Israeli settlers, or squatters?
This article linked from: antiwar.com
(as are many posts seen in this NG)
http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/fairenough/latimes588.html
The revelation that much of the West Bank land for
settlements is owned by Palestinians damages Israel's
self-image as a country of laws.
By Gershom Gorenberg
GERSHOM GORENBERG is the author of "The Accidental
Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements,
1967-1977."
November 26, 2006
At the West Bank settlement of Ofrah, as seen from the
ground, two-story suburban houses stand along quiet
streets. Near the community's entry gate are a few
prefab concrete structures — remains of the abandoned
Jordanian army base where the first settlers lived in
the mid-1970s, until they built their comfortable homes.
Here's another picture of Ofrah, with color-coded data
on land ownership superimposed on an aerial photo: Near
the entrance are small brown splotches of state-owned
land, the original Jordanian base. Almost all the rest
of Ofrah's area is marked in red, indicating that it
is private Palestinian property. The data on which the
map is based, apparently updated in 2004, comes from
the Israeli government's civil administration in the
West Bank. Leaked to researchers from the Peace Now
movement, the information forms the basis for their
stark report, published Tuesday, on exploitation of
private Palestinian land for Israeli settlement.
The report is both deeply disturbing and curiously
unsurprising. The public, in Israel and outside it,
did not know previously that 38.8% of all settlement
land is privately owned by Palestinians. Nor did we
know that the proportion is actually slightly higher
than this in the "settlement blocs" that the current
Israeli government hopes to keep permanently as part
of Israel. Settlements, the Israeli public presumed,
stood on land owned by the state or by Jews.
Yet, the newly revealed figures fit into a known
context: Israel rules the West Bank, but what happens
there does not follow Israel's own rules. Since
Israel's conquest of the territory in 1967, settlement
has been a tool in the battle for permanent political
control, and both officials and activists have been
complicit in putting the cause above the law.
The result is injustice to the Palestinian residents
and an undermining of Israel's legal institutions.
In the eyes of Israel's legal system, the West
Bank — except for annexed East Jerusalem — is under
military occupation. Israel's courts have avoided
ruling on the broad issue of whether all settlement in
occupied territory is illegal under the Fourth Geneva
Convention of 1949. But they have acknowledged that
the international laws of war codified in the 1907
Hague Convention apply. That includes Article 46,
which forbids confiscating private property for use
by the occupying power.
So how did settlements, built with government support
and often at government initiative, end up on private
Palestinian land?
In the first years of the occupation, Israel regularly
"requisitioned" land, ostensibly to meet provisional
military needs. Palestinian residents retained
ownership, but not control, of their real estate. On
some of that land, the government established
settlements.
Facing court challenges in the 1970s, the state argued
that the new communities served Israel's security and
were not permanent. The officials who planned the
settlements may have believed that they had military
value. But they did not regard them as temporary. The
settlements' underlying purpose, as shown by an
extensive paper trail in Israeli archives, was to
anchor a political claim to territory before any
negotiations began.
In a landmark 1979 ruling, the Israeli Supreme Court
overturned the requisition of land for one settlement,
Elon Moreh, when the state abjectly failed to show
military need. Elon Moreh was moved, and the government
stopped requisitioning land. But it did not return
property it had seized elsewhere to its owners, or
take down other settlements built on requisitioned
land.
Officially, the policy since 1979 has been only to use
state-owned real estate or land bought privately by
Jews for new settlements. Last year, though, a
government-commissioned report on small settlement
"outposts" set up in the last decade showed that many
stood on Palestinian property. That report apparently
relied on the same data used by Peace Now.
The Peace Now research suggests that the practice of
simply building Israeli homes on the land of others
with no legal basis is much more widespread. The vast
majority of settlements have been built since 1979.
Because the government has so far refused to reveal
what land is covered by old requisition orders, it is
impossible to know how much land has simply been
overrun. At the new Elon Moreh, for instance, 65% of
the land is Palestinian-owned, according to the Peace
Now report. Was any of that land formally requisitioned
before 1979?
Actually, though, the distinction is not as significant
as it seems. The requisitions before 1979 deliberately
bent the law of occupation. In the case of private land
overrun since then, the law has simply been broken. The
government has not only shirked its responsibility as
an occupying power to enforce the law, it has also
planned and subsidized the settlement effort.
So the irony is this: The bulldozers used to build
settlements have extended Israel's de facto control of
territory. Yet, at the same time, they have weakened
Israel as a state built on the rule of law — the kind
of state that its truest patriots have sought to create.
The Peace Now report is certain to sharpen, not end,
the arguments about who owns which specific pieces of
real estate. But the overall lesson of history remains
clear: Difficult as dismantling the settlement
enterprise will be, it is essential not only for a
diplomatic solution of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. It is needed to restore Israel to itself.
This article linked from: antiwar.com
(as are many posts seen in this NG)
http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/fairenough/latimes588.html
--
Just some of the side of the Israeli - Palestinian
conflict that Americans don't get to hear much.
http://groups.google.com/group/talk.politics.mideast/search?q=&start=0&scoring=d&enc_author=1Gh6WRoAAAARZ2tfPiTLv7PDDv7i9EloqtCnG93WhAKPcGhjYS8jMg&filter=0&
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