Showing posts with label land grab. Show all posts
Showing posts with label land grab. Show all posts

Monday, June 20, 2022

Anti-Israel activists have been screaming about Israel's demolition of the illegal structures on the "Masafer Yatta" area. Even this week, one resident published an op-ed in The Independent "The Israeli government is trying to destroy my village – we need your help." 

I showed last month that Masafer Yatta is a relatively recent set of illegal outposts, with no residents or structures outside ruins mentioned in the 19th century Survey of Western Palestine.

This 1935 map also shows nothing in that area:




Some recent aerial photos showing that the area was nearly empty as recently as 1997. Here are comparisons of areas as they looked then (at the beginning of the land grab) and in 2021:



 The residents showed their own evidence of residency in the area in recent decades, and the Israeli High Court said that their photos were only showing evidence that there weren't any permanent structures there.

For the sake of example, our focus will be on the aerial photographs of "Khirbet al-Fahit" presented by the respondents ("al-Fahit" according to the petitioners). In 1967 and 1981 the area was completely empty of buildings. Some development is evident during the years 1990 and 1991. In 2001 it is evident that a number of buildings were already built in Kharbit, and such were built more and more in 2007, 2009, 2011 and 2012. 
An identical picture is revealed from the aerial photographs attached by the petitioners and even more clearly. It can also be seen that in 1972 and 1981 there is no evidence of buildings in the area compared to 2011, when there is a lot of construction on the site. 
The same is true with regard to Khirbet Hilweh ("Al Hilweh" according to the petitioners). There is not much room to doubt that in the early years (1967, 1979, 1981 and even 1991) there is no evidence of construction on the site. However in the years 2007, 2009, 2011 and 2012 more and more buildings and houses were built.  There is a sharp and noticeable difference between the photos from the early period (in 1972, 1981 and even 1993) and the photo from 2011 in which  construction can be clearly identified.
The Regavim NGO gives the true origins of the illegal outposts:

This is how these "villages" were born: The shepherds of Yatta, who lived in brick and mortar homes, would sleep in the natural caves in the grazing areas during certain seasons, rather than trekking back to the village each night. After the IDF closed off the area, the shepherds were permitted to continue to graze their flocks there; the IDF gave them a few days' warning before live-fire exercises to insure that no one got hurt. But the give-them-an-inch-and they'll-demand-a-mile dynamic soon set in, and the Palestinian Authority jumped in and began to fund construction and provide materials for permanent structures. Foreign interests funded infrastructure projects for the "indigenous farmers" - laying the water and electricity lines that enabled more and more people to set themselves up on the "free" land and build additional homes - all funded by European donations. This pattern was repeated all through the area; this was proven in the High Court of Justice - by the plaintiffs themselves!    

But the IDF willingness to compromise meant that instead of dealing with the illegal construction early, they allowed it to become much more of a problem.

 The first petitions regarding Masafer Yatta were filed over 20 years ago - by leftist organizations that tried to wrest control of the area out of the State's hands. There were temporary injunctions issued, which were not only ignored, they were trampled. Rather than tear down the few structures that had popped up in the firing zone, the IDF kept pulling back, limiting the area it used for training in order to avoid harming the squatters who, for their part, pulled out all the stops and poured massive resources into more and more construction and development. What started off as a few structures in contained areas metastasized into hundreds of structures, many hundreds of residents, and a brand new fake-news international humanitarian crisis. A full two decades passed before the High Court finally admitted what had been clear from the start, and what Regavim has been saying all along: The Arab claims to this land are fake news, the claim that Israel is dispossessing indigenous people is a lie - and the State of Israel has allowed its own delusions that it can compromise on our national interest to cause massive local and international damage.   

The court decision also noted that the vast majority of petitioners still have homes in the places they moved from to grab this seemingly free land from the State of Israel. In other words, the claim that over 1000 Palestinians will be "homeless" is yet another lie. They have their original homes.

There are no indigenous residents of "Masafer Yatta." The land was always empty and the only reason anyone lives there today is because Palestinians are trying to steal all the previously empty lands they can and claim that they were always there. 




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Thursday, June 16, 2022



The Palestinian Authority news agency Wafa has an article claiming that Hamas is stealing land in Gaza from its proper owners.

According to the story, Hamas continually seizes thousands of dunums of  land by force of arms  in Gaza.

It turns around and gives some of this land either to its own members, or to employees in lieu of paying salaries.

It has evicted hundreds of families from their homes, including some who were allotted land back when Egypt controlled Gaza.

An investigative report by journalist Muhammad Othman, published in 2021, revealed that Hamas seized 42 dunams of land belonging to Al-Azhar University in Gaza and gave it to "others ."

According to Othman’s investigation, Hamas granted some to Hamas sports clubs and other plots of land totaling about 8 dunums for the benefit of the Young Muslim Women Association of Hamas .

Hamas regularly send notices to residents telling them to evict, because the land belongs to the government, as it scours old records looking for an excuse to steal their land.

One journalist tweeted sarcastically, "[Hamas] is looking through the old books...it wants the right of lands from the days of the Egyptians...soon they get to the lands from the days of the Ottomans, and eventually they will claim Canaanite land records as well."


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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Monday, May 25, 2020

  solow

 

 

Alan Solow, a member of the Executive Committee of Israel Policy Forum and former Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, wrote a blog in Times of Israel arguing that Israel should not extend sovereignty on parts of Judea and Samaria for this reason:

No solution should be imposed on anyone or by anyone in the Israeli-Palestinian arena.

While American Jewish consensus around Israel policy has not always been easy to attain, this sentiment has stood for decades as the one universally accepted principle undergirding the quest for a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – that it must be reached through bilateral negotiations between the parties. This precept allowed Jewish leadership to strongly urge American administrations of both parties not to attempt to implement their own vision of how to resolve longstanding differences between the two sides. Despite expressions of expected or preferred outcomes over the years, every President has endorsed this concept. This principle also allowed American Jewish leadership to credibly oppose unilateral attempts by the Palestinian Authority to declare a state or to otherwise take action without consent to change the status of disputed territories.

There is a fatal flaw in this logic: Palestinians have been acting unilaterally for decades.

They have called themselves the State of Palestine. They have joined numerous international conventions without any desire to actually enforce their words.

They have built illegally in Area C, with support from the European Union, creating facts on the ground and literally engaging in a “land grab.”

And, perhaps most importantly, they have taken the de facto veto power that the international community has given them, using exactly this logic, to make peace far more distant than it appeared to be in 2000.  They’ve said “no” to every offer, not to negotiate but to wait for others to pressure Israel to give up more concessions without compromising their own intransigent, extremist positions.

Solow makes it sound like this status quo can go on forever:

The fact is that nobody is credibly threatening Israel’s control over major settlement blocs in the West Bank which are generally recognized as likely becoming Israeli territory as part of a final status agreement. Israel’s continued control of these Jewish population centers is, as a practical matter, uncontested. The only reason to acquiesce to Israel taking them unilaterally now is to abandon the position that solutions are to be negotiated, not imposed.

It can go on for a few years, but the situation is not frozen in amber. Palestinians will continue to build; they will continue to attempt to gain political legitimacy at Israel’s expense, they will continue to grow in population, they will continue to occasionally explode in violence.

Israel cannot play forever by these rules where Palestinians can do what they want and Israel has its hands tied by adhering to an artificial moral standard.  Continuing to wait for Palestinians to come to the table means that Palestinians can continue to act with impunity.

Extending sovereignty is not a land grab. It is the beginning of a disengagement. It is finally choosing borders. It is solving the demographic problem. It is staking a legal claim. It is sending a message that Palestinian intransigence will not be rewarded anymore. It is recognition that the world has changed since Oslo and Israel cannot be tied to an agreement that the Palestinians have abrogated since at least 2001.

Solow shouldn’t be warning Israel against doing what it must. He should be explaining to American Jewry why Israel must do it. And it is a serious failure in American Jewish leadership that he, and other leaders, cannot even figure this out for themselves.

Friday, January 04, 2019

Nearly six years ago I gave a lecture at Yeshiva University on how to answer anti-Israel arguments. Since the lecture was over an hour and twenty minutes, I decided to break it up into 20 sections, one each to answer one popular anti-Israel argument.




We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

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