Rabbis protest mosque attack
2009-12-13 21:06
Yasuf - A group of Israeli rabbis went on Sunday to a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank to protest against its mosque being vandalised, allegedly by Jewish settlers.
The rabbis, moderate religious Zionists, were stopped at the entrance of the village by Israeli soldiers who told them the locality was declared a closed military zone for fear of clashes with the Palestinians.
Overnight on Friday, assailants vandalised the mosque in Yasuf, spraying hate messages in Hebrew and burning Korans in an attack blamed on hardline Jewish settlers angered by a temporary moratorium on settlement construction.
Clashes erupted the next day as villagers hurled stones at Israeli troops sent to investigate the incident, which has been condemned across the Israeli political spectrum, including by Yesha, a settler umbrella group.
"Our act is not political, but moral and humanistic, since these acts of vandalism against a place reserved for prayer are against the values of the Torah," a member of Sunday's delegation, Rabbi Yehud Gilad, told AFP.
The head of Yasuf's village council said the group would be welcome if its purposes were peaceful and it included no settlers.
"If the Israeli delegation is made up of people who are calling for peace and believe in coexistence, then we welcome them," Abdelrahim Muslih told AFP.
"But if there are settlers among them we will attack them with stones and will not allow them to enter," he added.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu again slammed the incident during Sunday's cabinet meeting.
"The torching of the mosque in the village of Yasuf... goes against any human values and against the Jewish tradition of the state of Israel."
"I ask the security services to make every possible effort to catch the culprits and bring them to trial," Netanyahu said, saying the perpetrators had to face "the full brunt of the law".
The area around Yasuf is home to hardline settlers who advocate a "price tag" policy under which they target Palestinians in retaliation for any Israeli government measure they see as threatening Jewish settlements.
