Israel ends lease with Hebron for wholesale market

[Wordie]

Israel ends lease with Hebron for wholesale market
By Arnon Regular and Nir Hasson

The Defense Ministry has terminated the lease with the Hebron municipality that enabled the Palestinian merchants to work in the city's wholesale market.

This means that the merchants from the wholesale market will not be able to return to their shops even if the Israel Defense Forces does evict the settlers squatting there.

Yossi Segal, the Defense Ministry official in charge of government property in the West Bank and the shops in Hebron, sent a letter on Tuesday to the Hebron municipality, advising it of the contract's termination. Haaretz has obtained a copy of the letter.

In the letter, Segal tells municipal attorney Mazen Kopti that he intends to end the rent-controlled lease between the city and the Defense Ministry for the wholesale market. The letter calls on anyone harmed by the lease's termination to file a complaint with the IDF's Civil Administration within 21 days.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/666427.html

I don't understand why the market is government property in the first place; the article says it had been seized by the IDF. Why? And yes, I know about the violence there in Hebron, but why would that legitimate the taking over of a market and allowing Israeli settlers to set up shop there, to the detriment of the shop's former owners, who clearly also need to make a living? After all, the settlers have also been violent. They "...pelted the policemen with eggs and acid as well as heavy objects, injuring four," injuring several police and military personnel, who recently served them with eviction notices.

[tatertop]

1. The 'settlers' are criminals, nothing less, nothing more.

[Wordie]

2. Yet the IDF continues to support them.

It appears the eviction of the settlers was a non-event, since the city is losing it's lease anyway. So what was the point. Will it be razed for settler housing now?

[Scurrilous]

3. Rattling the cage: Gentrifying Hebron

<snip>

"So, have the Hebron settlers given a name to the former Arab souk where the eight Jewish families are living, where they're throwing all manner of garbage and shrieking every kind of abuse at the police trying to get them to leave? What they should call it - and I'm sure they'll welcome the idea - is "Baruch Goldstein Street."

After all, they owe those liberated Jewish homes in the old souk to him. It was after Goldstein's slaughter of 29 Palestinian men and boys praying in the Tomb of the Patriarchs that the IDF shut down all the shops in the souk, forcing the Palestinian merchants out of business - for their own protection, of course. To prevent friction between them and their Jewish neighbors, who would be staying on.

Seven years later, after the baby girl Shalhevet Pass was murdered by a Palestinian sniper, the settlers moved into the shuttered Arab shops and made themselves at home. The murder of a Jewish infant by a Palestinian terrorist demanded a proper response. Especially since the response to the murder of 29 Palestinian penitents by a Jewish terrorist from Kiryat Arba clearly hadn't been proper enough.

Doesn't this make your Jewish heart proud? To see a pack of crazies, every single one of whom reveres Goldstein as a tzaddik, spewing filth at Israeli soldiers and police, burning Palestinian property and gleefully assaulting Palestinian children on their way to school - in Hebron, of all places?

Do you imagine Abraham would want to live there today?"




http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1136361015313&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull