A VAUNTED “fight unto death” by Jewish militants holed up in a disputed building in Hebron, a city on the Palestinian West Bank that is venerated by both Jews and Muslims, ended in their quick and relatively easy eviction by Israeli police on December 4th. But the Israeli police and army failed to prevent a subsequent splurge of violence against Palestinians in the city and elsewhere in the West Bank, which Israel’s outgoing prime minister, Ehud Olmert, termed a “pogrom”. A Jewish settler was filmed shooting and wounding two local Palestinians. Israeli security officials gave warning that the anticlimactic end of the Hebron siege could prompt the militants to try even more violent and spectacular methods to promote their cause. And Binyamin Netanyahu, said by pollsters to be the likely winner of a general election due in February, was embarrassed by a fellow member of his Likud party who has climbed up the party’s election-candidates list by belligerently backing the settlers.

The building in question is on the road between the Jewish settlement-suburb of Kiryat Arba and a holy site in Hebron revered by Jews as the Cave of the Patriarchs (including Abraham) and by Muslims as the Ibrahimi Mosque. Its ownership is the subject of litigation in Israeli courts between a Jewish settler association which claims to have bought it through a Palestinian middleman, and the Palestinian owner who claims the sale lapsed before it could be completed. The case is complicated by forgeries on the Jewish side and contradictions in the Palestinian’s account.

One night in March last year, in what Israel’s High Court of Justice called a quasi-military operation, some 150 students at a yeshiva (a school for Jewish religious study) took over the building on behalf of the settler association. They say it was empty; the owner claims they used force to empty it. Last month the High Court ordered the state authorities to remove the settlers and lock up the building pending a legal ruling on its rightful ownership.

But the case has long transcended local and legal arguments to become a cause célèbre in the running confrontation between settlers and the state in the wake of the forcible evacuation of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip and some parts of the northern West Bank in 2005 ordered by the then prime minister, Ariel Sharon. Young settler militants who still nurse a grudge because of that trauma streamed to Hebron to “defend” the building, making periodic forays into Palestinian areas to stone homes and burn cars.

The settlers call this the post-Gaza “price-tag policy”, whereby any attempt by the Israeli authorities to evacuate any settlement is resisted not only by confrontation with the evacuators but also by violent attacks elsewhere against Palestinians and the army. Such tactics have recently led to injury and extensive damage to Palestinian property. Two Israeli army officers were also hurt by settler militants.

The established settlement leadership purported to condemn, or at least not to condone, the militants’ behaviour. But it is unclear who leads whom among the settlers. Several right-wing members of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, visited the building in Hebron before the police moved in. And the heads of the Settlement Council of Judea and Samaria, the settlers’ preferred name for the West Bank, tried to negotiate a compromise with the defence minister, Ehud Barak, that would have left the Jewish squatters in the building.

This vagueness on the far right threatens to embarrass Mr Netanyahu, whose Likud says it generally opposes the withdrawal of Jewish settlers from the West Bank. In his party’s primaries on December 9th, an ultra-hardliner, Moshe Feiglin, was voted into the 20th spot on the Likud’s list of candidates, despite Mr Netanyahu’s vigorous efforts to block him. Thanks to disciplined block-voting by Mr Feiglin’s supporters among party members, the list was notable for its far-right ideological hue. Moderates whom Mr Netanyahu publicly backed were pushed down or out. Mr Feiglin’s website, in which he denies the right of Palestinians to nationhood and urges Israel to annex the West Bank, was off the air next morning for “upgrading”.