Tag: Settlers

Israel begins new settlement, despite U.S. opposition

Ha’aretz

18 May 2009

Israel has begun constructing a new settlement in the northern West Bank for the first time in 26 years, Army Radio reported.

The move comes on the eve of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s first meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama, despite Western calls for Israel to halt its settlement activity.

Tenders have been issued for 20 housing units in the new Maskiot settlement and contractors have arrived on site to begin foundational work, the radio reported.

The initiative began three years ago, under the auspices of then defense minister Amir Peretz, who promised to transform a former army outpost into a permanent settlement for evacuees from the Gaza Strip. The move was then frozen due to American insistence.

The Jordan Valley Regional Council head, David Ahayeini, has insisted that the construction is being carried out completely legally.

“There is full consensus among Zionist parties that the Jordan Valley must remain under Israeli control within the framework of any diplomatic deal,” he said. “The Jordan Valley is needed for the sake of state security, and woe to the administration that strays from this path.”

The Peace Now movement called the move proof that “Netanyahu is not ready to commit to a two-state solution” and is striving to “prevent the creation of a Palestinian state.”

“The way to do that is to built settlements and make all of us – Arabs and Jews – live in one state,” said Peace Now chief Yariv Oppenheimer.

Palestinian farmers and internationals prevented from working their land by Israeli army

15th May 2009

On the morning of the 15th, a group of international and Israelis helped the al-Jabari family to clear their lands in readiness for planting a new crop.  The al-Jabari family’s land is located between the two illegal Israeli settlements of Kiryat Arba and Giv’at HaAvot in the Hebron district of the southern West Bank.  After just half an hour the Israeli army, police and border police arrived in large numbers and used force to remove the farmers and solidarity activists from the land.

At 9:45am on the 15th, 20 Palestinians went to the fields accompanied by six Israelis, and four international human rights observers to clear terraces of farmland belonging to the al-Jabari family.  The Israeli police were already guarding the “synagogue” when the farmers arrived.  After working the land for half an hour the army, the police and the border police moved up to the farmers and showed a “closed military zone” order and ordered everyone but the Palestinians to leave or be arrested. The owner of the land was initially allowed to stay.  Later, however, he was forcibly dragged off by the soldiers.

Between the two illegal settlements is an area of Palestinian owned farm land where vines and olives have been grown for generations.  The land has been falling into disuse because the families who own it are in fear of the increasingly violent intimidation by the police and settlers.  Recently the settlers, under the protection of the police, erected a large tent on the Palestinian farm land between the settlements.  The settlers provoked local Palestinian residents by calling the illegal tent a “synagogue” thereby engineering claims of anti-semitism against any attempt to remove it from the farm land.

Norwegian MP: If investment in occupation acceptable, we must revise ethics guidelines

Ma’an News Agency

15 May 2009

A Norwegian ethics committee is due to travel to Israel and the West Bank in two weeks to assess the investment of the world’s largest government pension fund, The Norwegian Government Pension Fund, in Africa Israel Investments.

In advance of that visit, a delegation of seven members of the Norwegian Socialist Left Party travelled to the West Bank and Gaza Strip this week to see for themselves the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, siege on Gaza and the destruction wrought following Israel’s war on the area last winter.

After under a week in the area Member of Parliament Ågot Valle, spokesperson on foreign affairs for the party, spoke out about Norwegian investment in the Africa Israel Investments company. “No doubt we as a party cannot support investment in a company that violates human rights, contributes to an occupation and war,” Valle said in a telephone interview.

The company, owned by Israel’s richest businessman, Lev Leviev, invests in settlements and owns construction companies involved in building both the separation wall and illegal settlements in the West Bank.

Valle’s party is encouraging the ethics committee to be thorough in its assessment, but added that if it finds investing in Africa Israel Investments ethical, “then the ethics guidelines must be re-written.”

The visit was, in part, to solidify the Socialist Left position over the ethics committee findings and over Norwegian investments in the Israeli company, but it was also a chance to “see for ourselves” the realities in the area.

Delegates who had never been to the area were “shocked” at the “strategically planned settlements,” checkpoints and 30-foot-high border wall snaking across the West Bank, as well as “some heavy destruction” in the Gaza Strip. The delegation, including three members of Parliament, was denied entry to the coastal area Tuesday without explanation. A second attempt was successful.

Following the tour, which will finish this week, MP Valle noted that the delegation could not help asking themselves, “After seeing the situation here; does Israel really want peace?”

Israeli forces kidnap 2 farmers in Qalqiliya region

11 May 2009

At 7 am Sunday morning, May 10, 2009, two farmers from Izbaht Tabib, Jaefar Tabib, 23, and Naem Tayayhe, 30, were arrested as they went out to work their land. They remain in custody.

In the evening of the same day, a bus with about 60 settlers, accompanied by the Israeli army, came to the area. They appeared to discuss the area while looking at maps. The farm land is vital for the farmers, and they suspect that the objective of the settlers’ visit may be a first step towards constructing a new settlement.

Izbaht Tabib, a small village established before 1948, has a population of 226 Palestinian refugees.

Despite the 2005 court decision to alter the route of the Wall which is already constructed between Izbaht Tabib and Azzun, the Apartheid Wall in the northern West Bank continues to be built. Fifty percent of Palestinian land has already been taken by the construction of the Wall in Azzoun. Azzoun is isolated by the Wall on the east side and the west side as well as road 55 in the south. Today, 60 % of Palestinians in this area are living below the poverty line since there are no jobs.

According to the mayor of the Azzoun Municipality, Mr. E. Iyad Khalaph, this is part of Israel’s ‘transfer’ tactic to impoverish residents so that they will leave their land on their own to make a living elsewhere.

Checkpoints are often set up around the village and soldiers in jeeps enter in the daytime and evenings, asking to see I.D.cards and questioning the local population. Additionally, Israeli settlers often enter the village and harrass Palestinian residents.

Several residents are also threatened with home demolition orders with no specific time line.

New West Bank roads jeopardizing chances for peace accord

Amos Harel | Ha’aretz

14 May 2009

Palestinian interest in the intentions of the new Israeli government tends to focus on one small area in the West Bank, Ma’aleh Adumim and its environs, particularly the area known as E1 linking the settlement to East Jerusalem.

Earlier this month Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayad participated in mass Friday prayers against land expropriation in the area, and the Palestinian media was full of reports of Israeli settlement plans in Ma’aleh Adumim and E1.

The concerns are not baseless. E1 is the only area that Benjamin Netanyahu explicitly committed to developing, on the eve of February’s elections. His political rival, Labor Party chairman Ehud Barak, also publicly expressed support for building there.

Plans for expanding the Israeli presence around Ma’aleh Adumim continued apace under the Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert governments, in the interest of creating contiguous Jewish settlement from East Jerusalem to Mitzpeh Yeriho, on the outskirts of Jericho. Visitors to the area in recent weeks can see that the gradual annexation is continuing, even if its goal is far from being reached.

Still, a significant hurdle lies around the corner: the firm, declared opposition of the United States government, opposition that is likely to be expressed during Netanyahu’s meeting with President Barack Obama in Washington next week.

One of the main developments in the area is at Kedar, a small settlement of 80 families, south of Ma’aleh Adumim, that is at the center of a prolonged legal battle. The security establishment, under Sharon’s inspiration, designed the route of the separation fence so that 8,000 dunams (2,000 acres), including Kedar, would be on the Israeli side of the barrier. The route would have expropriated lands from the Palestinian village of Sawahra and forced the evacuation of hundreds of Bedouin living between Kedar and Ma’aleh Adumim.

After residents of Sawahra petitioned the High Court of Justice on the matter, The Council for Peace and Security drafted a new plan that placed Kedar on the Palestinian side of the fence. After a two-year delay, the defense establishment presented yet a third plan, this one expropriating 4,000 dunams but including Kedar on the Israeli side of the barrier.

In early June the High Court held a hearing on the petition against the new plan. Meanwhile, an Interior Ministry-appointed committee recommended uniting Kedar and Ma’aleh Adumim into a single community, a step that would facilitate authorization of the new route.

GOC Southern Command Gadi Shamni has issued orders to pave an additional road passing south of the fence’s route in Kedar, linking the Bethlehem area with Mitzpeh Yeriho. The cost of the project is estimated at hundreds of millions of shekels.

In E1, as Haaretz reported in February, infrastructure plans were completed last year for the construction of a new neighborhood, to be called Mevasseret Adumim. Construction of settlements and outposts has also continued, particularly in the northeastern part of the Ma’aleh Adumim bloc, in the settlement of Kfar Adumim and the satellites that have sprung up around it.

All of these developments share a single common denominator – by taking “a dunam here and a dunam there,” they are tightening Israel’s grip on the land. The new roads and junctions were designed to allow a separation between Israelis and Palestinians. In tandem to roads built for Israeli use, Palestinians coming from Ramallah will travel via Hizmeh and the al-Zaim Junction south toward Bethlehem, or east toward Jericho via a bypass road near Kedar.

These steps seriously diminish the already narrow possibility of reaching a final-status agreement with the Palestinians. Over the past decade Palestinian officials have hinted that they could come to terms with Ma’aleh Adumim, but that willingness is unlikely to extend to the giant “bubble” developing around the settlement.

Colonel (Res.) Shaul Arieli of the Council for Peace and Security, one of the framers of the Geneva Initiative, says that Israel’s actions can be explained in one of two ways – as the deliberate sabotage of a future final-status agreement, or as the wanton waste of taxpayer money.