Goodbye, Green Line: The Israeli government goes all out to boost West Bank settlements
New housing projects are seen in the West Bank Israeli settlement of Givat Ze’ev
The lead Haaretz editorial on 8 April 2024:
The government of destruction sacrifices sovereign Israel on the altar of the settlement enterprise. This year the lords of the land have stepped up their intensive erasure of the Green Line, economically and physically, even in wartime.
Outrageous and dangerous bills have already been passed. Two of them stipulate, for the first time, that settlements will be included, as if they were legitimate communities, in a program to redistribute arnona (property or municipal) taxes collected by wealthier Israeli towns and cities to poorer ones. A law sponsored by MK Yakov Asher (United Torah Judaism) allows the interior minister to instruct communities that have industrial zones to share arnona payments with settlements.
Meanwhile, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s Arnona Fund Law states that the settlements may receive money from the fund, which communities in Israel proper pay into, but will not be obligated to share their own arnona revenue. The High Court of Justice is hearing challenges to the law now.
The government works tirelessly to normalize the settlements, including by equalizing conditions between the settlers and all residents of Israel, as if the former did not live in occupied territories. Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi, for example, recently demanded and was issued military orders levying sanctions on cellphone carriers that fail to guarantee coverage in 95 percent of the West Bank. His ministry is spending 50 million shekels ($13.6 million) in expanding mobile coverage beyond the Green Line. Transportation Minister Miri Regev earmarked 20 percent of the budget of her ministry’s infrastructure program for the territories. The number of housing units advanced for construction in the settlements in 2023 was also the highest since the Oslo Accords.
Smotrich’s dream is coming true: the establishment of a civil administration under his control, which will replace the Civil Administration operating under the Defense Ministry. “His” administration will be responsible for all aspects of the lives of the Jews in the settlements, from roads to nature reserves. The new settlements minister will join the current settlements minister, Orit Strock, who heads the National Missions Ministry.
The past year proved that Strock’s special mission is mainly the efficient transfer of huge amounts of state funds to the territories, at the expense of the Israeli authorities. Moreover, with unprecedented audacity and during the war, while the budgets of all government ministries were cut by 5 percent and allocations earmarked for the Arab community by 15 percent, her budget soared, receiving an increase of 378 million shekels, for a total of 543 million shekels.
The current government is not the first to help the “young settlement movement” – a euphemism for illegal outposts – but the past year proved that this government has lost all restraint. If the settlers are not stopped, they will continue to further their control of the Palestinians, sabotage the possibility of reaching a territorial compromise and accelerate the deterioration of Israel’s international status, until they turn it into a pariah state with no allies.
This article is reproduced in its entirety