Since Smotrich Appointment, Israel Nearly Stopped Enforcing Law on Illegal Settlement Construction
An outpost near the Israeli Ma’aleh Levona settlement in the West Bank, this week.Credit: Gil Cohen-Magen
The Civil Administration has not been enforcing laws on illegal construction in the West Bank since the authority to approve demolitions passed into the hands of far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich late last year, only enforcing it in a few isolated cases.
According to figures obtained by Haaretz, the level of enforcement has dropped sharply since the coalition was sworn in last year. Sources familiar with the details described the changes in enforcement, as well as the intervention by Smotrich’s associates who are preventing the dismantling of structures built without a permit.
In all of 2022, on average 25 enforcement operations were demolished each month, but between the swearing-in of the new government on December 29 and the month of May, there were only two such operations a month on average. “There has been no enforcement for some time,” said a source in the defense establishment. “This issue used to be an internal IDF one; now, almost everything is reported to the settlement authority, [controlled by Smotrich],” he explained.
In February, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Smotrich, who also holds the role of minister in the Defense Ministry, reached an agreement over the division of the ministry’s powers in the West Bank. They agreed to establish a settlement authority, led by Smotrich, which would take charge of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories and the Civil Administration, Israel’s governing bodies in the West Bank. Ultimately, all the powers regarding illegal construction were given to Smotrich, except for structures whose dismantling had been deemed essential for security purposes by the defense minister.
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich at the Knesset in Jerusalem, in February.Credit: Emil SalmanIn the past, demolition or confiscation of illegally built structures was brought to the defense minister for approval only when it was considered as something that could lead to a volatile situations. Different sources have told Haaretz that now, however, every dismantling of a Jewish-built structure is brought before the new authority, which tends to withhold approval other than in isolated cases.
Heading the new authority is Yehuda Eliahu, a Smotrich associate. They co-founded Regavim, an organization waging a public and legal campaign against Palestinian construction. Eliahu is also a former head of the Binyamin Regional Council in the West Bank, whose current head is also a close associate of Smotrich.
The current state of affairs has drastically changed the operations of the construction monitoring unit at the Civil Administration, with enforcement only carried out when privately-owned Palestinian land is affected or when there is an urgent security need, as defined by the defense minister. Enforcement also occurs when regional councils controlled by settlers support it.
Over the last few months, there have been several cases in which forces arriving to enforce construction laws or to remove settlers who had taken over Palestinian land withdrew after intervention by politicians. According to two sources, one case occurred at the Ein Rashash spring, under the jurisdiction of the Binyamin Regional Council, which is used by Palestinian shepherds in the Jordan Valley.
Settlers built a structure around the spring in an attempt to collect its water and create a pool. Civil Administration officials arrived in May with the intention of demolishing the structure, and soon after, the head of the Binyamin Council informed the media and called on politicians to halt the demolition immediately. The demolition was in fact stopped, after Smotrich’s associates intervened to stop it, according to sources who spoke with Haaretz.
Smotrich has intervened in other cases as well, one of the prominent among them being the evacuation of a vineyard near the settlement of Shiloh. The evacuation, which began in February, was a result of a High Court of Justice ruling handed down before the authority changed hands. Smotrich’s intervention led to a temporary halt of the evacuation, which was eventually completed.
A defense establishment source added that an enforcement operation near the unauthorized settler outpost of Adei-Ad was canceled in May. Before the cancellation, when the forces arrived to the site of construction, they were welcomed by a road blocakge made out of burning tires.
Most recently, on Thursday, Smotrich asked the State Prosecutor’s Office to shelve a reply it had prepared to a petition against the evacuation of an unauthorized outpost newly established near Ma’aleh Levona. The petition was filed against Gallant by settlers occupying the outpost. Prosecutors representing government ministries said the petition was slated to be dismissed out of hand, detailing the financial damage to the state and the harm to security that would be caused by halting the evacuation. However, Smotrich repeated his request, talking to the media and arguing that based on the division of authority between himself and Gallant, he was supposed to have approved the state’s response. This caused the prosecutor’s office to inform the court that the response had been submitted by mistake and that it was not a final version.
Even before authority over law enforcement was passed to Smotrich, such enforcement in the West Bank was scanty, with the Civil Administration focusing mainly on the demolition of Palestinian buildings. One example of the different treatment by law enforcement of Jews and Palestinians can be seen in reported figures showing that out of 187 demolition orders against new structures between 2019 and the end of 2020, 159 were given to Palestinians and only 28 to settlers.
Furthermore, while many unauthorized outposts have been built over the years and have received formal demolition orders, they have nonetheless flourished, with some becoming legalized over the years. This includes ten outposts formalized by the government earlier this year.
Figures on law enforcement carried out between January and May show a striking difference between figures from 2022. In that year there were about 300 cases of enforcement of construction laws against Jews in the West Bank, compared to only about ten in the last five months under Smotrich.
“There is less, of course there is,” a head of a settler regional council acknowledged in conversation with Haaretz, asked whether enforcement efforts have lessened under the current government. “If [Smotrich] evacuates, they’ll tell him – we voted for you, and you’re evacuating us?”
The outpost at Ma’leh Levona, with its evacuation suspended at the request of Smotrich, is one of seven that were built in different locations following the recent terror attack near the settlement of Eli. According to a defense establishment source, four of them are in the Binyamin Regional Council area which lies between Ramallah and the Jordan Valley.
“Politicians have told us not to touch these outposts. How can they support removing them when one cabinet member encouraged the occupation of more hillsides?” added the source, referring to a statement made by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir on a visit to one of these outposts two weeks ago.
After more than a week, approval came for evacuating these outposts, based on the authority of Gallant, who said it the move was necessary for security reasons. Other sources who spoke with Haaretz said that much pressure was exerted to evacuate the outposts, and that in the past, such requests would not have reached the defense minister. Ultimately, five of the outposts were evacuated voluntarily on Friday. Another one had its settlers removed by the Civil Administration, with the last one’s evacuation suspended until Monday.
In a column recently published in the Shabbat Bulletin “A Small World”, Elisha Yered, spokesman for the hilltop youth living in illegal outposts, complained about the current situation. Yered, who lives in the illegal outpost of Ramat Migron in the northern West Bank said that the government is dismantling recently built outposts, such as an outpost called “Yonatan Field” that sits on private Palestinian land.
However, Yered admitted that older outposts are treated differently: “The destruction campaigns stopped almost completely after a few weeks, due to strong pressure and work by [Finance Minister] Smotrich and [National Security Minister] Ben-Gvir and their party members.” But then he made it clear that this doesn’t satisfy him: “The zero-inclusion policy for establishing new points led by Gantz and Fox has not changed in any way, and has even intensified.”
This article is reproduced in its entirety.