Start with an outpost, the rest follows
The article from +972 is followed by one from the normally less critical NY Times.
The Giv’at outpost set up near the settlement of Beit El in 2001. All settlements and outposts built in the West Bank are illegal under international law and, as this one was built on private Palestinian land, it was also illegal under Israeli law. After years of court and government rulings that it should be dismantled, it was declared legal by the Israeli government in 2013.
West Bank outposts: An entire system of dispossession
At the core of Israel’s settlement outpost system lies the systemic violation of Palestinian human rights.
By Yossi Gurvitz, written for Yesh Din, +972
April 22, 2015
Israeli private security guards try to stop Palestinians from working their land in the West Bank village of Sinjil, near the Israeli outpost of Givat Haro’e , August 18, 2013. Three years after settlers invaded their land, following the HCJ injunction order issued in the petition filed by the landowners through Yesh Din, landowners from the village of Sinjil arrive to their land for the first time. (Photo: Activestills.org)
Civilian Israeli security guards try to stop Palestinians from working their land in the West Bank village of Sinjil, near the Israeli outpost of Givat Haro’e , August 18, 2013. Three years after settlers invaded their land, landowners from the village of Sinjil arrive with a High Court injunction ordering them to have access to their land. (Photo: Activestills.org)
If we had to look for a good example of the meaning of the outpost system – the unofficial settlements Israel builds in the West Bank – we could hardly expect a better one than that supplied by the minister of defence himself. Commenting on a legal appeal that — contrary to some reports, Yesh Din is not part of — demands the removal of the Mitzpe Kramim outpost, Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon said (Hebrew):
This location was established legally, with the support of the prime minister and the defence minister. True, later someone appealed, an Israeli organization of course, a leftist organization that found some Arab who claims ownership.
As painful as it is that this is the level of understanding displayed by a senior government minister, the interesting part here is actually the where Ya’alon talks about “some Arab who claims ownership.
With some brutality, Ya’alon touches on the main problem of the outpost movement: its violation of Palestinian human rights in the West Bank. Yesh Din’s research over the years, and particularly its report, “The Road to Dispossession,” which uses the outpost Adei-Ad as a microcosm, finds that the creation of an outpost is a steady source for unceasing violation of the rights of the Palestinian residents in adjacent villages. This violation is inherent in the existence of the outpost.
Let me explain. When an outpost is created, territory is seized. This becomes the core of the outpost. This territory often includes private Palestinian land. Around the core there is what is known as the SSA – “special security area” – which Palestinians may not enter except on special occasions, since it serves as the perimeter of the outpost. Outside the SSA there is Palestinian land that becomes a source of friction.
Why is it a source of friction? Because the goal of those who set up outposts is to expand. Adei-Ad, our test case, now includes territory nearly 30 times its original size. How do outposts expand? Israeli civilians arrive in the vicinity and either attack Palestinian farmers or damage their crops. This is done in order to terrorize them and force them to abandon their land. When the land is abandoned, it is taken over.
In order to do so, of course, the outposts require assistance from their main partner, the government of Israel: soldiers who do not prevent violations such as settler riots; policemen who do not properly investigate attacks on Palestinians; prosecutors who close cases without due cause; a Civil Administration that does not enforce its own demolition orders; government offices that hurry to provide services for illegal settlements; and at the end of the line – the state attorneys, who time and again appear in court to defend these massive violations of the law, not to mention postponing bringing an end to them for long as possible. Time after time, the state proposes legalizing these outposts as a gift to the lawbreakers.
The first violation of Palestinian rights is that of their right to property — in other words, the land that is lost when Israeli civilians take it over. A short while after that comes the violation of their right to life and security: if you go to work your land, note that there is a chance you will not return home in one piece. Palestinian freedom of movement is also violated: with the creation of an outpost and the declaration of an SSA, its territory keeps expanding, and Palestinians are forbidden from entering.
All this ultimately leads to the violation of Palestinians’ right and ability to make a living. Two of the villages near Adei-Ad have already been emptied of many of their residents. An agricultural settlement, after all, cannot exist if its land is taken away by force.
We are not dealing with just one case: there are about 100 outposts. Every time one of them is legalized, it creates a precedent for the legalizing the next outpost, and creates incentives for Israeli civilians to seize more land and terrorize more Palestinians.
This isn’t an accident, it’s a system. The outposts are approved, as Ya’alon admitted, by the defence and prime ministers. This is the system, as shown in the previous post, in which all government offices are complicit; this is the system whose existence is now out in the open, with no blushing, announced by the defense minister. This system means the systemic, intentional, violation of Palestinian human rights, and it must stop.
The IDF talks with settlers from the Esh Kodesh outpost as they stage a sit-in in an attempt to prevent Palestinians from working in their fields in the northern West Bank village of Jalod. Photo by Jaafar Ashtiyeh / AFP
By Nicholas Kristof
February 26, 2015
SINJIL, West Bank — The Israeli elections scheduled for March 17 should constitute a triumph, a celebration of democracy and a proud reminder that the nation in which Arab citizens have the most meaningful vote is, yes, Israel.
Yet Israeli settlements here on the West Bank mar the elections, and the future of the country itself. The 350,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank — not even counting those in Arab East Jerusalem — impede any Middle East peace and stain Israel’s image.
But let’s be clear: The reason to oppose settlements is not just that they are bad for Israel and America, but also that this nibbling of Arab land is just plain wrong. It’s a land grab. The result is a “brutal occupation force,” in the words of the late Avraham Shalom, a former chief of the Israeli internal security force, Shin Bet.
Most Israeli settlers are not violent. But plenty are — even stoning American consular officials early this year — and they mostly get away with it because settlements are an arm of an expansive Israeli policy. The larger problem is not violent settlers, but the occupation.
“We planted 5,000 trees last year,” Mahmood Ahmed, a Palestinian farmer near Sinjil told me. “Settlers cut them all down with shears or uprooted them.”
Israel has enormous security challenges, but it’s hard to see the threat posed by 69-year-old Abed al-Majeed, who has sent all 12 of his children to university. He told me he used to have 300 sheep grazing on family land in Qusra but that nearby settlers often attack him when he is on his own land; he rolled up his pant leg to show a scar where he said a settler shot him in 2013. Now he is down to 100 sheep.
“I can’t graze my sheep on my own land,” he said. “If I go there, settlers will beat me.”
Sarit Michaeli of B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, accompanied me here and said that the allegations are fully credible. Sometimes Palestinians exaggerate numbers, she said, but the larger pattern is undeniable: “the expulsion of Palestinians from wide areas of their agricultural land in the West Bank.”
Elsewhere, I saw graffiti that said “Death to Arabs” in Hebrew, heard Palestinians say that their olive trees had been poisoned or their tires slashed, and talked to an Arab family whose house was firebombed in the middle of the night, leaving the children traumatized.
The violence, of course, cuts both ways, and some Israeli settlers have been murdered by Palestinians. I just as easily could have talked to settler children traumatized by Palestinian violence. But that’s the point: As long as Israel maintains these settlements, illegal in the eyes of most of the world, both sides will suffer.
To its credit, Israel sometimes lets democratic institutions work for Palestinians. In the southern West Bank, I met farmers who, with the help of a watchdog group, Rabbis for Human Rights, used Israeli courts to regain some land after being blocked by settlers. But they pointed wistfully at an olive grove that they are not allowed to enter because it is next to an outpost of a Jewish settlement.
They haven’t been able to set foot in the orchard for years, but I, as an outsider, was able to walk right into it. A settler confronted me, declined to be interviewed, and disappeared again — but the Palestinians who planted the trees cannot harvest their own olives.
A unit of Israeli soldiers soon showed up to make sure that there was no trouble. They were respectful, but, if they were really there to administer the law, they would dismantle the settlement outpost, which is illegal under Israeli as well as international law.
Kerem Navot, an Israeli civil society organization, has documented “the wholesale takeover of agricultural lands” by Israeli settlers. It notes that this takeover is backed by the Israeli government “despite the blatant illegality of much of the activity, even in terms of Israeli law.”
There are, of course, far worse human rights abuses in the Middle East; indeed, Israeli journalists, lawyers, historians and aid groups are often exquisitely fair to Palestinians. Yet the occupation is particularly offensive to me because it is conducted by the United States’ ally, underwritten with our tax dollars, supported by tax-deductible contributions to settlement groups, and carried out by American bulldozers and weaponry, and presided over by a prime minister who is scheduled to speak to Congress next week.
At a time when Saudi Arabia is flogging dissidents, Egypt is sentencing them to death, and Syria is bombing them, Israel should stand as a model. Unfortunately, it squanders political capital and antagonizes even its friends with its naked land grab in the West Bank. That’s something that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might discuss in his address to Congress.
An Israeli soldier confronts a Palestinian man attempting to plant an olive tree sapling earlier this month near the West Bank city of Ramallah. Photo by Majdi Mohammed/Associated Press