- JERUSALEM (AFP) - Right-wing
rabbis are mobilising against the international roadmap for peace which
aims at a Palestinian state on what they say is part of Eretz Israel, the
land the Bible says was given by God to the Jews.
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- More than 500 of them gathered this week at a Jerusalem
hotel to condemn the roadmap and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for
going along with it, notably by starting to remove Jewish settlement outposts
in the West Bank.
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- They included former chief rabbis Avraham Shapira and
Mordechai Eliyahu, as well as Zalman Melamed, founder of a pirate radio
station that pushes a virulently nationalist and anti-Arab line.
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- Eliyahu set the tone, being quoted as saying, "No
one, from the simplest person to even the prime minister, has the right
to cede even one granule of the land of Israel. The holy one, blessed be
he, gave it to us, to us alone he gave it."
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- The meeting was called by the seven-member Council of
Rabbis of Judea and Samaria -- as Israelis call the occupied West Bank
-- and Gaza, whose edicts have the word of law among the settlers in the
Palestinian territories.
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- The council's fierce denunciation of Labour prime minister
Yitzhak Rabin for signing the 1993 Oslo accords giving the Palestinians
a measure of autonomy was viewed as a factor in Rabin's assassination by
a Jewish extremist in 1995.
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- All seven rabbis run religious schools indoctrinating
thousands of students, while Zalman has internet sites and a free weekly
newspaper with a circulation of 100,000 as well as his radio station.
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- On June 4, while Sharon was meeting Palestinian prime
minister Mahmud Abbas and US President George W. Bush at Aqaba in Jordan
to back the roadmap, the rabbis branded as "criminal and immoral"
any attempt to drive the Jews from "their" land.
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- They also called on the settlers to oppose any attempt
to dismantle their outposts "with determination but without violence."
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- Settlers have ignored the second part of the message,
clashing with troops sent to pull down the first inhabited rogue outpost
to be pulled down in line with the roadmap.
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- The authorities are worried that a future incident will
see extremist settlers, spurred on by the rabbis, resist with firearms.
The head of the domestic intelligence agency Shin Beth, Avi Dichter, has
reportedly had several meetings with the religious council to ensure that
the appeals for non-violence are respected.
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- For the moment, a dove, Shlomo Aviner, remains one of
the most influential members of the rabbis' council. He has said he is
opposed to even passive resistance, saying that not all methods are allowed
to defend Israel, but in the present climate his voice may not be heard
for long.
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