How to Create an Israeli Settlement: First, Seize Land. Then Wait for Opportunity to Strike
The entrance to the Evyatar outpost. Even as a war raged in Gaza, vigorous efforts were made to regularize key outposts in the northern West Bank.Credit: Moti Milrod
Idan Yaron writes in Haaretz Nov 9, 2024
At the beginning of September, Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, a 26-year-old human rights activist holding American and Turkish citizenship, was shot to death by an Israel Defense Forces soldier in the West Bank village of Beita. The village is situated opposite the settler outpost of Evyatar. It was her first activism in the region. Bleeding from a head wound, she fell to the ground in an olive grove, another victim in the enduring struggle that the villagers and their supporters have been waging weekly since settlers moved into Evyatar in May 2021, and tried to illegally confiscate the lands of the villagers nearby. She was the eighth fatality in this dark saga.
A few months earlier, in April, a momentous event occurred in Israel. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich – who is also a minister in the Defense Ministry, in which capacity he oversees most of the powers of the military government’s Civil Administration, including planning, construction and enforcement – ordered government ministries to “launder” dozens of outposts and to treat them henceforth as though they were legal. One reason for this move was to block the enforcement of demolition orders in the outposts, even if they weren’t yet fully approved, as legally required.
To that end, Article 119 of the coalition agreement signed in December 2022 between Likud and Smotrich’s party, Religious Zionism, which calls for “regularization” of the status of the outposts, was applied. With a wave of the hand, these “outposts” – euphemistically called “communities and neighborhoods in processes of regularization,” or even just “young communities” – became officially recognized settlements, entitled to the whole gamut of services and infrastructure, including funds for public structures like synagogues, community centers and day cares.
And so, even as a war raged in Gaza, vigorous efforts were made to regularize key outposts in the northern West Bank, including Homesh and Evyatar. The minister of settlements and national missions, Orit Strock, declared that “Evyatar shall rise!” And so it was: At the beginning of last July, the Civil Administration completed declaring the area on which the Evyatar outpost stands as state lands.
The security cabinet decision that laid the groundwork for the declaration was something of a “price tag” event, to use the settlers’ term for their “revenge” attacks on Palestinians and their property. In this case, the justification offered for the upgrade was that it was a response to the unilateral decision of five European states (Spain, Slovenia, Belgium, Ireland and Malta) to recognize a Palestinian state, and to steps that the Palestinian Authority is promoting at the International Criminal Court in the Hague. Or, as Smotrich put it on June 28, “For every country that unilaterally recognizes a Palestinian state – we will establish a settlement… in Judea and Samaria.”