As violence spirals and calls for peacetalks grow, extremists say they
will build a new West Bank settlement
for each of the eight students killed.
Toni O'Loughlin in Jerusalem
Israel's far-right settler movement has set itself on a
renewed collision course with the government of Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert, declaring that last week's
massacre in a Jewish religious school had targeted
them directly and vowing to build a new illegal
outpost in the West Bank for every one of the
killed students.
Amid a sense of spiralling crisis in Israeli and the
Occupied Territories - which has stemmed from
the impression that both Olmert and Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas are rudderless amid
the climbing violence - Abbas performed yet another
policy U-turn, calling for new talks with Israel after
having earlier appeared to back away from peace talks.
The latest moves follow the killing on Thursday by
a Palestinian gunmen of eight Jewish seminary
students, the bloodiest attack in Israel in two years.
Hamas, which had vowed to avenge the more than
125 Palestinians killed in a recent Gaza offensive by
Israel, at first claimed responsibility, then backtracked.
Hamas's claim came as the spokesman for Israel's
right-wing settlement movement said that he believed
the attack on the religious college was aimed at his
movement. Dani Dayan, the chairman of the Yesha
Council, said yesterday that the attacker deliberately
targeted Mercaz Herav yeshiva, known for its messianic,
national religious Zionism. 'Of course it wasn't a
coincidence or by chance,' Dayan said.
Israel has been under increasing pressure from the
United States, its main ally, to stop building
settlements in the occupied West Bank but the
government has struggled to curtail the expansion
because the settlers wield considerable electoral power.
Olmert needs the religious right in his governing
coalition to maintain his fragile grip on power.
The religious right opposes the US-backed Annapolis
peace talks and this latest attack will further
undermine Olmert's authority. Dayan said the peace
talks were 'leading nowhere'. 'They have raised
expectations that everyone knows can't be fulfilled by
Olmert or Abbas,' Dayan said. 'In this part of the world,
when your raise expectations and can't fulfil them,
you get violence.'
But even secular Israelis have been angered by the
attack. Professor Ephraim Yaar at the Tami Steinmetz
Center for Peace Research, who conducts a monthly
peace poll, said: 'There certainly will be a very adverse,
strong effect.' However, Yaar said the anger among
secular Israelis would recede within a month, assuming
there are no more similar attacks.
Despite confusion about who carried out the attack,
there is speculation that Hamas and Hizbollah colluded
to avenge the alleged Israeli assassination of a senior
Hizbollah commander in Damascus last month and
Israel's incursion into Gaza last week which killed
more than 100, many of them civilians.
The conflict between Hamas and Israel intensified
after Hamas ousted its main political rival, Fatah,
from the Gaza Strip in the middle of last year. Abbas,
who leads Fatah, condemned the attack on the
seminary and insisted that the Annapolis peace
process was the only way to settle the 60-year
conflict. 'Despite all the circumstances we are living
through and all the attacks we are experiencing we
insist on peace,' Abbas said.
While Olmert is also expected to continue peace
negotiations, his government will come under
intensified pressure to retaliate with a strong military
response in Gaza. But last Tuesday, two days before
the Jerusalem shooting, US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice was forced to step in and prop up
the shaky talks after Abbas suspended contact in the
wake of Israeli's military operation in Gaza.
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