Tag: Bil’in

By Dan Izenberg

To view original article, published by the Jerusalem Post on the 4th August, click here

In one of the most bitter clashes in memory between the High Court of Justice and a representative of the State Attorney’s Office, Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch on Sunday accused the state of violating a ruling handed down 11 months ago regarding the route of the West Bank security barrier between the Palestinian village of Bil’in and the urban settlement of Modi’in Illit.

The conflict came during a hearing over a motion for contempt of court filed by attorney Michael Sfard on behalf of Bil’in residents after the state failed to find an alternative route to the one rejected by the High Court on September 4, 2007. A few days after Sfard filed the contempt of court petition, the state presented a proposal for a new route. Sfard fired back that the new route ignored all of the guidelines the court had given the state in its September ruling.

Attorney Avi Licht, representing the state, disagreed with Sfard. All three justices – Beinisch, Supreme Court Deputy President Eliezer Rivlin and Ayala Procaccia – disagreed with Licht.

In its September 4, 2007, ruling, the court criticized two elements of the barrier route between Bil’in and Modi’in Illit. In the northern part of the segment, the original barrier route had left all of Wadi Dolev, a fertile area of hundreds of dunams owned and farmed by Bil’in villagers, on the Israeli side. At the same time, the southern part of the original barrier route was designed to protect Phase 2 of a new housing development project called Matityahu East, even though the land earmarked for Phase 2 was empty and there were no detailed plans for its development.

The court ordered the state to move the barrier to include as much of Wadi Dolev as possible on the Palestinian side and said the route should not be built on Palestinian-owned land. Regarding the southern segment of the barrier, the court ordered the state to move it so that Phase 2 of Matityahu East would be on the Palestinian side.

According to a new proposal presented by the state to the court on Sunday, the northern segment of the barrier was shifted so that some of the Wadi Dolev land would be on the Palestinian side. However, the route of the barrier continued to be on privately-owned Palestinian land. Meanwhile, the state did not shift the southern segment of the barrier at all, so that all of Phase 2 of Matityahu East remained on the Israeli side despite the court’s instructions.

Licht said the state could not follow the court’s guidelines regarding the southern segment because that would mean that the barrier would be situated only a few meters away from the houses of Phase 1 of Matityahu East and this was too great a security risk. He argued that the state had adhered to the court’s order not to take Phase 2 of Matityahu East into account in determining the new route but that the result had been the same – all of Phase 2 remained on the Israeli side of the barrier. The difference was that this time, the route had been determined to protect the existing Jewish residents of Phase 1 and not the future Jewish residents of Phase 2.

Beinisch ruled that the state had indeed violated the court’s ruling from September. She said that if the state had concluded that it could not obey the ruling because of security concerns for the residents of Phase 1 of Matityahu East, it should have come back to the court and told it so, instead of claiming that the alternative route was in keeping with its allegedly reasonable interpretation of the court ruling, which, she repeatedly insisted, was not reasonable.

Toward the end of the heated discussion, Licht informed the court that the state had come up with an alternative barrier route that would provide security for Phase 1 of Matityahu East and still leave some of Phase 2 on the Palestinian side of the barrier.

Beinisch gave the state 45 days to present its new proposal. She gave Sfard three weeks to respond to the proposal after it is presented to the court. Beinisch added that the court would hand down a ruling on whether to penalize the state for contempt of court at the end of the hearing on the alternative route.

By Dan Izenberg

To view original article, published by the Jerusalem Post on the 3rd August, click here

The High Court of Justice is due on Sunday to hear a petition filed recently by residents of the Palestinian village of Bil’in charging that the government and the army are in contempt of court for failing to reroute the barrier separating the village from Modi’in Illit in keeping with a High Court ruling from September 2007.

Several days after the contempt of court petition was submitted to the court, the state submitted a proposal for the new barrier route.

But in another brief filed immediately afterward, the petitioners, represented by attorney Michael Sfard, charged that the state’s proposal completely disregarded the guidelines of the High Court ruling regarding the route of the new barrier.

“The route proposed by the state is a brazen one that deliberately and grossly violates the ruling and doesn’t try to fulfill even one of the guidelines that the court set down,” Sfard said. “We do not know from where the state drew the strength to treat a High Court decision as if it were worthless dust. The state’s decision makes a laughing stock of the ruling, apparently based on the belief that the court will not extend its help to the farmers of Bil’in a second time and will not reject the route a second time.”

During the debate on the original route, Sfard and the villagers said the barrier route took into account the future expansion of Matityahu East, a new neighborhood planned for Modi’in Illit. The barrier was designed to follow the boundaries of the outline plan for the development of the new neighborhood, even though the neighborhood had not yet been built. However, by the time the matter came to court, some residential buildings had been constructed in the western part of the neighborhood. There was no detailed outline plan for the eastern part of Matityahu East and the government had no intention of building there in the near future.

Officially, the land of Matityahu East belongs to the state – though the villagers maintain it is theirs – while the land east of the Matityahu East boundary belongs to Bil’in villagers. According to the ruling handed down by Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch, Deputy Supreme Court President Eliezer Rivlin and Justice Ayala Procaccia on September 4, 2007, “The state and the West Bank military commander must reconsider, in a reasonable amount of time, an alternative to the route of the separation barrier on the lands of Bil’in that will cause less injury to the villagers and leaves the cultivated lands as much as possible on the eastern side of the barrier. In this context, the respondents should consider an alternative whereby the built-up part of Matityahu East will be on the west [i.e. “Israeli”] side of the barrier, while the agricultural areas in Wadi Dolev and the areas designated for the second stage of Matityahu East will remain on the east [i.e. West Bank] side of fence.”

Nine months after that decision, the state has proposed a route that seizes private Palestinian land in the cultivated part of Wadi Dolan, then loops south and east to link back up with the original barrier route rejected by the High Court. The loop in the route returns about 350 dunams (35 hectares) of agricultural land to the villagers. Contrary to the court ruling, however, all of the unplanned part of Matityahu East remains west of the barrier in “Israeli” territory and the barrier, instead of running through state-owned land, continues to run through private Palestinian land.

To view original article, published by Maan on the 1st August, click here

Dozens of residents and a Palestinian journalist suffered breathing problems after inhaling tear gas fired on them by Israeli soldiers during a peaceful protest in the village of Bil’in on Friday afternoon.

Photos courtesy of Activestills

The protest is a weekly event against the construction of the separation wall which cuts the village off from its ancestral land.

After Friday noon prayers, Bil’in residents took to the streets alongside international and Israeli peace activists, carrying Palestinian flags and banners denouncing Israeli policies such as construction of the wall, land confiscation, settlement building, road closures, the siege of Palestinian cities, and the killing of civilians, especially children. Other slogans condemned shooting detainees while they were hand-cuffed and blind-folded, as Israeli forces were recently filmed doing in the nearby village of Nil’in.

Demonstrators chanted slogans calling for national unity as they made their way to the wall in an attempt to cross into the village lands. The group carried with them a picture of Ahmad Husam Musa, a boy who was killed by the Israeli army in the village of Ni’lin on Tuesday while participating in a demonstration.

Israeli soldiers attacked the demonstration, firing tear gas bombs and rubber-coated metal bullets on the crowd. Dozens were treated for tear gas inhalation, including Imad Burnat, a Palestinian journalist.

On Wednesday, a group of Italians visited the wall in the village and listened to a detailed presentation on the wall and its deleterious affects on the village by the Popular Committee Against the Wall. The Italian group tried to access the village lands behind the wall, but Israeli soldiers prevented them from doing so. The delegation headed to Ni’lin, a village northeast of Bil’in, where they hoped to extend condolences to the family of the child killed Tuesday. Israeli soldiers, however, prevented them from entering the village.

The Popular Committee Against the Wall in Bil’in denounced the violent Israeli attacks on the demonstrators.

On 4 September 2007, the Supreme Court ordered the Israeli authorities to redraw the path of the wall because the current route was deemed “highly prejudicial” to the villagers of Bil’in. In July a new route for the wall was submitted to Israeli authorities. The new plan will return some of the agricultural area that has been destroyed by the construction process, but the new route will cut into a second agricultural sector. According to the group’s lawyer, the new route will actually take more land away from the town than the original.

The town has objected to the plan and is awaiting a court hearing scheduled for 4 August.

A Palestinian village sues two Montreal-based companies over the construction of a West Bank settlement

By Jesse Rosenfeld

To view the original article published by The Montreal Mirror click here

Accused of war crimes for their involvement with Israeli settlement expansion, two Quebec-registered companies are being sued in Canada by the occupied West Bank Palestinian village of Bi’lin.

Toronto lawyer Mark Arnold filed a claim in Quebec Superior Court on behalf of the village against Green Park and Green Mount International three weeks ago. The case is part of a combined Palestinian, Canadian and Israeli effort to halt expansion of the Modi’in Illit settlement.

The sister construction companies are being charged with violating both Canadian and international law, while also acting as agents of the Israeli state due to their construction of residences in Mattityahu East, a hilltop adjacent Modi’in Illit’s main settlement block. Calling the case unprecedented, Arnold cites the Fourth Geneva Convention and Canada’s Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act.

“They are Canadian companies and subject to Canadian and international law,” he says, contending Green Park International and Green Mount International are aiding the transfer of settlers to an occupied territory, resulting in a war crime and violating both these acts and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

Although officially based in Montreal, there is little information about the two companies, which also have offices in Panama City. Their Montreal office is a commercial photo studio and Arnold believes their official director is only a name on paper.

Tracing ownership

Quebec government records say Green Park and Green Mount are controlled by Lexinter Management, whose majority shareholder, F.T.S. Worldwide Corp, is a Panama-based company historically involved in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s diamond trade.

However, according to a spokesperson from Green Park and Green Mount’s business partners Danya Cebus construction company, the two companies are owned by wealthy American businessman Shaya Boymelgreen. Danya Cebus received a subcontract for the Mattityahu East project in 2004 and the spokesperson says the two companies are part of Boymelgreen’s business conglomerate.

“Green Park and Green Mount—as part of the Boymelgreen group—subcontracted to Danya Cebus, with the [Israeli] government’s approval in awarding contracts,” says a Danya Cebus spokesperson. “Boymelgreen was the group that won the contract and Danya Cebus is acting as the subcontractor.”

A subsidiary of Africa Israel Investments LTD, Danya Cebus is owned by Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev. Leviev’s relationship with UNICEF was severed in June over the involvement of Danya Cebus in West Bank settlement construction.

The village is seeking a permanent injunction against Green Park and Green Mount construction at Modi’in Illit and $2-million in punitive damages. Bi’lin is also demanding that the company restore the land to its pre-construction state while also footing the bill for it.

“We want to show that people who come and profit from Palestinian suffering will lose,” says village council secretary Mohammed Khatib. He adds that Bi’lin is fighting to retrieve its land, not win monetary settlement for it.

Khatib says Modi’in Illit sits on lands belonging to Bi’lin, and Mattityahu East—sitting atop land confiscated by Israel’s Separation Wall—is the closest part of the settlement to the village residences. The villagers have been waging both a popular and legal struggle against the wall and expanding settlement for three years, winning an Israeli High Court decision in November 2007 ordering the Wall’s rerouting.

Nonetheless, it has yet to be moved and an Israeli military alternate route proposed on July 10 has been roundly rejected by the village. The newly proposed route will maintain most of the confiscated farmland, including Mattityahu East.

The politics of confiscation

Khatib contends that legally targeting the companies in Canada is essential because the issues are being ignored by the Israeli courts. “The legal system in Israel is not giving us the minimum of our right,” he says. “The settlement and the wall will turn Bi’lin into an enclave surrounded on three sides by the wall and settlement.”

The Israeli lawyer representing Bi’lin, Michael Sfard, sees the Canadian case as an important warning sign to the building sector about the consequences for involvement in Israeli settlement construction. “The impact is huge,” he says. “Foreign and Israeli corporations abroad should beware and think twice about embarking on settlement projects.”

Sfard argues that this claim was not originally taken to the Israeli courts because the Israeli courts have a precedent for referring to land confiscations for settlement expansion as a political issue and refusing to deal with them. If the case is successful for Bi’lin, Sfard intends to bring the ruling to the Israeli courts, asking the Israeli judiciary to enforce the Canadian court’s ruling against Green Park and Green Mount.

Neither Green Park, Green Mount nor Boymelgreen responded to requests for comment.

Jesse Rosenfeld is a freelance journalist based in Ramallah.