confrontation between settlers and
police turned violent. Afterward,
settlers launched a public campaign
decrying police violence, and the
Knesset formed a special committee
to investigate the event.
Since Amona, no wide-scale
evacuation of a larger outpost has
taken place.
Mark Regev, a spokesman for the
Prime Minister's Office, noted that
the police and army presence in the
West Bank has been increased and
authorities more commonly issue
temporary restraining orders bar-
ring those deemed dangerous from
the West Bank.
"We cannot underestimate the
threat posed by vigilante extrem-
ism," Regev said. "We lost a prime
minister [Yitzhak Rabin] to a bullet
fired by an extremist Jew, and the
threat has not subsided."
Most mainstream settler leaders
take pains to distance themselves
from radicalism. They say young
violent settlers, known as hilltop
youth, are beyond their control.
Pinchas Wallerstein, director of
the Yesha Council settler umbrella
group, said settler leaders are try-
ing to be proactive about reining
in the extremists by reaching out
to young people, holding meetings
and trying to draft a set of guide-
lines for behavior that would be
endorsed by settler rabbis.
The message Yesha is trying to
convey to youths, Wallerstein said, is
that even though Israel carried out
the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, "the
State of Israel is important and we
should try to fix mistakes from the
inside and not become outsiders."
He added, "Even though the state
is not always right, breaking the
rules is not going to change things."
Critics of Israel's 42-year pres-
ence in the West Bank say the
occupation has fostered a Wild
West, anything-goes approach to
the law, with the result apparent in
land grabs and physical assaults on
Palestinians by both soldiers and
civilians. This, they say, makes a
crackdown against Israeli lawbreak-
ers in the territories a challenge.
"When a society gets used to
lawlessness being the norm, the
abnormal becomes the norm:' said
Dror Etkes of Yesh Din. "It's very
hard to wake up from that and say
let's change things now." ❑

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June 25 2009

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