US: “This settlement’s location deep in the West Bank… would link a string of outposts that effectively divide the West Bank and make the possibility of a viable Palestinian state more remote,”
Israel intends to move ahead with plans to construct 98 new homes in the West Bank settlement of Shiloh, despite harsh United States objections to the plan.
On Monday the state informed the High Court of Justice it awaited final bureaucratic approval to develop the site within six months as a relocation option for the 40 families from the Amona outpost.
It, therefore, asked the HCJ to delay by seven months the mandated December 25 demolition of the outpost.
Alternatively, the state said, it was also pursuing the option of using the abandoned property law, so that it could relocate the outpost to land adjacent to the community’s current location.
Washington has rebuked Israel for both plans, but the State Department issued a particularly sharp statement in which it said the Shiloh project was tantamount to the creation of a new settlement, something Israel had promised the US it would not do.
“This settlement’s location deep in the West Bank… would link a string of outposts that effectively divide the West Bank and make the possibility of a viable Palestinian state more remote,” the State Department had said.
But in its statement to the High Court of Justice, the state said that it wanted to avoid the kind of violent clashes that occurred in 2006 at the outpost between right-wing activists and security forces, during a court mandated demolition of nine homes.
It warned that a poorly executed evacuation “could have a security and political impact on the region,” particularly given “the sensitive reality” in which Israel finds itself.
“The state wants to prevent the harsh images and results, as well as the injuries, that accompanied the evacuation that occurred there a decade ago,” the prosecutors said, noting that there are 200 children living in the outpost.
The Campaign to Save Amona has stated that the families have no intention of leaving of their own volition, and have warned politicians, including Netanyahu, to watch out for their seats in the next election should their community be destroyed.
The Amona families have called on Netanyahu to retroactively legalize 2,000 unauthorized homes throughout Judea and Samaria built on private Palestinian property.
The bill offers to compensate the Palestinian landowners either financially or with alternative lots.
Most members of Netanyahu’s Likud and Bayit Yehudi factions have promised to support that bill.
But in a speech to mark the opening session of the Knesset on Monday, Netanyahu hinted that he would not do so, when he told the plenum he intended to demolish the Amona outpost.
“I am certain that at the end of the day the [Amona] residents will evacuate responsibly,” he said. “We need to remember that we are a nation of laws.”
Netanyahu told the Knesset that there won’t be any other government that would help their enterprise more than his has done.
Opposition leader Isaac Herzog, who spoke immediately after Netanyahu, reminded the parliamentarians that the High Court had issued it’s ruling in 2014, thereby giving the state two years to evacuate the outpost residents.
He added that the issue was whether a nation of laws would sanction land theft by authorizing 2,000 homes built without permission on private Palestinian property.
Politicians can’t argue about the need to comply with law and then try to skirt a court ruling, Herzog said. They can’t speak of the importance of the rule of law, and simultaneously support a bill to retroactively authorize such settler homes throughout the West Bank.
“You are talking about an arrangements bill for private property that would harm the principles of justice of a nation of laws,” Herzog said. “That is not an Arrangements bill, it’s a concealment bill without shame.”
In its document to the court, the state also spoke of the bill as well as the determination of the Amona families to remain where they are.
The prosecutors said they hoped those objections would fall away when it was understood that the entire community would be relocated to permanent homes together at the same new location.
The state said that it had begun seeking alternative sites in January 2015, and had weighed sites in the settlements of Ofra, Ma’aleh Mishmash, and Ma’aleh Amona before settling on the possibility of building a new neighborhood in the Shiloh settlement, next to one named Shvuet Rachel.
Amona was built in 1995 without permits from the government or the Defense Ministry on private Palestinian property. It received a NIS 2.1 million grant from the Ministry of Housing and Construction.
The state’s request to delay the outpost’s evacuation is the latest in a series of delays to an initial court ruling, which was issued in response to a petition by the non-governmental group Yesh Din.
It called on the court to reject the petition stating that it was an “insult to the rule of law” and was politically motivated to “evade carrying out the ruling.”
“Yesh Din expects the High Court to reject this request swiftly in order to aid the State in directing its efforts to enforcing the law and returning the land in question to its rightful owners, residents of the Palestinian communities of Silwad, Taybeh and Ein Yabrud, as it should be doing,” the group said.
In Israel; if we do not fight for our rights, we will not be here. It is a matter of survival.
Abbas the financier of the Munich Massacre.
Complain on Israel ignoring its Jewish roots and heritage of our nation.
The minute the U.N. its representatives or anyone else call Judea and Samaria aka West Bank occupied territory, than there is nobody to talk to. Jordan is also occupied territory. Moreover, all the Arab countries received over 12 million sq. km. of territory, established after WWI are also occupied territory; they were all allocated their territory by the Supreme Allied Powers at the same time they allocated Palestine aka The Land of Israel as the National Home of The Jewish people in their historical land as international law. The Jewish people must fight for their rights and heritage no concessions. Past concessions and compromise have proved counterproductive and only increased terror and violence. Stop deluding your-selves the Arabs do not want peace; they want all of Israel without the Jews. When the Arabs teach and train their children to hate, commit terror and violence, and their charter calls for the destruction of Israel. You are dealing with the enemy and not a peace partner. NEVER AGAIN. Stop the Ghetto Mentality.
The Arabs attacked Israel with superior men-power and weapons, in four wars since the British left The Land of Israel aka Palestine in 1948. They lost all four wars in utter defeat. It is time for the Arabs to face reality. The Land of Israel west of the Jordan River including ancient Jerusalem, which was liberated in four defensive wars; belongs to the Jewish people and will be retained by Israel and its Jewish population for eternity.
It is enough, that the Arabs have Jordan, which is Jewish territory, and the homes and over 120,000 sq. km. of land the Arabs confiscated from the terrorized and expelled million Jewish families, who lived in the Arab countries for over 2,600 years and now were resettled in Israel and comprise over half the population. The Arabs received over 12 million sq. km. of territory after WWI.
YJ Draiman
The Arab countries terrorized and expelled a million Jewish families and confiscated all their assets including home and over 120,000 sq. km. of land.
@ Austin:
Well put! Thank you. Pro-pal activists dismiss everything I say with the mantra about “stealing” “their” land. There needs to be a hasbara (what is the applicable adjective, please?) emphasis on this very point in every mode of communication from drama (the real stories of the people involved) to the broader picture, scholarly studies, etc. They are obsessed and they don’t care about anything else.
We must show them the history. They think we popped out of Europe 20 minutes ago to steal a country that never existed. (Kessler unintentionally did a lot of damage even though he didn’t start the whole Kazar nonsense). I told somebody my family was from Lithuainia. He asked me what the family name was. I said, “Koplowitz” he just looked at me. I could have thrown him some of the others too, Braun, Schlesinger, Israel. Yeah, real Lithuanian names. Even without the documented evidence from every century of where and who we were and what we were doing. Even without the letter by which were invited to Lithuania formally as we were being expelled from Southern and Western Europe.
“We had to come to America to become Russians, Poles, Germans, or whatever. Over there we were just Jews.” – Walter Matthau – great Litvak-Jewish-American actor.
Joan Peters did ground-breaking work in “From Time Immemorial”. Jewish anti-semite Norman Finkelstein (who these people quote too) claimed to debunk it and later another great work, by Jonah Goldberg “Ordinary Germans – Hitler’s Willing Executioners”. We need scholarly books up the wazzooh debunking Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said (some work has been done here). Point by point as was done with Farakkhan in the 90s causing the violent, murderous, anti-semitic movement he founded to collapse shortly thereafter.
I remember Peters begins her book by saying she didn’t start with any particular bias against the “Palestinians” but the thing that really got her attention in the beginning of her research was the odd wording of the unique definition of a “refugee” as the U.N. was applying it to the pals. It defined a palestinian refugee as the descendant of any arab who lived in Palestine for more than 2 years before 1948. Hello???? Anybody home? Ironic isn’t it that UNRWA began as the agency responsible for the Jews in displaced persons (DP) camps.
These Leftists don’t recognize international agreements from before the ’60s or ’70s when Africa was decolonized and the see the League of Nations and the U.N. as instruments of imperialism. One guy said, “what was the language mainly spoken in Palestine in the 19th century.” I said things like Jerusalem was mainly Jewish and then Christian before Muslim from 1840 to 1890, the official language was Turkish, but they are hung up on language ’cause that’s what Marx talked about. People were defined by religion and the whole thing was part of Turkey. Mostly uninhabited, and conquered from us anyway. Continually driven off land we continually had to re-purchase. (This one guy says conservatives believe in the sanctity of private property so I’m not a real conservative. There were always Jews there. I should have said, “what’s so special about the 19th century?” There should be movies and novels about the lives and contributions (documented) of the Jews of Eretz Israel in each century. Like Foner and Lewis who wrote a documentary history of Black Workers in each era. One to a volume. And the Jewish novels of Howard Fast.
Though don’t you just love it when they say, “you can’t go back 2,000 years.” We don’t have to. We never left. The barbarians they support go back 14 hundred years and want to reverse history by over 100.
Except for the certain fact that the Arabs, who were dredged up from nowhere, have no ownership rights to that land, and indeed, none of the Arabs have ownership rights, except perhaps, and that’s a BIG perhaps, the descendants of the 4-5 wealthy Arab families to whom the Turkish Sultan sold a few very small parcels. As they didn’t live in Palestine, but in Damascus and further afield, it’s not likely that they ended up in Israel. Their land was let to fellahin who lived in small mud huts, and paid 50% of their produce to the owners. The fellahin never owned anything they were basically slaves.
Besides, the Land was owned by the Jewish People, and that ownership was confirmed and agreed on by a variety of International Conferences and Agreements, which have been mentioned many times on these pages, by me and others. When Israel was re-constituted, what was not owned by Jews already (less than 7%) was regarded as State Land. The vast majority of the Arabs present at that time were newly come to Israel within the past couple of years, or at most, from the 1920s looking for work. Then there were the usual nomad Bedouins with their herds. None of these people had any ownership rights and certainly no title deeds, that were not forged in Ramallah or thereabouts, where it became a thriving industry. Artificial ageing also was a good racket.
there are laws and there is statecraft. ergo, compensate the arabs handsomely a la eminent domain and then both STAY in Amona and BUILD in Shilo. think too of the resonance of that phrase– Israel is building once more in ancient SHILO! True Jews and many evangelicals will surely get excited just thinking of that wonderful thought.