Like thieves in the night: Stealing Palestinian land

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

http://972mag.com/like-thieves-in-the-night-stealing-palestinian-land/80098/

The Israeli government wants to prolong its long-term thievery, based on a particularly dirty trick. A few words on the uneven ground upon which the settlement of Beit El rests.

Why am I boring with paperwork from 1979, a time so unenlightened its favorite music was disco? Ah: because it shows us how the system of theft works in the West Bank. Shasha was basically ordering the confiscation of private, registered land, ostensibly for security reasons and in actual fact for the purpose of building a settlement (his document also demands that the head of the local yeshiva – a religious school – will be cautioned that “any further attempts at unpermitted deviations,” such a lovely term, will be “punished with all severity”), all the while hiding the fact from the residents. By doing so, Shasha deprived them of their right to protect themselves from the order by appealing to the High Court of Justice.

Such an act, the High Court ruled back in 2005, is reserved for totalitarian states: “Secret legislation, kept in hidden archives, is one of the signs of a totalitarian regime and contradicts the rule of law.” Now we expect the court to follow its own ruling

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While the army made no use of the land, settlers invaded it in 2010, and began illegal construction on it. It was illegal enough to cause the Civil Administration to issue demolition orders to those structures that same year – orders which were never enforced since the rule of law is important, but the settlers’ political lobby is more important. Our petition demands that, since the army has made no use of Qassem’s land for the past 34 years, it is time to return it to its owners – before the government pulls a fast one and “retroactively validates” the illegal construction on the site, which is part of the slippery deal Prime Minister Netanyahu offered after the evacuation of the Ulpana Hill. The land must be returned to its owners both because no legal use was made of it, because so much time has passed since it was confiscated for alleged military use, and because the procedure used to seize it – Shasha’s order – was completely invalid.

[Loudly]

1. Weren't these people nomadic and quite without any system of land ownership before Jews came back?

[Scootaloo]

2. Nope.

Well, the Bedouin were, but otherwise no,

[oberliner]

3. Legit petition

In fact, the totality of that settlement of Beit El ought to be dismantled.

Peace Now has been drawing attention to this since at least 2006.

From Wikipedia:

According to Peace Now, private Palestinian property makes up 96.85% of the land that Beit El, along with its outposts

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beit_El

[gopiscrap]

4. Fucking Israel and we enable that