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June 13, 2003/Sivan 13 5763, Vol. 55, No. 42
Settlements prepare for bulldozers
MATTHEW GUTMAN
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
"This is the real war," said Itai Zar, the founder and spiritual leader of Gilad's Farm, a settlement outpost just over the hill from Nablus in the West Bank.
It was 4 a.m. on June 10. An orange half moon had dropped behind the Tel Aviv skyline to the west and a dense fog blanketed the hill.
The flesh on Zar's cherubic face sagged. It was partly from defeat - 10 outposts had been dismantled by Israeli soldiers June 8, and five more were slated to be torn down - and partly from a keen sense of betrayal that weighed on the young leader.
Referring to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's decision to begin the immediate evacuation of 94 settlement outposts, most of them unpopulated, Zar pledged that settlers would pour all their resources into preventing "this betrayal of the land."
"Unfortunately," one of Zar's cohorts said, Sharon "is more afraid of President Bush than of God Almighty, and that is a problem."
Gilad's Farm, named after Zar's brother Gilad, who was shot dead by Palestinian terrorists in an ambush not far from the outpost two years ago, is the nexus of the settlers' feverish campaign to thwart the evacuation, planned for this week, of four populated outposts and one abandoned one.
On the evening of June 10, Supreme Court justices met to deliberate on the demolition of Gilad's Farm, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz reported.
The petition presented to the court includes documents attempting to prove that members of the Zar family legally own the land and live there under official author-ization.
Across the northern West Bank, hundreds of settlers converged on outposts to block the army from de-molishing them.
Red lines, bridges and all matter of rhetorical boundaries have been crossed, the activists said. It now is time to take the battle to Sharon, for years the patron of the settlement move-ment but now its foe.
The anger toward Sharon is palpable.
Sharon is blind to the Palestinians' true intentions - the destruction of the State of Israel, the outpost youth say.
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