After being thwarted twice by the military, thousands of settlers marched this week in a procession without incident to bring a Torah to Joseph’s Tomb in the West Bank city of Nablus.
Settlers initially planned to hold the procession Dec. 12, the day before implementation of the Palestinian self-rule accord was to have begun.
The army barred the settlers because a procession would violate curfews that had been imposed on the area, which is populated mostly by Palestinians, and because the procession was viewed as too provocative at a sensitive time.
The procession was rescheduled for later that week, but the army canceled it after 2,000 settlers clashed with soldiers, who detained dozens of settlers overnight.
On Tuesday night, under heavy guard, the procession took place.
During the Torah dedication ceremony at the Od Yosef Hai Yeshiva at Joseph’s Tomb, speakers referred to the historic Jewish connection to Nablus — Shechem in Hebrew — and rejected the charge that installing a Torah there or anywhere else in they call Greater Israel could be provocative.
Rabbi David Dudkevitch, a rabbi at the yeshiva, called the procession “a victory of Torah over foreign influence in Israel and a victory over the government that has surrendered to concepts foreign to Israel.”
According to the biblical account, Joseph, who died in Egypt, was reburied near the ancient city of Shechem after his bones were brought out of Egypt in the Exodus.
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