Good News, Bad News, and some Intriguing Political Analysis

March 26, 2012

Allen Katzoff Civil Rights, Democracy, Israel, Jewish settler violence, Land Expropriation, West Bank , , , , 3 Comments

There was lots of interesting news during the past several days while I took a short vacation to drive through the Galilee where, after this winter’s torrential rains, yellow and blue wildflowers cover the hillsides and some areas resemble the dark, green woods of New England. So here are three items that make for interesting reading.

Supreme Court ruling on Migron

This is good news if you care about the rule of law in Israel and the importance of enforcing Supreme Court decisions. In 2006 the court ordered that the illegal settlement of Migron be evacuated and the land be returned to its rightful Palestinian owners. This was followed by 6 years of delays and government inaction. Recently, an agreement was reached between the government and the settlers, without consulting the Palestinian landowners, that would have delayed the evacuation until 2015. Yesterday, the Supreme Court rejected this agreement and unanimously ordered that Migron be demolished by August 1st. Click here for key excerpts from the justices’ decision.

Migron settlement. Credit: Reuters

Despite settler claims to the contrary, Migron was a clear-cut case. Here is a 2008 article describing an Associated Press investigation of the settlers’ claims of ownership. One of the documents presented to the court was a bill of sale by a Palestinian farmer, Abdel Latif Sumarin, that was signed and notarized in 2004. Unfortunately for the settlers, Mr. Sumarin had died over forty years earlier in 1961. The notary, who is based in California where the fictitious sale was purported to have occurred, also declared his signature was fraudulent. See the article for more details.

Of particular note, and perhaps more indicative of the attitudes behind the settlers’ actions and the government’s policies, is a reference at the very end of the article to Itay Harel, a settler who lives on that particular plot of land:

“Itay Harel, a social worker who lives on the Sumarin plot in Migron, insisted the sale was legitimate, although he refused to discuss it in detail. He also made clear that from the settlers’ perspective, the sale was beside the point.

‘This land belongs to the people of Israel, who were driven off it by force,’ Harel said, referring to the defeat and exile of the Jews by Rome in A.D. 70. He said no Palestinian had a rightful claim to any part of the West Bank.

‘Anyone who claims the land is his is lying, and it is said that if you lie enough times, you start believing it,’ he said.”

Israeli Politicians and defense officials are scrambling to figure out where to move the settlers and how to avoid a violent confrontation with their supporters. Even worse for the government, this might open the door to many other court decisions that settlements have been built on privately owned Palestinian land and must be evacuated. We can expect that the Knesset will attempt to address this issue. Today’s newspaper reported that already there are bills under consideration that stipulate “if a community [Jewish settlement] is erected on private land in good faith, after a certain number of years the rightful owner cannot evict residents but can demand compensation.” So far these bills have been blocked but Migron is a game changer.

Riot in a Shopping Mall

One week ago 300 fans of the Beitar Jerusalem soccer team descended on the Malha Shopping Mall in Jerusalem to celebrate the team’s victory in a game. They stood on tables and chairs, screaming “Death to the Arabs” and then proceeded to attack the Arab workers in the mall.  As one shop owner said, “…they beat the hell out of them.” Arabs were hurled into shops, smashed against plate glass store windows, and chased up and down the escalators. The entire riot was captured on the closed circuit video cameras in the mall. A very large contingent of police eventually arrived 40 minutes later and cleared the mall. Then nothing was done. No one was arrested or prosecuted despite the video evidence. The media ignored the incident until the Haaretz newspaper broke the story five days later last Friday. Click here for more details.

A frame of Beitar fans in the Malha Shopping Mall taken from a video clip.

Over the weekend, the police were scrambling to do damage control, claiming there will be a thorough investigation and that the perpetrators will be prosecuted. One can only imagine the police and media response if 300 Arabs had invaded a shopping mall and then chased and beat Jewish workers.

The problem is that the lack of police follow-up is not unique. I documented a long history of police ignoring violence against Arabs in East Jerusalem in a February blog post. The situation is especially egregious in the West Bank. The human rights NGO Yesh Din reported that over 90% of police investigations into settler violence against Palestinians resulted in no indictments (97% resulted in no indictments if the crime was limited to destruction of Palestinian property). Even worse, as I reported in the February blog post about East Jerusalem, it is often the Palestinians themselves who are arrested if they file complaints. Click here for an example.

Why the Israeli public votes as it does

Here is a thought-provoking article which argues that the political status quo of the West Bank occupation is a rational choice that the Israeli public has chosen, given today’s environment. The article offers an intriguing explanation for why the Likud and Netanyahu are so popular right now, despite polls that show many Israelis would like to end the occupation.

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The Negev: A Bedouin Village versus a JNF Forest

March 15, 2012

Allen Katzoff Bedouin, Civil Rights, Demographics, Home demolitions, Israel, Land Expropriation , , , , Leave a comment

There was a clear blue sky after many days of rain when we drove to Al-Arakib near Be’er Sheva down in the Negev. The air was cool but the sun was strong. All around us the desert was in bloom as we turned onto the dirt road, passed a small cemetery on the left and pulled up before a large three-sided Bedouin tent. In the distance I could see groves of trees on higher ground. But the surroundings around the tent were barren, just sandy ground and rocks. I was soon to find out why.

To read the rest of this post, go to http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-negev-a-bedouin-village-versus-a-jnf-forest

Singing to the Soldiers

February 13, 2012

Allen Katzoff Israel, Jewish settler violence, Land Expropriation, West Bank, West Bank violence , , , , , , , Leave a comment

There we were, standing on the edge of the ledge facing a line of armed-to-the-teeth Israeli soldiers 15 feet away from us, as if our scraggily band of middle-aged folks with a sprinkling of 20-somethings posed any threat to their bulging muscles, semi-automatic rifles, and the other weaponry in their hands. They had just roughly pushed us up the rocky incline from the lower field where our group had been busy planting olive tree saplings in honor of Tu B’shvat, the Jewish new year for trees. We had regrouped in a small upper field littered with stones. A few hundred yards behind their line the sun was highlighting the red tile roofs of the settlement of Talmon. We didn’t know if they were preparing another advance on us or perhaps were going to hit us with a volley of tear gas and stun grenades, which we heard they had done to a few brave souls earlier in the day, the residual scent just barely floating on the air.

To read the rest of this post, go to http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/singing-to-the-soldiers

Hope and Reconciliation

February 6, 2012

Allen Katzoff Home demolitions, Israel, Jewish settler violence, Land Expropriation, West Bank , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

This past weekend there were two things I encountered that gave me hope – hope for the future of a peaceful Middle East.

Hope #1 – Friday’s Haaretz Magazine had a story about teaching the philosophy of Abraham Joshua Heschel in Israel. See http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/change-of-heart-1.410878

The reporter interviewed Dror Bondi, a teacher at a Hesder Yeshiva in the West Bank (students at a Hesder Yeshiva combine army service with Torah study). Surprisingly, Heschel is not well-known in Israel and is seldom studied. Bondi’s mission is to change that.

Bondi grew up in a West Bank settlement, a child in a right-wing religious Zionist family. He attended demonstrations in the 1990’s protesting Yitzhak Rabin’s peace initiatives. After Rabin’s assassination in 1995 Bondi entered a multi-year crisis during which he challenged his previous beliefs about the land, God, and politics. I am not a philosopher so I will let Bondi’s words speak for themselves in the article but I will say he reminded me of the essence of the religious calling – which ironically can so easily be forgotten here in Israel – and he filled me with hope. (Note: for those readers not familiar with Heschel’s life, the middle of the article offers a brief biography but the beginning and especially the latter half of the article deals with his religious thought and its relevance to Israel.)

Bondi also reminded me of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, another beacon of hope in the Orthodox landscape here (see my December 23, 2011 post). Although both are in the distinct minority, perhaps a time will come when they will change the conversation in the Orthodox Jewish community.

For those who are Jewish educators interested in re-framing the conversation about Israel within a religious context, Rabbis for Human Rights, with branches in both Israel and North America, also has material to assist with this.

Hope #2 – This weekend I traveled to Susya in the barren looking hills near Hebron on the West Bank. This is an area with active Jewish settlements and local Palestinians who are clinging to their land, living in tents that get demolished over and over by the Israeli army. The government’s goal is to remove all the Palestinian farmers from the district. As in other areas of the West Bank, this is bare-faced ethnic cleansing with the Army repeatedly loading the residents onto trucks to transport them away. But the farmers keep coming back to their land, setting up new tents to replace those demolished, never surrendering no matter how bad conditions get. I hope to write more about Susya in future posts but the following article by David Shulman, a professor at Hebrew University, will give you a visceral experience of the local Palestinians’ encounter with their Jewish neighbors. It is one of the best descriptions of what it is like to confront the occupation face-to-face. See http://www.palestinemonitor.org/spip/spip.php?article1799

Palestinian farmer's home in Susya. The families live in tents because their dwellings are slated for demolition by the government.

But that is not why I am writing this post – although the courage and tenacity of those farmers is inspiring and heartbreaking at the same time. Rather, I am writing to tell you about Combatants for Peace (see http://cfpeace.org/), an organization composed of former Israeli soldiers and Palestinian fighters, individuals who had fought but now work for peace, non-violence, and an end to the occupation. They have about 200 active members who belong to five regional groups, each one pairing an Israeli city with a Palestinian city, for example, Tel Aviv and Nablus. Each group meets monthly in the Palestinian cities (the Palestinian members cannot enter Israel) to plan activities, tours for the public, and events.

To give you an idea of how and why these former fighters became involved in this organization, the following links are brief life stories of two members of the group, one Palestinian and one Israeli. They illustrate how this conflict has deep and long roots on both sides but how reconciliation can emerge. Both accounts are very moving and provide the kind of insight into the occupation that only personal testimony can do.

1 – http://cfpeace.org/?cat=6&story_id=667

2 – http://cfpeace.org/?cat=6&story_id=970

(Others accounts are available on the website and are worth reading.)

Combatants for Peace organized the bus from Tel Aviv that took me to Susya. All 50 seats were taken, many by former Israeli soldiers who were devoting the day to show solidarity with the farmers in the Hebron Hills.  We were all instructed to remain non-violent and passive if the nearby settlers come to harass and attack.

We spent the afternoon at a newly built school that serves 35 children, grades one through four. For much of the last decade, children did not attend school because road closures made it impossible. A few years ago the community set up tents for a school. When a powerful storm blew the tents away they built the new concrete structure. Since there is no electric power or water hookups provided to Palestinians, the school uses solar power and water is trucked in. Until recently there were no bathrooms at the school.

Of course, since Palestinians in this area cannot obtain building permits, the school already has been served with a demolition order from the government – just like all the Palestinian dwellings in the area. One day a bulldozer will show up unannounced, accompanied by soldiers. It will quickly reduce the school to a pile of rubble, perhaps along with some Palestinian tents in the area. (The farmers live in tents which are easier to reconstruct than buildings after they are demolished.) Such is life for the residents of Susya.

The new school in Susya. Note the solar panel on the roof that provides electricity. The building will be demolished by the army at some point.

But on this weekend Israelis and Palestinians celebrated the school by planting sabra cacti on the hillside in front of the school building. It was a fitting symbol. The school’s principal mentioned in his welcoming remarks that the sabra is historically emblematic for both Israelis and Palestinians – another thing we could fight over if we chose to. But the truth is, just as we are all visitors on this earth, so too with the sabra in Israel and Palestine. It turns out it is a native plant of Mexico and was introduced to the Middle East only during the Ottoman Empire. So much for historical myths!

Local Palestinians and Combatants for Peace planting sabra cacti on the hill overlooking the new school.

A Tale of Two Cities

January 26, 2012

Allen Katzoff Bedouin, Civil Rights, Demographics, Home demolitions, Israel, Jerusalem, Judaism, Land Expropriation, Separation Wall , , , , , , , Leave a comment

“The day Jerusalem was liberated was the day that the city heaved a sigh of relief and began to spread its wings, for the benefit of its Arab and Jewish residents alike….We will never again allow Jerusalem to become a separated, bleak and divided city.“ Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

When Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke those words at the Jerusalem Day ceremony in 2010, he was already too late. Unbeknownst to his audience, Jerusalem had already become bleak and divided.

This is a tale of two cities, one rich with parks, well cared for neighborhoods and tourist attractions; the other impoverished and deprived of even basic services. And as for a united Jerusalem spreading its wings for the good of Jews and Arabs alike, well, you decide below on the efficacy of that claim.

As background, as I covered in a post on January 16, A Virtual Tour of East Jerusalem (I urge you to “take the tour” if you haven’t done so already), Israel annexed in 1967 all of what had been East Jerusalem plus 28 nearby villages and incorporated them into the municipality of Jerusalem.

Fast Forward to 2012:

Let’s see how the Palestinian population has fared 45 years later when compared to Jewish West Jerusalem.

Population: There are 303,000 Palestinian residents in East Jerusalem, one-third of the population, out of a total of 835,000 people in the Jerusalem municipality (2009 data).

Poverty: 65% of Palestinian families live under the poverty line as compared to 31% of Jewish families. (This is 2008 data. Economic conditions in East Jerusalem have gotten much worse since then so these figures have deteriorated further.)

Children:  74% of Palestinian children live under the poverty line compared to 45% of Jewish children. (Also 2008 data)

Schools: Average class size is 32 students in East Jerusalem versus 24 students in West Jerusalem. School buildings are neglected, often run down. The Jerusalem municipality’s own statistics listed 50% of East Jerusalem’s classrooms to be sub-standard in 2009 (704 out of 1,360) including 221 that were deemed unfit.

In addition, due to an estimated shortage of 1,000 classrooms in the municipal schools there, an estimated 11,000 Palestinian children (12% of school age children) did not attend school for the 2009-2010 school year due to lack of space. Tens of thousands of others were forced to attend private schools, which posed a severe financial burden on the mostly impoverished population. In 2008, the per-student budget allocation for elementary school children in Jewish West Jerusalem was 400% higher that in East Jerusalem: 2,372 NIS (New Israel Shekels) per Jewish student versus 577 NIS per Palestinian student.

Given all of this, it is not surprising that there is a 50% drop out rate for Palestinian children compared to 7.4% in the Jewish sector.

Several recent court rulings have ordered the Jerusalem municipality to build more classrooms and to increase the East Jerusalem school budget. How these rulings will be implemented is a question that will unfold over time.

Pre-school: There are roughly 15,000 three and four year olds in East Jerusalem. Despite the importance of early education on child development, 90% of them are not enrolled in a pre-school educational program. This is not for a lack of interest. There are only 2 municipal pre-schools in East Jerusalem compared to 56 in West Jerusalem.

Land: One-third of the land in East Jerusalem has been expropriated by the Israeli government from Arab owners since 1967.

Housing: As of 5 years ago, over 50,000 housing units for Jewish residents has been built on this expropriated land. That number is larger today. No housing has been built for Palestinian residents.

Housing density for existing homes in East Jerusalem is almost double what it is for Jewish residents: on average, 1.9 people per room versus 1 person per room. It is nearly impossible for Palestinians to obtain building permits to construct new houses or to repair existing ones due to discriminatory policies. The result is massive illegal construction without safety inspections and the constant threat of demolition by the government.

View of East Jerusalem neighborhood

Municipal Services: There are minimal municipal services provided to East Jerusalem residents. A simple walk through neighborhoods will reveal decrepit roads and sidewalks, and few public parks or playgrounds. Hundreds of streets are not provided with trash collection services that results in trash piling up everywhere.

Street scene in East Jerusalem

Water connections: 160,000 Palestinian residents, over half the population, have no legal connection to the water network. Either they jury-rig connections to the water mains or they use stored water in containers.

Sewage: Estimates state that East Jerusalem is in need of 50 kilometers of new main sewage lines. Entire neighborhoods still use cesspools, not ideal for densely packed urban neighborhoods, and existing sewage facilities are antiquated and poorly maintained. It is not unusual for sewers to overflow and for sewage water to run above ground close to homes.

NOTE: These last few items pose a risk to public health from infectious disease but they continue to be ignored by municipal authorities.

Postal service: 10 post offices serve Palestinian areas compared to 42 in West Jerusalem. Mail delivery is only partial and sporadic making commerce more difficult.

In addition, Palestinian residents face the ongoing menace of home demolitions and eviction, especially in the neighborhoods directly abutting the Old City where the government works closely with several ideological NGOs to evict Palestinians and replace them with Jewish settlers (For details, see my posts of January 2 and January 10).

Home in East Jerusalem shortly after being demolished. Note pile of rubble in the background.

The construction of the Separation Wall, as noted in previous posts, has disrupted the flow of commerce by severing neighborhood from neighborhood and all of East Jerusalem from the nearby commercial centers of Ramallah, Bethlehem, and the rest of the West Bank. This has caused massive economic dislocation and impoverishment.

Separation wall in Jerusalem. Note how it splits this neighborhood in two, severing all connections.

The data above is just a sampling of the comparisons between Palestinian East Jerusalem and Jewish West Jerusalem. For those interested in more details, you can read a full report that was produced by The Association for Civil Rights in Israel, an organization that fights for the rights of all Israelis. (For more details, see http://www.scribd.com/doc/31806771/Report-May10-ACRI-Human-Rights-in-East-Jerusalem-Facts-and-Figures – Scroll down to page 38 for English). A preface to the report sums it up as follows:

“Israel’s policy for the past four decades has taken concrete form as discrimination in planning and construction, expropriation of land, and minimal investment in physical infrastructure and government and municipal services. As a result, East Jerusalem residents suffer severe distress, and their conditions are worsening.”

“Life in East Jerusalem can be described as a continuing cycle of neglect, discrimination, poverty, and shortages. These, compounded by construction of the Separation Barrier cutting Jerusalem off from the West Bank, have led to the social and economic collapse of this part of the city. A large majority of East Jerusalem residents do not receive, and cannot afford to buy, the most basic services.

It seems to me that the facts on the ground in East Jerusalem belie the claim that Jerusalem is indivisible. East and West Jerusalem are like two separate worlds, one a modern urban environment, a magnet for visitors, and the other a neglected and impoverished backwater. The demand for a unified city which has been made into a roadblock for peace, the city that tourists are shown with reverence, is a Potemkin Village hiding the truth.

Update on recent Bedouin Home Demolitions:

Two days ago I linked to a late breaking story about a middle of the night demolition of several Bedouin homes. Unfortunately, more details have emerged that make the situation more distressing. In all, six houses were destroyed making many more families homeless than was originally reported. See this update to read what the experience was actually like: http://972mag.com/idf-commits-price-tag-attack-against-activists-resisting-home-demolitions/33866/

Salim Shawamreh's house before it was demolished. See the link above for the view afterwards.

Profoundly disconcerting in the above link was when one of the Israeli soldiers yelled at Rabbi Arik Aschermann, director of Rabbis For Human Rights in Israel who had rushed to the scene, to take off his skullcap because “he was a disgrace to Judaism.” This while the soldiers were escorting a bulldozer from house to house, demolishing them without any advance notice. In the dead of night, entire families – men, women, children and babies, bewildered and disoriented – were evicted into the cold winter rain with no shelter and just the clothes on their backs.

Tzedek tzedek tirdof. (Justice, justice shall you pursue.) Deuteronomy 16:20

A Virtual Tour of East Jerusalem

January 16, 2012

Allen Katzoff Bedouin, Jerusalem, Land Expropriation, Separation Wall, Silwan, West Bank , , , , , 1 Comment

Ten days ago I went on a drive through East Jerusalem with Ir Amim, a human rights NGO that works to protect the rights of all of Jerusalem’s residents and to prevent the establishment of facts on the ground from precluding a negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On the tour we stopped at high lookout points where we saw large areas of intertwining Jewish settlements, Palestinian villages, and the remaining open land in between. The situation on the ground is complex, especially given the rugged geography, so one really has to see it to grasp the situation in a meaningful way.

This poses a huge obstacle to fully understanding the torturous attempts at a peace process. Jerusalem is central to the negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis – and every new construction project has symbolic importance and impacts the facts on the ground. Yet, if one has never actually seen the landscapes I saw with Ir Amim, understanding the ramifications of Israeli government actions or the rationale for Palestinian reactions is difficult. So I realized on this tour that most American, and even many Israelis, are at a disadvantage when trying to interpret new developments in the headlines.

To read the rest of this post, see http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/a-virtual-tour-of-east-jerusalem/

 

Elad and Jewish Settlement in Silwan

January 10, 2012

Allen Katzoff Home demolitions, Jerusalem, Land Expropriation, Silwan , , , , , Leave a comment

Last week on January 2nd I posted a column about how the Jewish National Fund (JNF) has been evicting long-time Palestinian residents and replacing them with far-right Jewish settlers in the Palestinian area of Silwan in East Jerusalem. (see https://sevenmonthsintelaviv.com/2012/01/02/silwan-and-the-jewish-national-fund).

Although the JNF story has been in the news a lot lately, a key player in Silwan is Elad, an ideologically-driven settler organization. Their goal is to convert Palestinian neighborhoods close to the Old City of Jerusalem into Jewish enclaves. This post will deal with how Elad and Ateret Cohanim, an NGO with similar goals that is more active in other areas of Jerusalem, acquire property in order to evict the Palestinians who live there.

How Palestinians are Evicted from their Homes:

These right wing NGOs use five main strategies to take over property. Some of these strategies are straightforward legal methods but others are based on allegations of more questionable practices. In these latter cases whenever possible I have cited testimony from Knesset hearings or court proceedings to provide documentation for the allegations. (All of the information below is taken from reports produced by professional researchers at Israeli human rights NGOs, three of which I cite at the end of this post. As a disclaimer, Elad has sued Ir Amim, one of these NGOs, over a report that includes some of these allegations. Ir Amim is defending the report’s accuracy.)

1 – Absentee Property Law: Briefly, this law allows property to be seized by the state if it is proved that the owners live in Arab countries or in the West Bank (see my January 2nd post for more historical background). The application of this legislation to East Jerusalem first began in the late 1970’s.

How this law is implemented is especially interesting.

  •  The process begins when a deposition is filed with the Custodian of Absentee Property, which is an office in the Israeli Ministry of Finance, claiming that a property has an “absentee owner.” These depositions are often prepared by Elad or Ateret Cohanim.
  • The custodian evaluates the claim and, if accepted as valid (more on this below), declares the property as absentee.
  • The property is then transferred to the Jerusalem Development Authority which disposes of the property based on the recommendation of a committee in the Israeli Ministry of Housing. Representatives of Elad and Ateret Cohanim attend those committee meetings.
  • Not surprisingly, the properties are usually turned over to those NGOs for settler use. This completes the closed loop where the NGOs file the claims and then receive the property.
  • This process of registering property as “absentee” is not public. Palestinian residents and owners have no way of knowing it is occurring, they cannot stop the transfer of ownership with legal action, and they are not entitled to compensation. They can undertake legal action after the fact, which can take many years and is expensive, beyond the means of many families.

Allegations of fraud have been made against Elad in preparing the claims of absentee ownership. For example, in a case that resulted in a Knesset investigation, Elad used the testimony of one Palestinian individual as the basis for many claims. Unfortunately, this Palestinian had a background that included perjury. During a 1991 Knesset hearing, Aharon Shakarji, then the Custodian of Absentee Property, testified that this Palestinian had been the sole basis for claims on “maybe ten or fifteen” properties in East Jerusalem that he had declared absentee. He further stated that he was willing to accept depositions from someone whom he knew “had committed perjury” without further investigation. When a Knesset member asked “Is it enough for you to get a letter from somebody and you grab the property?” Shakarji replied “Yes.”

In an unrelated court case involving the Custodian’s actions, a judge wrote in his final ruling, “Not only was the good faith of the custodian [of absentee property] not proven, but it has been proven beyond doubt that both the declaration of the entire property as absentee property and its sale to the Jerusalem Development Authority are both unacceptable because they were done in an extreme lack of good faith and there is no factual or legal basis to legalize them.”

2 – Previously Owned Jewish Property: Buildings and land in East Jerusalem that belonged to Jews or Jewish organizations before Jordan captured the area in the 1948 war (when Israel became a state) can be reclaimed and the Palestinian residents evicted. On the surface, this sounds reasonable as property is restored to the rightful owners. However, it is a one-way street. Palestinians residents of Jerusalem or the West Bank cannot reclaim their property in Israel that they owned prior to 1948. If they could, large areas of Jewish West Jerusalem would suddenly have many Palestinian residents since Jewish families who live in the many beautiful old Arab houses would have to surrender their homes.

One famous case in this category that began in the 1980’s involved Mohamed Gozlan and his family. They occupied a house that had been owned by the JNF. Mohamed’s father had sheltered and saved the Jews in his neighborhood during the 1929 Arab riots and was considered a hero. After a long legal battle the Gozlan family was evicted in 2005 and the JNF leased the property to Elad.

3 – Straw Men: It is alleged that Elad and Ateret Cohanim will sometimes use Palestinian ”straw men” who pose as buyers of property for their own use. After they purchase the property the straw men transfer ownership to the settlers. Because of the deceit and fraud involved in these transactions, they are kept secret. Some of these deals ended up in court when they became known.

4 – Threat of Demolition: As explained in previous posts it is extremely difficult for Palestinians to obtain building permits to build new houses or renovate existing structures. Thus huge numbers of buildings in East Jerusalem are built illegally and subsequently face demolition orders. This can lead to financial ruin for the owners. There are allegations that the settler NGOs take advantage of this by offering to take property off the hands of the owners and assume the risk of demolition. After the sale is completed, the settler organizations get the demolition orders rescinded. In one recorded telephone call with someone instrumental in this process, it was stated that Ateret Cohanim had arranged with the municipal authorities for demolition orders to be issued on the properties they wanted to acquire, thus setting up the process.

5 – Land expropriation for archeological and tourist purposes: Large plots of land in Silwan have been acquired or are being targeted for archeological digs that will become ideologically-driven tourist attractions. The City of David National Park just outside the Old City walls is an example. It is run by Elad and is the only national park in Israel where both the archeology and operations are managed by a private organization. Elad keeps all of the ticket receipts. They are in charge of ongoing archeological work and educational programs that espouse their ideological perspective. Hundreds of thousands of visitors come to the park each year including tourists, students, and Israeli soldier groups for tours and programs.

Across the street from that site Elad is running another large excavation with plans to turn it into a similar tourist destination, and a third site is being pushed hard by the mayor of Jerusalem which would result in a significant number of Palestinian homes being demolished (demolition orders for 43 structures are currently outstanding at that Silwan site).

Additional Allegations of deceit: When I visited Silwan last month I heard more allegations of the use of fraud when taking over properties but I have not found independent corroborating data for those stories. However one accusation, which was detailed in one of the NGO reports I drew on for this post, is worthy of a Hollywood script. One of the mukhtars of Silwan, Lutfi Siyam, testified in court that shortly after the death of his illiterate grandmother, her fingerprints were stamped in the places for a signature on property sale documents.

The Result:

The result of all this property acquisition is that 2,000 Jewish settlers now live in East Jerusalem neighborhoods close to the Old City, often in gated compounds protected by video surveillance systems and private security guards paid for by the Ministry of Housing. These private guards are an armed force unto themselves in the middle of Palestinian neighborhoods with little oversight or controls.

As you might imagine, the resentment and fear of eviction in many Palestinian areas is quite high as these settler enclaves convert these close-knit neighborhoods into areas resembling armed camps. In a future post I will address how this has significantly raised the level of violence and disruption, often making normal life impossible for the Palestinians who live there.

Further Reading:

The information in this post was taken from several research reports produced by Israeli human rights NGOs. For those interested in more details I suggest the following:

1 – The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), as its name suggests, works to protect the civil rights of all Israeli citizens. Their report “Unsafe Space” provides a good overview of the settlement enterprise in East Jerusalem in the Appendix #1, beginning on page 35. It can be downloaded at this link: www.acri.org.il/pdf/unsafe-space-en.pdf

2 – Ir Amim is an organization that works to protect the rights of all of Jerusalem’s residents and to prevent the establishment of facts on the ground from precluding a negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You can download their detailed research report “Shady Dealings in Silwan” by scrolling down to the middle of this page:http://www.ir-amim.org.il/Eng/?CategoryID=254

As noted above, Elad has filed a civil suit against Ir Amim over this report.

3 – Emek Shaveh is a group of archeologists and residents of Silwan who are opposed to the ideologically driven excavations in East Jerusalem that are run by Elad. They challenge how those finds are being presented to establish a solely Jewish narrative to the exclusion of other historical periods and people. Emek Shaveh publishes reports and runs tours that present an alternative archeological story, including pre-biblical and post-temple periods, to illustrate the full range of Jerusalem’s history. See http://www.alt-arch.org/silwan.php and http://www.alt-arch.org/publications.php

A Short Trip to the West Bank, Part 1

December 19, 2011

Allen Katzoff Land Expropriation, Separation Wall, West Bank , , 2 Comments

Shortly after I arrived in Tel Aviv two weeks ago I was invited to take a drive to the West Bank with the staff from the B’tselem USA office who were in Israel for a week of meetings and updates. They were going to see a few sites of interest and had an extra seat in their car. So I hopped on the bus to Jerusalem where I joined them.

As background, B’tselem (www.btselem.org) is an Israeli organization that is concerned with human rights in the West Bank. They report on what is happening “under the radar” in the occupied territories by issuing carefully researched reports that document abuses or illegal activity. What I saw during this brief trip has rarely been covered in the media.

Our first stop was the Palestinian village of Al-Walaja which is under the jurisdiction of the Jerusalem municipality. Years ago a significant portion of the village’s agricultural land was expropriated, without compensation, by Israel to build the Jerusalem neighborhoods of Gilo and Har Gilo. The mechanism to do this was to declare the fields military land after which the neighborhoods were constructed. The result was a serious blow to the economy of the village since it was agriculturally based. The farmers affected lost their livelihood with no legal recourse.

Today the separation wall is being built around the village. Its path is between the village’s remaining agricultural land and the houses. This will effectively deny the farmers entry to any of their land although they will be able to apply for temporary three month access permits. However, those often are not granted or renewed and experience in other Palestinian villages has been that, even when temporary permits are issued, soldiers don’t always show up to open the gates through the wall. Obviously farmers cannot take the chance of planting and investing in their fields without assurances of ready access. Thus the wall will effectively deprive the village of its remaining economic viability. In addition, once the land is not worked for three years it is declared “abandoned” and the state can legally expropriate it without compensation (Arbitrarily denying access for security or other reasons for three years is one of the favorite legal mechanism’s to take over private Palestinian land).

In the meantime, the contrast between the Arab village and the nearby Jewish neighborhoods is striking. The roads in the village are old and rutted, there are few if any government services provided, and building permits are almost impossible to obtain so, even if there were funds available, improvements or new construction could not be made legally. As a B’tselem report stated, “Over the years, the Jerusalem Municipality has not provided services to the village, and city officials’ visits to the village have primarily been to document houses built without a permit or to demolish them.” In comparison, the roads for settlers are modern and well maintained, and Gilo and Har Gilo are attractive neighborhoods with parks, playgrounds, shopping, and modern buildings.

A telling symbol is the new separation wall itself. On the side facing the Jewish neighborhoods the wall is covered with a pretty facade of Jerusalem stone. On the Palestinian side it is ugly, grey concrete.

Unfortunately, the experience of Al-Walaja is not uncommon on the West Bank but it is seldom reported in its full magnitude and long-term impact.

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