A militant Jewish settlers groups in the West Bank has issued a set of guidelines on how to resist any Israeli evacuation of Jewish settlements.
The group, calling itself the Headquarters for the Struggle To Abolish the Autonomy Plan, last week published what it called its “Ethical Code — what is permitted and what is forbidden: to soldiers, officials, businessmen, industrialists, judges and archaeologists, when facing the terrorist regime and the branches of the Israeli government that cooperate with it.”
The code provides guidelines in case of forced evacuation from the territories by the Israel Defense Force. The code is signed by 150 public figures, academics, legal experts and retired military officers, all identified with the settlers movement.
The group is not part of Yesha Council, the council of Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, but one of its leaders, Elyakim Haetzni of Kiryat Arba, near Hebron, is a well-known extremist in Yesha circles.
Yesha has been staging its own public demonstrations to protest proposed IDF redeployments in the West Bank as part of an agreement currently being negotiated with the Palestinians.
Uri Ariel, secretary-general of Yesha Council, announced last week that effective immediately, the settlers would move to disperse any Palestinian demonstrations in the territories.
The code, made public at a news conference last week, advises settlers to physically resist attempts of evacuation from their homes in the territories by IDF soldiers. They are, however, advised against using firearms against the soldiers.
IDF veteran Shlomo Baum, of the legendary 101 parachutist commando unit, was involved in writing the code. He said, “We will resist actively. This means that if someone is pulled by their hair when being evacuated from their home, they will pull the hair of their evacuator.”
The code does not demand that IDF soldiers disobey orders. Instead they are advised to try and leave their post in case orders to evacuate settlers are given.
With its 11 points of conduct, the code mirrors the recently published ethical code of the IDF. It will be distributed to the settlers in the form of a pocket-sized 12-page booklet, leaders of the group said.
At the news conference, haetzni called for documenting what he termed the government’s “illegal activities” in abandoning the security of the State of Israel.
These documents would then serve in a court of law, where Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres would stand trial for “war crimes.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
