Israel Demolishes Illegal Structures in Post-1967 Areas, But Not the Ones You Think
By J.J. Goldberg
Pressure continues to mount on Israel to honor its commitments on West Bank settlement construction by dismantling illegally-built structures and halting new ones. It’s not going smoothly.
The latest critic to pile on the Jewish state is Dorit Beinisch, chief justice of Israel’s Supreme Court. Beinisch ripped into the Israeli Defense Ministry during an October 28 hearing for repeatedly failing to carry out existing demolition orders and offering a shifting array of excuses. The court was hearing initial arguments in a suit filed by human rights groups over nine homes built in Ofra, a settlement near Ramallah, on privately-owned Palestinian property.
According to a Ynet report on the hearing, government representatives acknowledged that the homes were built illegally on private Palestinian property and are under court order for demolition. The government representatives told the justices that the decision to delay carrying out court orders had been made by Defense Minister Ehud Barak, because of the delicacy of the timing. Barak, alert readers will recall, is the embattled Labor Party leader who brought his party into the Netanyahu coalition, over the objections of most of his Knesset caucus, in order to protect the peace process.
“The court is aware, I’m sure, of the ongoing political process,” Barak’s adviser on settlement affairs, Eitan Broshi, told the justices, according to Ynet. “The defense minister has been wracking his brain with this question and we ask the court’s understanding on the matter.”
Beinisch’s reply: “You say ‘priorities,’ but there is no implementation of priorities. Illegality is being ignored. Ofra isn’t the first instance. There are so many cases up in the air. The impression is that you changed your position about your willingness to demolish.”
Associate Justice Ayala Procaccia added her own criticism of the government’s inaction, saying that “When there are allegations of stolen land, that has to be at the top of the list.”
Happily, the Forward can report that Israel is not entirely ignoring illegal construction in the areas captured in 1967. This week alone authorities demolished at least six illegal structures, a record five of them on a single day, October 27. It must be said that the added alacrity shown in this week’s demolitions might be connected to the fact that they involved Arab homes in traditionally Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. The homes were demolished because they had been built “without proper construction permits,” in the words of municipal officials quoted in the Jerusalem Post.
The demolitions are part of a growing trend that could threaten the stability not only of Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, but of Jewish homes in West Jerusalem and throughout Israel, as we’ll explain after the jump.
The sixth demolition took place the following day and involved a protest tent put up by Nasser Ghawi and his family across the street from their former home in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem. The Ghawis and a neighboring family, the Hanouns, had been evicted August 2 after Israeli courts upheld a claim by Jewish families that they owned the surrounding property before the city was divided in 1948. Two Jewish groups, the Sephardic Community Committee and Nahalat Shimon International, have been fighting in courts for years to reclaim pre-1948 properties in East Jerusalem, and Jewish and Arab advocates alike are predicting more evictions in the months ahead.
The growing pace of Arab home demolitions and evictions in East Jerusalem has become a source of serious new U.S.-Israeli tension, including an unusual State Department diplomatic rebuke to Israel’s ambassador and a public protest by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the worst is still ahead, according to the Murdoch-owned Sky News.
More worrying, some Israelis are warning (here and here, for example) that successful Jewish efforts to reclaim East Jerusalem property lost in 1948 are setting a dangerous precedent that could open the door to thousands of claims by Arab families to property they lost in 1948 in West Jerusalem and perhaps the rest of Israel.
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One wants to cry -- for sanity, for justice, for...
This terrorist acts by the Zionist regime show that Judaism is a very by nature and from its inception a very evil religion. The Zionist philosophy is in many ways identical to Nazism. The German Nazis believed that they were a superior race and had a god given right to dominate the world. They kept innocent people in ghettos and murdered millions of people in the name of those god-given rights.
Jews are not any different. The Torah is in fact the most evil and disgusting book that has ever been written. It is all about murder and genocide against non-Jews. The most horrible mass murders in history have to be Moses, Joshua, Saul, David, Salomon, Hitler and Pol-Pot.
The Zionists are acting exactly like the Nazi regime under Hitler. You put innocent people in a vast concentration camp in Gaza, you kill and starve children and women in the name of God, you steal, you lie, you murder in the name of God. Your god is not my God. You are evil and your god is evil. You are just bad people.
John Rogers, my friend, Violence of War, how do national policies do it? How do Leaders of Nations do it?? You see the hate, of war, and what it has done to many on both sides.
How do they transform these evils idealistic that one nation is better in the sight of G-D of All Mankind? Yet it is happening to innocent children, young and old. Every nation under the sun has done it! Turned innocent hearts into killers, for love they say of country or love of god, the god that mankind has created for them selves. The work of their hands that creature of their making not the G-D of Creation.
Nations turn, from those who love into those who hate. Take care my friend John Rogers, that the hate that is doing this, does not take your heart. Hate in this war is so powerful, it hate others enough to want them all to cease to exist, to exterminate them, to eliminate them and their very memory form the face of the earth forever! Hate is stronger, than any thing that kills in war, hate can kill both sides.
Their have been good seeking people that war has taken, and turned them into a person that can act out their thoughts and never take responsibility for they see evil and think it is in all. They become perplexed.
War trys to create an image of hated members of what they declared were inferior race or do not belong on their land ---THE ENENY--- IS --HATE--- please, my friends, dont let it take you down. Read scripture, and understanding will come to you why.
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