A Balcony Over Jerusalem

by John Lyons

  By the early 1950s, Israel’s rural economy depended on the plundering of Palestinian refugees’ farmlands, whether olives trees, vineyards or Jaffa orange groves … no compensation was, or ever has been, offered to the refugees or the millions of their descendants, many of whom today languish in poverty in refugee camps across the Middle East. Nor has Israel settled accounts with the absentees who live inside the Jewish State. A quarter of a million Arab citizens of Israel are today deprived of all rights to their original property, having been declared, in truly Orwellian language, ‘present absentees’ [present in Israel but absent from their property for a day or more in 1948].15

  Another way Israel takes over private Palestinian land is to invoke an old Ottoman law. Under the Ottoman Empire, in order to farm land the owner had to pay a high registration cost. If someone stopped farming their land for three years, the sultan could declare it dead land and give it to someone else to farm. Importantly for today’s occupation, the sultan decided that if someone farmed unregistered land for 10 years it became theirs. The Israeli Army often prevents Palestinians from gaining access to their land while settlers are permitted to use it. The settlers then need only go to the Supreme Court to show that for 10 years they have been caring for this ‘abandoned’ land. The Palestinian ownership is then cancelled. Although the Israeli Supreme Court overturned this law in 2012, it still influences decisions of the court.

  I regularly witnessed the court’s endorsement of discrimination. ‘Most of the cases we deal with involve a twisted interpretation of the law,’ Yariv Mohar from Rabbis for Human Rights told me. ‘Mostly the government tries not to bluntly disobey the law but they try to make it confusing so that it always serves the interests of the settlers. They will say that they are considering a claim by settlers under Ottoman law but then the Israeli courts will give it an interpretation that has never been made in the past. What they do is invent new interpretations of the law without inventing new laws themselves.’16

  Israel has also claimed land through ‘security buffer zones’. There are 12 settlements in the West Bank that have formal buffer zones, and any Palestinian who enters one of these areas is liable to be shot.

  Sylvie and I had an opportunity to meet Dror Etkes, Israel’s foremost expert on land in the West Bank, soon after he finished a report on the amount of agricultural land taken over by settlements. He had also investigated ‘closed areas’ in the West Bank. More than 50 per cent of the West Bank land controlled by Israel has been closed for military activities, even though 78 per cent of it is not used for manoeuvres. These closed military zones are not accessible to Palestinians, but some of them have been built on by settlers.

  This is how Etkes described the creation of Greater Israel: ‘From audacious fraud and forgery to military seizures for “security needs” and “the public good” to dusting off antiquated Ottoman laws, the Israeli settlement enterprise has no shortage of tools for taking over Palestinian land in the West Bank … What we are actually witnessing is the rule of law disappearing before our eyes.’17

  Simply counting the number of settlers in the West Bank does not give an accurate picture of settlement growth, said Etkes. The fastest growth now is through agricultural rather than residential settlements, through gaining more land rather than simply more settlers. The growth of commercial areas is also substantial. In addition to commercial centres inside settlements, there are approximately 20 Israeli-administered industrial zones in the West Bank, according to Human Rights Watch.18

  Dror Etkes also found that in the last decade there had been a decline of about one-third in cultivated Palestinian agricultural lands in the West Bank. One factor behind this was the ongoing expansion of Israeli agricultural areas. This expansion included de facto appropriation of actively cultivated private lands whose Palestinian owners – individuals or entire communities – had been expelled, whether by the settlers or by the Israeli military.

  Etkes found that Israeli agricultural lands in the West Bank covered about 93,000 dunams (Ottoman acres) – about one and a half times the total built-up area of the settlements, not including East Jerusalem. This showed that ‘settlement growth’ covered more than residential areas. This is important because Israel’s lobby groups, including AIJAC in Australia, often point to residential settlements to argue that they only account for a small area of the West Bank. According to Ektes, Israel’s system was set up for ‘a land grab’ such as this. ‘There’s no rule of law,’ he told me. ‘The rule of law is a dead letter in the West Bank.’

  I’d arrived in Israel with the belief that, whatever the country’s problems, it adhered to the rule of law. But the more I researched the reality in the West Bank the more I came to the gradual realisation that the manipulation of the rule of law was used in the quest for Greater Israel. There was one occasion, for example, when a regulation was changed for 24 hours by the Defence Ministry’s Civil Administration to allow 250 settlement houses to be approved. Israelis from the settlement of Ofra retroactively requested a permit for 200 houses that had been built and 50 planned houses. Most of the 200 houses had been built illegally on private Palestinian land. But there was a problem: the houses were 80 metres from the main road and the army regulation was that no house could be built within 120 metres of the road. So for 24 hours the Civil Administration reduced the limit from 120 metres to 80 metres, which meant all settlements houses could be approved. The next day, a Palestinian family in the village of Beit Ummar, hearing of the changed law for the neighbouring settlement, also retroactively requested a permit for a house that had received a demolition order. The Defence Ministry rejected the application, saying that the rule was that a house could not be within 120 metres of a road.19

  Israel’s settlements began with guns and a lie. Soon after Israel took the West Bank in 1967, hardline religious elements decided to ‘reclaim Judea and Samaria’. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol made no official ruling on whether settlements could proceed, but Rabbi Moshe Levinger, a leader of the pro-settlement national religious supporters, took the initiative. A firebrand who today would fit the US State Department’s definition of a terrorist, Levinger and his supporters travelled to Hebron in the West Bank for Passover in 1968. They checked into the Park Hotel saying they were Swiss tourists. And they hid their weapons. The Park Hotel would become a base from which they formed a militia to seize central Hebron and force out Palestinians. A secret document from 1970 confirms the deception the government engaged in to help those first settlers: 250 new housing units were to be built, but ‘all the building will be done by the Defence Ministry and will be presented as construction for the IDF’s needs’.20

  What began as Israel’s ‘settlement enterprise’ has, 50 years later, become Frankenstein’s Monster.

  One myth perpetuated by many of Israel’s supporters is that the occupation came as a surprise – but the ambition of taking over the West Bank as part of Greater Israel was clear before the country won the Six Day War of 1967. In the documentary The Law in These Parts, former Supreme Court president Meir Shamgar states that laws for the West Bank were written in the early 1950s.

  The master plan for Israel to take over the West Bank was formed by Yigal Alon when he was Minister of Labour in the early 1960s. The strategy was that controlling most of the West Bank would effectively push Israel’s border to Jordan. It gave Israel a security buffer against Jordan, Syria and Iraq. The Alon plan also meant Jordan and the West Bank could never form any political or military entity against Israel.

  Another result was the fragmentation of Palestinian towns, according to British journalist Jonathan Cook who has studied Israel’s methodology in Nazareth, where he lives. Cook’s view is that a neighbouring Jewish city of Upper Nazareth, built in the 1950s, was the prototype for Israel’s settlement movement. He told me that is where Israel first tested the model of encirclement, isolation and containment of Palestinian communities. Today, Upper Nazareth encircles the Palestinian community in Nazareth, leaving it unab
le to expand, while also isolating it from Palestinian villages nearby. This is similar to the way many Israeli settlements in the West Bank have encircled Palestinian villages.

  Under the Oslo Accords, the West Bank is divided into three areas: Area A, which is 18 per cent of the West Bank and is under the control of the Palestinian Authority; Area B, 21 per cent, is under civil control of the Palestinian Authority, and Israel retains control of security; Area C, 61 per cent, is totally under Israeli control. This is where all the settlements are. But even in Areas A and B, the Israeli Army can enter anytime and has complete authority if it claims there is a security issue. It enters parts of Areas A and B most nights.

  Oslo was intended to be an interim agreement of five years to allow both parties to move to a final agreement under which a Palestinian State could be formed. But Israel has entrenched its control over Area C.21 There were 110,000 settlers in the West Bank when Oslo was signed in 1993. Today there are 394,000. In a time of peace, the number of settlers has surged.

  ‘One of the things that killed Oslo was as a result of Oslo,’ Yehuda Shaul said. ‘The system of bypass roads that it led to.’ At Oslo the Israelis won the right to build bypass roads in the West Bank – they argued this was necessary for security. Before Oslo, many settlers would need to drive through Palestinian towns to get to and from their settlements. The US mediators should have realised that if Israel wanted to build a network of roads they were not thinking of leaving after five years. ‘It [Oslo] was fatal for the Palestinians,’ Israeli journalist Gideon Levy told me. ‘All the big settlements came after Oslo. If the Israelis did not evacuate one house in the settlements from Oslo it shows they had no intention.’

  The by-pass roads entrenched the settlements. After building these roads, Israel banned Palestinians from using many of them. Israel had used Oslo to make a Palestinian State more difficult.

  ‘It gives them absolute control over Palestinians’ movements,’ said Yehuda Shaul. ‘The way the dual infrastructure of roads and permits has been set up by Israel means less restrictions but absolute control. In 15 minutes, 300 army jeeps can shut down the West Bank’s entire road system. We have absolute control over what roads you can use and at any moment we can block them.’

  It also made access to the settlements from Israel easier, effectively turning them into commuter suburbs. Yehuda Shaul explained: ‘Because of that system, settlers could say, “When I drove out here I saw Palestinians and had to drive through Palestinian towns. Now I see modern highways, I see no Palestinians and I’m safe.”’ Crucially, settlements went from being a pioneering and messianic experience to a suburban, middle-class one.

  Israel’s largest-selling newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, reported in 2003: ‘When most of the Israeli public, and maybe most of the world too, think about the Jewish settlements in what used to be called “the territories”, they envision mainly a handful of wind-swept sheds and beat-up old trailers. But the current state of affairs is completely different. The Jewish population in the 1967 territories is already equal to half of the Palestinian population there, and it is in the midst of one of the largest demographic surges in the world.’22

  New York Times journalist Jodi Rudoren agreed. ‘One thing people are totally shocked by is how big and established the settlements are and who lives there,’ she told me. ‘You come and have this notion it’s bearded, gun-toting [people] and caravans and you go to Ariel or Maale Adumim or Efrat and it’s full of people who are mostly middle-class people. First of all, sometimes you meet non-ideological people and their view is “My government gave me tax breaks to move here and I moved here because I wanted a backyard and I didn’t mean to oppress anybody and by the way I do think it’s mine.”’

  Since Israel began its occupation it has provided financial incentives for Israelis to move to settlements. You get tax concessions, you get private security, you get good schools and hospitals, and most of all you get cheap housing. House and land packages are much cheaper when you don’t have to pay for the land part. This has been a major attraction – my Hebrew teacher could afford a much bigger apartment in Har Homa than he could in Jerusalem. Some people distinguish between economic and religious settlements, but in the end they amount to the same thing: ever more land for Israel.

  Some secular Israelis may be moving to the settlements, but other Israelis think the settler movement is not worth it: Israel takes so much punishment in the Western world because the settlements are always the running sore for the international community. Some in the centre or on the centre left of politics are contemptuous of the settlers. However, the majority of Israeli opinion now would be: ‘We’re there and it’s ours. The Palestinians should find somewhere else to live.’

  For Israel today, there are three main reasons why the settlements are important. The first is religious: the references to Judea and Samaria in the Bible. The second is security: having a large number of the hilltops looking east towards the Muslim and Arab world allows the best defence. And the third is economic: the Jordan Valley’s agriculture is lucrative and the settlements alleviate housing pressures in Israel. The dominant view is that if Israel can keep increasing the number of settlers in the West Bank, then eventually it can argue that there are more Israelis there than Palestinians so it’s logical to annex it – or at least Area C. This would leave Areas A and B for an independent, although tiny, Palestinian State.

  According to the Washington Post, 39 per cent of the land used for settlements is privately owned Palestinian land.23 There are 131 settlements, including three very large ones – Maale Adumim, Gush Etzion and Ariel. There are also 99 outposts – small communities that attach themselves to settlements but which even under Israeli law are illegal. Even the outposts have military protection, cameras, mailboxes, public transport and electricity. This is despite the fact that connecting electricity to an unauthorised location is illegal. Once they have electricity and water from the settlements, they begin lobbying to be made official. Israel’s human rights group Yesh Din researched how Israel retrospectively makes these outposts ‘authorised settlements’. They found: ‘Approximately a quarter of the 100 outposts that currently exist have been approved or are at various stages of the approval process … Simultaneously, the [Government of Israel] consistently denies the status of these outposts, established without official permission and in violation of Israeli (as well as international) law, as settlements.’24

  ‘The strategy with the outposts is to fill in the gaps between the settlements,’ former Israeli commander Yehuda Shaul told me. ‘The intention was that the settlements and outposts would duplicate themselves – that every settlement would break out of its borders and duplicate itself. Every Palestinian village in the West Bank is encircled. With Bethlehem, for example, on one side are the settlements of Nokdim and Tekoa, one side a military base and nature reserve. We’ve worked it all out. We’ve taken Bethlehem as a test case. This is a strategy of fragmentation.’

  In 2005, the Israeli Army commissioned a comprehensive database of Israel’s settlements to give legal ammunition to the State to defend any claims of loss of ownership by Palestinians. In 2009, when Defence Minister Ehud Barak received the report and saw the result, he decided that it should not be published because ‘publication could endanger state security or harm Israel’s foreign relations’.

  But someone leaked the report to Israeli newspaper Haaretz. It revealed that in about 75 per cent of settlements, construction – sometimes on a large scale – had been carried out without the appropriate permits or contrary to the permits that were issued. The database also showed that in more than 30 settlements extensive construction of buildings and infrastructure – roads, schools, synagogues, yeshivas and even police stations – had been carried out on private land belonging to Palestinians. Put simply, the settlement construction had been conducted illegally.25

  Sarit Michaeli from human rights group B’Tselem told me:

  Everything has been incremental but 50 years la
ter you have half a million Israelis living in an occupied area that’s not part of Israel’s sovereign territory – except East Jerusalem which was annexed, therefore Israel views it as its own – you have 120 so-called legal settlements and another 100 so-called illegal settlements that are all illegal under international law, you have two legal systems that apply to Israelis and Palestinians in parallel, you have Israeli democracy in tatters because of all the problems that stem from such a long-term occupation. Everything is legal because they found various legal excuses to justify it but of course it’s not legal. Clearly it’s a complete farce.

  The settlers have established deep roots in Israel’s political and military establishments: an estimated 12 per cent of the commanders of the IDF themselves live in settlements. Even Avigdor Lieberman lives in the illegal settlement of Nokdim: the only defence minister in the world who does not live inside his country’s borders. The task of the IDF in vacating settlers – including many of their own commanders – would be extraordinarily difficult.

  The New York Times’s Jodi Rudoren thinks that ‘among left-wing people or critics of settlements or the occupation there’s a view that undoing it would be simple. When people come here they realise it would not be simple.’

  According to Dror Etkes:

  If you applied the law tomorrow you would have to evict thousands of Israeli settlers. You have entire settlements which are constructed on private Palestinian property. What would you do with Ofra, with half of Beit El? You have thousands of families and tens of thousands of dunams of agricultural land which you would have to uproot. You would have to break roads in settlements which are passing through Palestinian property. The entire system in the West Bank is built on breach of law. Two neighbourhoods in the same settlement – in between them is a valley which used to be cultivated in the ’80s by Palestinians, then the settlement took over and there is a road which joins the two. How do you deal with that? There is no way a settlement could function if the law was applied.