(Ha'aretz) Uzi Benziman - Thanks to the Palestinian terrorist groups, the moment when Israel is compelled to face up to America's demand that it dismantle illegal outposts keeps being pushed off another week. The defense establishment now argues that when Shaul Mofaz became defense minister, he discovered that his predecessor had solved this problem. After all, before the last Knesset elections, didn't Benjamin Ben-Eliezer claim that all the illegal outposts had been dismantled at his instruction? Since then, Mofaz points out, he has seen to it that every new unauthorized outpost has been evacuated, and he has the statistics to prove it: Eight full outposts and four partial ones have been taken down. According to the defense establishment, all of the outposts still in existence received some sort of approval not from Mofaz, but from his predecessors. Previous defense ministers did not dismantle these outposts because they were told that there was insufficient legal basis for doing so.
2003-05-23 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive