The army and the residents of Beit El are playing cat-and-mouse, and the question is who will outlast whom. The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that the caravans and residents in Tel Chaim B - the easternmost neighborhood of Beit El, only about 200 meters from the 20-family neighborhood of Tel Chaim - could be dismantled. Army commanders told Beit El officials that it would occur within 36 hours after the Sabbath was ended. That deadline came and went, however, and the outpost still stood.
Last night, 48 hours after the Sabbath, many busloads of soldiers were seen gathering and preparing for an evacuation. The word went out in Beit El and hundreds of people from Beit El and elsewhere came to spend the night. In the middle of the night, however, came the news that the soldiers had been dispersed and that the evacuation was off. The residents are now in the unenviable position of awaiting the army's next move.
Hundreds of teenagers from around the country responded to the Yesha Council's call to come to Beit El last night. It is this that apparently brought about the army's decision to push off the dismantlement. The Yesha Council says that the struggle against the dismantling will be "firm and resolute, but not violent." Prime Minister Sharon told Labor Party leaders with whom he met last night that he plans to dismantle a total of 90 outposts, almost all of which are unpopulated.
Supreme Court Justice Michael Heshin was outspokenly critical of the Tel Chaim B residents in his ruling last week. "You've been in that spot only two weeks, and you're already claiming rights from the times of Avraham Avinu [the Patriarch Abraham]!" he said. He also declared that the land was privately-owned by Arabs. One of the residents of Tel Chaim B, hosting a Sabbath meal for his Beit El neighbors, said, "Unfortunately, the judge didn't even look at our claims and was not sufficiently familiar with the case... What, because some nomads came from Saudi Arabia 150 years ago and divided up the land, saying, 'Ahmed you take that and Mahmoud you take all that,' their claims our more valid than ours?! If you want to go back that far, then our claims go back much longer than that!"
In "From Time Immemorial," author Joan Peters shows that the concept of an Arab Palestinian people is a myth and that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Jews did not displace Arabs here - but rather the opposite. The book states on p. 168-9,
"The peoples who roamed the country in the 19th century were not... indigenous to the land. They did not stay on the land. Of the sparse population who were later counted as 'original' settled 'Arabs' in the 19th century when the arriving Jewish immigrants united with the native Palestinian Jewish population, many were in fact imported Muslim peoples from Turkey and other lands. [They were brought by] the Turks, in many cases, to protect against the wandering Bedouin tribes...
"Kurds, Turcomans, Naim, and other colonists arrived in Palestine around the same time as the Jewish immigration wave began. 18,000 'tents' of Tartars, the 'armies of Turks and Kurds,' whole villages settled in the 19th century of Bosnians and Moors and 'Circassians' and 'Algerians' and Egyptians, etc. - all were continually brought in to people the land called Palestine."