This time, too, Israel will accuse the Arabs of unilateral steps, ignore the United Nations, expand settlements in the West Bank, and build more neighborhoods for Jews in East Jerusalem.
settlements
Israel Harel does not deal with the simple fact that the land on which his son and his friends are living is private land, registered properly in the name of Palestinians, who have submitted to the High Court the deeds that prove their family’s ownership of the land. The petitioners’ documents are unequivocal, and the State of Israel is not denying their ownership.
The activists, who belong to the extreme right, claim solution to housing crisis is construction in the West Bank; plan to set up dozens of more tents in coming days.
Forty-two cabinet ministers and MKs, all members of the [right wing pro-settlement] Eretz Yisrael Lobby, signed a petition addressed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, calling on him to solve the housing crisis that has swept up the country by building in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
IOA Editor: Turning problems into opportunities…
Unprecedented ruling states that Migron must be razed by April 2012; Israeli government had admitted outpost was built on lands belonging to Palestinians, but has thus far failed to dismantle it.
Anyone who asserts that there is no construction in Israel should peruse OECD data on building beyond the Green Line. 9% of GDP beyond the Green Line comes from construction, compared with 4.7% of GDP within the Green Line. The difference is even greater for residential construction: within the Green Line, residential construction accounts for just over a fifth of investment; beyond the Green Line, it accounts for almost 45%.
Six governments preferred to encourage Israelis to go and live on settlements rather than in the periphery of the country. This had a critical effect on the level of supply in various regions, and therefore on the prices of real estate.
Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz confirmed Monday that the state subsidizes bus tickets within West Bank settlements, causing them to be cheaper than tickets for rides within the Green Line.
IOA Editor: Transportation options and costs are an integral part of household location decisions. Therefore, public transportation subsidies to Jewish residents of illegal West Bank settlements, which reduce the cost of living in the West Bank compared to pre-1967 Israel, constitute yet another incentive for Israelis to become settlers.
Inclusion of Jordan Valley, northern Dead Sea and area surrounding Ariel in ‘settlement blocs’ whose takeover the IDF Civil Administration is advancing, would prevent establishment of Palestinian state with territorial contiguity… Until now it was not known that the administration, which is a military agency, was charged with distinguishing between the blocs Israel is demanding to annex as part of a final-status agreement and the rest of the settlements.
Basically, the anti-boycott law allows all those who feel they have been harmed by a boycott, whether against Israel or an Israeli institution or territory (i.e. the settlements in the West Bank) to sue the person or organization who publicly called for it, for compensation. This definition is very broad—even a simple call not to visit a place falls under it—and most important, the prosecutor plaintiff doesn’t even have to prove damages.
This is a politically opportunistic and anti-democratic act, the latest in a series of outrageously discriminatory and exclusionary laws enacted over the past year, and it accelerates the process of transforming Israel’s legal code into a disturbingly dictatorial document. It casts the threatening shadow of criminal offense over every boycott, petition or even newspaper op-ed. Very soon, all political debate will be silenced.
Opposition blasts law, which penalizes persons or organizations who call for a boycott of Israel or the settlements, calling it unconstitutional and irresponsible.
Acting on orders from the government, the Civil Administration declared 189 dunams [approximately 47 acres] of land belonging to the Palestinian village of Karyut to be state land, so as to retroactively legalize houses and a road in the Hayovel neighborhood of the settlement of Eli. This would seem to violate Israel’s long-standing commitment to the US not to expropriate Palestinian lands for settlement expansion.
IOA Editor: The land takeover process described in this news story is typical and has been used for decades, including for dispossession of Palestinians within pre-1967 Israel. Typically, land becomes “uncultivated” after it is declared a closed military area (presumably for IDF training) by military order which prohibits its legal owners to access it. When the legally-required time in which it must remain “uncultivated” in order to qualify for confiscation passes, the government proceeds to reclassify it as state-owned by virtue of being “uncultivated.” Hard to believe? It shouldn’t be. A great deal of the land of the Galilee was transferred from Arab to Jewish ownership in this manner.
According to the [Israeli] court decision, the custodian of abandoned property in the West Bank area allocated the land on which the farm stands to the World Zionist Organization, which granted a permit for use of the land to Sussia, a cooperative agricultural association [a group of Jewish settlers].
Muna and Muhammed are 12-year-old twins living in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem. Settlers have taken over the front of their home, but the family continue to live in the rest of the house.
For the first time in decades, Palestinian activists in Ras al-Amud, a neighborhood of Jerusalem south east of the Old City, invited Jewish Israeli activists to join them in their protest against a fortress settlement in their area. The neighborhood is the site of nearly daily confrontations between Palestinian youth and Israeli forces, and is sometimes referred to as the “daily intifada”.
This latest of Obama’s statements may be the closest the president has come to legitimising illegal Israeli settlements… Obama’s idea of Palestinian self-determination is for Palestinians to accept whatever Israel decides.
The Palestinians and the international community, including the United States, have long objected to the E-1 plan on the grounds that it would cut the West Bank in two and sever East Jerusalem from the rest of the area.
Despite Netanyahu’s rhetoric, the facts on the ground – illegal outposts, failure to abide by court rulings, unfettered settler activity- make peace a distant dream.
The one-two punch of settler “price tag” attacks carried out under the watch of the army and with the encouragement of state-funded religious nationalist rabbis is common all over the West Bank. Most Jewish Israelis view the army with reverence, and are reluctant to criticize its conduct under any circumstance. And though settler violence is considered a matter of controversy in Israeli society, a new poll shows that a staggering number of Israelis support the pogroms meted out by fanatical settlers against defenseless Palestinians.
