several unsuccessful attempts to stand for parliament, and is due to run again in February.
 
The march through Umm al-Fahm is partly intended as an election ploy, according to Jafar Farah, of the Arab political lobby group Mossawa.
 
“The actions of the settlers from Hebron have not been generally popular with Israeli Jews. Through this provocation in Umm al-Fahm, the Front hopes that it can win greater sympathy from the public.”
 
Marzel has conducted similar stunts before against Palestinian citizens, who constitute a fifth of the Israeli population. His supporters have marched in the Arab town of Sakhnin in the Galilee and through an Arab neighbourhood of the “mixed city” of Jaffa.
 
But Mr Farah believes Umm al-Fahm has been chosen this time because it can be more easily marketed as an “enemy city”.
 
In recent years the town has gained a wide notoriety among the Jewish pubic. Its residents angrily took to the streets in October 2000 to protest against the early stages of the army’s crushing of the second Palestinian intifada. Clashes with police led to three local residents being shot dead.
 
Located in an area known as the Little Triangle, a narrow strip hugging the northwest corner of the West Bank, the town was once seen – before the construction of the separation wall – as the gateway for suicide bombers from Jenin.
 
Its Muslim population has successfully resisted official attempts by the state to “Judaise” the area by bringing Jews to settle it, as has occurred elsewhere in the country.
 
Politicians, who regularly refer to the Little Triangle as a threat to the country’s Jewishness, have been devising ways to transfer the area’s quarter of a million inhabitants to the other side of separation wall in a land swap.
 
Umm al-Fahm is also the base of the radical wing of Israel’s Islamic Movement. Its leader, Sheikh Raed Salah, a resident of Umm al-Fahm, has earnt especial loathing from many Israeli Jews for his campaign to protect Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque from Israeli plans to tighten its grip on the Old City.
 
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest book is “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net. A version of this article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi.