Hebron, March 01: The illegal radical Jewish settlers sang, danced and drank themselves into a stupor, ignoring the growing outrage of the indigenous Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank.
As they do every year on the Jewish holiday of Purim, the illegal settlers donned costumes — one was a clown, another a Palestinian — and drank and danced to celebrate a biblical miracle.
But this year the holiday comes amid growing unrest over an Israeli plan to renovate the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a flashpoint holy site revered by Jews and Muslims in the heart of the town of more than 160,000 Palestinian Muslims.
The Palestinian town, like the rest of the Palestinian territories, has been under illegal Israeli occupation since 1967.
And the Israeli move is seen as an attempt to retain illegal Israeli control of holy sites in the Palestinian territories.
There have been days of clashes since hardline Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he wanted to include the burial site of Prophet Abraham in a national heritage plan.
The move has sparked international outrage and the United States has attacked it as a “provocative” act that could further imperil its hope of relaunching Israeli-Palestinian peace talks suspended during Israel’s war on Gaza over a year ago.
But on Sunday hundreds of radical Jewish settlers in the Palestinian city of Hebron expressed little concern as they waved Israeli flags and marched through the ancient streets guarded by a roughly equal number of tense Israeli soldiers.
Many Jews are encouraged to celebrate the two-day holiday by drinking large amounts of alcohol, and on Sunday many revellers staggered through the streets drunk at midday.
“The Tomb of the Patriarchs is all we have,” declared rabbi Baruch Marzel, who heads the 600 Jewish settlers installed in an enclave in the heart of the Palestinian city.
“If we do not have rights to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, (then) we do not have the right to be a nation.”
The West Bank town and the holy site have for decades been the scene of violent tensions.
The Ibrahimi mosque is split in half and shared uneasily, with Jews worshipping in a part that has been converted into a synagogue.
This year Purim falls close to the anniversary of the infamous 1994 shooting massacre of 29 Palestinians inside the mosque by the US-born Jewish extremist Baruch Goldstein.
—Agencies