Knesset committee is told that Arab illegal construction is 16 times that of Jews, per person.
The Subcommittee for Judea and Samaria of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee hosted on Sunday the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), Major General Yoav Mordechai, for a discussion of illegal construction in Judea and Samaria.
According to information presented to the committee, about 550 illegal structures were built by Arabs in Areas C in the course of 2014, as opposed to 150 illegal structures built by Jews. Bearing in mind that the Arab population in Areas C is smaller than the Jewish one – about 90,000 Arabs compared with about 400,000 Jews – the rate of illegal construction in the Arab sector is 16 times that in the Jewish sector.
Subcommittee Chairman MK Moti Yogev (Jewish Home) demanded that the security authorities carry out demolition orders against illegal structures and present a timetable for the relocation of Bedouins from the Abu Dis and northern Jericho area. In addition, he demanded that international organizations encouraging illegal building be reined in.
“Based on my past experience,” he said, “with the cooperation of the Israel Police, we removed the foreign lawbreakers in the past, through the court, and expelled them from Israel. This is what is required today, too, of the elements in Central Command, the Civil Administration and the Foreign Ministry – to enforce the law.”
MK Orit Struk (Jewish Home) said the information presented to the committee shows an “astronomical” rate of illegal construction by Arabs in Areas C. She said the phenomenon was “organized, funded and timed by the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the European Union,” and blamed the IDF’s Civil Administration for failing to forestall it.
The NGO Regavim presented the committee with aerial photographs that show that the PA is systematically encouraging illegal construction in the area next to Jerusalem. The construction is funded by EU states, in contravention of the law and previous agreements.
Regavim’s Ovad Arad accused the Israeli defense establishment of standing by idly as the PA works day and night to take over state land. He said that some of the delays in enforcement stem from legal obstacles, but it does not stand to reason that the legal advisor of the Civil Administration is the one who runs the Administration, de facto. In addition, he claimed, the Administration sits on its hands even when there are no legal obstacles to demolishing illegal structures.
A source in COGAT denied, in a conversation with Arutz Sheva, that there is any discrimination against Jews in enforcement of demolition orders.
About the illegal Arab buildings, I want to know one thing only: Whether or not the government of Israel has given the Israeli Army the order to remove the Arab squatters and destroy the buildings, or to remove the Arab squatters and turn the buildings over to the Jewish Shomron and Yehuda authority.
Anything else I regard as the usual ghetto Jew weeping and wailing over the injustice and unfairness of it all. And, as all people who read my comments here or elsewhere know for certain by now, I do not now and never have given a shit for any aspect of the unfairness and injustice or it all. In the hard and sometimes brutal playing of the game of life and death, and in regard to issues such as the sovereignty of a piece of land by any given nation, weeping and wailing over the unfairness and injustice of it all gets you nothing whatsoever, other than the probably- justified contempt of those nations that stole their lands from one or more predecessor people, and remain strong enough to hold their lands against anybody who wants to take it from them by the same tactics that made them possessors rather than wannabes.
Do you understand the full impact of what I am writing here? There is no justice regarding national sovereignty, irrespective of promises by the British Empire, mandates of the League of Nations, votes of approval or disapproval of the United Nations Organization, or promises by Kenyan-Indonesian president of the United States or his appointed secretary of state.
Power is all there is, and power is all there ever shall be. If you lack power, those who have it will kick you around like so many talking, eating, sleeping, and fearful footballs. And if they are candid about these matters, as the Arabs at least are, they won’t even pretend to feel sad about the way they treated you.
But if you have the power — and this means being prepared to use it and not just boast of it in this or that implied threat — it means you can take whatever you want from your enemies, and either kill, enslave, or even compensate them for their losses, assuming you still carry around with you the 100-pound deadweight of liberal conscience, strapped around your necks like so many draft animals.
So take your choice. Either get power and use it, or let them all kick you around as they always have done, because like so many fools throughout history, your forefathers actually believed that the Jew-haters had any sense of kindness and fairness. In any case, you either had better start acting as if everything I have written here is true. Otherwise, you might just find out the hard way that, just as I said, the only justice you can make for yourselves is to acquire the power to enforce it.
Like great Stalin once purportedly said to “Iron” Feliks Dzerzhinski, chief of his dreaded Cheka secret police, while the two of them sat around a lunch table in the Kremlin, ruminating and plotting:
“There’s one thing about power you can’t deny, Feliks. It’s the one thing in the world you can’t fake. You either have it or you don’t.”
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
ALL the democracies are failing their nations and putting the world into armageddon.
Israel is either a land of law, or a land of select laws. too sad.