A Higher Law

MANIFESTO

This story isn't getting much ink anywhere (including, God knows, Israel), but apparently

In an incident on Monday played down by the [Israeli] military as an aberration and described by some political commentators as a crossing of a red line, a handful of soldiers protested against the partial dismantling of a settler-outpost in the West Bank.

Their action prompted 15 right-wing legislators in the 120-member parliament to propose a bill that would bar the military from forcing troops to remove Jews from settlements in the occupied territory.

Two of the soldiers disobeyed orders and refused to secure the settlement site, which had been built without government permission and where police razed two buildings. They were sentenced respectively to 20 days and 14 days in jail.

Two other soldiers, who held up a sign at an army base in the West Bank saying their batallion would never evacuate settlements, also faced a disciplinary hearing at which each received a month-long prison term.

[A]t least some of the soldiers involved in both incidents were from the Orthodox Jewish minority, which has taken on an increasingly prominent role in the military and tends to support West Bank settlements.

Critics say the army should not be used for operations against Israeli citizens. Instead, they say, police should handle settler issues, while the army patrols the borders and areas of conflict.

The settlements are a major point of contention between Israel and the Palestinians. The Palestinians refuse to restart peace negotiations with Israel unless the government freezes all settlement construction in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

The feeling of the protesters is that the settlements are for Jews because God told them the area was for Jews; needless to say, it's hard to argue with such irrationality.

Meanwhile,

Defying the United States, Israel approved on Tuesday the building of 900 homes for Jews on West Bank land it occupied in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and annexed to its Jerusalem municipality.

It goes without saying that if any other entity in the Mideast were guilty of such hegemony, there'd be saber-rattling in the US the likes of which cannot be exaggerated.