The following article is extracted from the
July-August 1997
issue of
THE OTHER ISRAEL
Facts on the ground
In closed meetings with foreign diplomats, Netanyahu would claim that he had
been forced to start Har Homa only by pressure from the right wing in his
coalition, and ask the listener's indulgence for continuing with the project,
since its stoppage would lose his government its parliamentary majority. In
speaking to his own followers the Prime Minister would, on the contrary, use the
most crude nationalist rhetoric to boast that Har Homa was his own idea to start
with, and that he was determined to follow it through. Whatever the truth, it
soon became clear that Har Homa/Jebl Abu Ghneim was but a symbol representing a
far more widespread issue -- the extension of settlements, and its use as an
instrument of policy.
In the beginning of June, Netanyahu semi-officially announced his plans for
the definite solution: several Palestinian enclaves, cut off from each other and
from the outside world, and altogether comprising not more than forty percent of
the West Bank. This was dubbed "The Alon Plus Plan", in reference to the plan
formulated in the late sixties by then Labor Minister Yigal Alon and serving for
many years as part of the Labor Party program. The publication was apparently
timed to appeal to Labor hawks and clip the wings of newly-elected Labor Leader
Ehud Barak. Actually, the original Alon Plan -- which King Hussein, rejected as
"totally unacceptable" -- offered to the Arabs more than the Netanyahu version.
Alon did want to annex big parts of the West Bank to Israel, but the remainder
was at least to stay one continuous whole, not cut up into small pieces as
Netanyahu would have it.
In preparation for his "Alon Plus," it made sense for Netanyahu to authorize
and encourage the settlers to grab as much land as they could. For their part,
the settlers did not need much encouragement and were quite willing to grab even
beyond the lines drawn on Netanyahu's map.
From nearly every Palestinian town or village, a settlement is visible --
sometimes more than one. Roughly concurrently with Har Homa, bulldozers appeared
at the edges of many of these, starting new construction on land which
Palestinian peasants have considered theirs from time immemorial -- but which,
they discovered in many cases, have been declared by the government to be "state
lands" and assigned to be part of "the municipal area" of the nearest
settlement. (In one case, at the settlement of Yitzhar near Nablus, a settler
incursion into Palestinian land was shown to be illegal even under the military
government's weighted legal system, and the army used force to evict the
settlers -- but heavy pressure by the hardline ministers soon forced a reversal,
with the settlers being allowed back to the contested spot and the army ordered
to grant them military protection.)
The Palestinian population was not entirely helpless in face of this
onslaught. In numerous places they banded together to defend their land and
stake a clear claim to threatened plots, by every means in which ownership to
land could be made manifest: erecting fences, planting trees, building houses...
in one case, the municipality of Han Yuneis in the Gaza Strip sent municipal
workers to erect bathing installations on a length of sea shore claimed by
settlers.
For their part, the settlers also staked a claim to the same pieces of land,
leading to numerous clashes and confrontations of which only a minor part got
any serious media attention. (When settlers in the Gaza Strip erected a
"Monument to a Fallen Soldier" on land acknowledged by the Oslo Agreement to be
Palestinian, serious week-long riots and confrontations broke out. At the end,
the military authorities for once admitted that the Palestinians had been in the
right and removed the monument, to the settlers' chagrin; this came too late for
two Palestinian teenagers who had already been shot dead by the soldiers.)
In places where the settlers and their supporters in the government are
unable to either confiscate land outright or to declare it "government land",
they need to purchase Palestinian land -- a method used especially by the
settler associations penetrating into the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem. Since
in the Palestinian society selling land to settlers is considered treason, such
sales are conducted in great secrecy, through middlemen and brokers, in the
twilight zone of fraud and forgery.
Immediately after work at Har Homa began, a settler group established
themselves at five houses in East Jerusalem's Silwan Village, in one blow
doubling their foothold in this strategic area just outside the Old City walls.
With regard to a sixth Silwan house, the Palestinian owners were able to produce
documents proving to an an Israeli court that the "sale" of their house to the
settlers had been fraudulent. Shortly afterwards, a senior Armenian clergyman
who had resided many years in East Jerusalem sold to another group of settlers
his extensive house at Jerusalem's Mount Scopus -- and immediately left the
country.
Both at Silwan and at Mount Scopus, the new settler acquisitions were
immediately surrounded with barbed wire; guards from a private security company
(reportedly paid for by government money) were permanently posted around the
perimeter; and the entry of Palestinians into the newly-made enclaves
prohibited. In the case of Mount Scopus, this process was documented in detail
by TV cameras, with a jubilant settler pointing to neighboring Palestinian
houses and exclaiming "God is with us, everything will soon be ours!"
This challenge, broadcast in the prime-time TV news and repeated on the
Israeli TV Arabic-language program, sent shockwaves through the Palestinian
society. On the following week, the Palestinian Legislative Council convened in
Ramallah, having at the top of its agenda a bill setting the death penalty for
any Palestinian selling real estate to non-Palestinians.
Even before the bill was voted on, three Palestinian real estate brokers, known
to have worked with the settler associations, were kidnapped from their homes
and assassinated. Netanyahu accused the Palestinian police in Ramallah of being
behind the killings; the Palestinian Authority hotly denied the allegations.
Among the Palestinians, there appeared a clear support for these killings,
right across the political spectrum, with even known moderates stating that the
sale of Palestinian land to settlers was an act of the utmost treason. The
Palestinian Minister of Justice, Freih Abu Medein, put it simply: "These are not
ordinary real estate deals. Israel regards any piece of land which was bought by
a private Israeli as passing forever into Israeli political sovereignty. We have
the right to protect ourselves against this."
This Palestinian position was unpalatable to large parts of the Israeli and
Western public opinion, putting the peace camp on the defense. The Labor-Meretz
affiliated Peace Now Movement felt obliged to publicly condemn the killing of
the land brokers, as did several opposition Knesset Members. Moreover, the case
happened to coincide with a corruption scandal, involving large sums of money,
being revealed by the Palestinian Authority's comptroller; and to top it all,
the Palestinian Police created another scandal by arresting for several days the
independent, outspoken journalist Daud Kutab -- a man with an impeccable record
in the struggle against the Israeli occupation, well known in the international
media, and an American citizen to boot.
The Editors
THE OTHER ISRAEL
is the newsletter of the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace
P.O.Box 2542
58125 Holon
Israel.
Phone/Fax: (03) 5565804
Editor: Adam Keller
Coeditor: Beate Zilversmidt
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