Last update - 00:00 10/12/2007
The right vents its anger / An unsuccessful gimmick
By Amos Harel
After the latest furor raised yesterday by right-wing activist Aryeh Yitzhaki over the establishment of nine symbolic outposts during Hanukkah, it seems the media would do well to adopt a new rule of professional caution: When it comes to Yitzhaki, better to report after the fact. This is, after all, the same Yitzhaki who barricaded himself with a number of supporters in the Shirat Hayam outpost on the Gaza Strip beach on the eve of the disengagement, and threatened to use weapons against anyone who tried to remove him.
But explanations of the gap between threats and actions are never required of the extreme right. Hence, Baruch Marzel - who never carried out his threats to shut down the infrastructure of the country at the beginning of disengagement - can keep warning to set the grass roots on fire if Prime Minister Ehud Olmert makes good on his obligation to effect additional evacuations next year.
The outposts established over the holiday should be understood for what they are: the right venting its anger over Olmert's declarations ahead of possible progress in negotiations with the Palestinians, not over building real outposts. More than 100 of these have gone up throughout the West Bank with no media fanfare. They were established almost clandestinely, after long and serious preparations and in many cases with the government looking the other way, if not outrightly encouraging them. Most of the outposts were established by more serious people and - in terms of the political process - inestimably more dangerous ones than the organizers of the Hanukkah protest.
Yesterday's gimmick was to set up the outpost in area E-1 between Jerusalem and Ma'aleh Adumim. In light of the plan to locate Judea and Samaria district police headquarters in the disputed area, and United States criticism over the weekend about construction at Har Homa, any move in Jerusalem attracts a great deal of attention, even before one mentions the city's status in the post-Annapolis talks or the right wing's new initiative to fight for unity of the city. The left is also aware of the major impact of steps taken in E-1 and its accessibility to foreign TV crews, close to Jerusalem. (Saturday Israeli anarchists and Palestinian activists set up an "outpost" in E-1; they waited an hour and a half until the police evacuated them and promised to compare yesterday's treatment of the right-wing demonstrators.)
THe army and the police were quite well prepared for yesterday's outpost protest, in terms of the sensitive political situation. But the true test of the intentions and capability of the Olmert-Barak government with regard to the outposts and the settlers will come at the next stage - with real outposts with hundreds of inhabitants, as part of the obligations with which Israel returned from Annapolis, and with the outposts that will doubtless be built if talks with the Palestinians produce even the slightest progress.