As illegal settler outposts in the West Bank continue to circumvent law and only expand, Palestinian homes that have been around for decades longer are demolished over and over again.
Carmel settlement seen behind Umm el Kheir demolition (Photo: Operation Dove)
This week, national-religious MK Zevulun Orlev (Habayit Hayehudi) was interviewed on an Israeli news show called London & Kirschenbaum about his proposal for a bill to legalize illegal settler outposts in the West Bank (yes, you read correctly – to make legal what is illegal). The private bill, which has been tabled due to the Prime Minister’s objection, would bar the state from demolishing and evacuating settler outposts in the West Bank that have been around for four years and have at least twenty families living in them.
One such outpost is Migron, which has been the center of controversy in the news in recent days as the government has once again demonstrated its pro-settler agenda. The Supreme Court has ruled the outpost must be demolished by March 2012, but Prime Minister Netanyahu has circumvented the decision by reaching an agreement with the settlers to move their illegal outpost two kilometers over and turn where they live now into a farm. Peace Now has an informative report on the Migron situation which can be found here.
So getting back to MK Orlev: In his interview, he defended the bill with the argument that (paraphrasing from the Hebrew): families who moved to the West Bank in good will and with government support cannot be evacuated from their homes because no civilized country in the world has a policy of house demolitions.
MK Orlev must therefore be unaware of his government’s deep-rooted policy of home demolitions, including the 200 house demolitions that took place in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 2011 alone, as well as the demolitions that took place on Wednesday in Umm al Kheir, and the day before that, in Anata.
The Bedouin village of Umm al Kheir in Area C in the Southern West Bank has been suffering from repeated demolitions in recent months. The state claims that the Palestinians who bought the land as refugees following the war in 1948 do not have the rights to the land, even though they have been living there since the 1950s. In reality, the settlement of Carmel established in the 1980s is the reason for the demolition. Without moving these Palestinians out, the settlement cannot expand.
(Photo: Guy Hircefeld, Ta'ayush)
An Israeli soldier can be seen smiling at the wreckage:
(Photo: Guy Hircefeld, Ta'ayush)
(Photo: Guy Hircefeld, Ta'ayush)
Aftermath (Photo: Guy Hircefeld, Ta'ayush)
January 27, 2012
8:18 am
Zevulun Orlev’s “no civilized country in the world has a policy of house demolitions” echoes Netanyahu’s outcry that “killing childeren is crossing a red line”. I fully agree, as with Orlev, if it applies to all houses and all children.
These articles don’t just give Israel a bad name, it makes one sick reading them. There must be some masochism in supporting a website that ruins the day time after time.
January 27, 2012
8:52 am
I suggest to Mairav, this news can be seen optimistically. What we have here is a stone cold Zionist admitting to guidelines that are universal human rights. Now it is only a matter of time before such people are forced to realize that everyone within any one political border has the same rights; regardless of their ethnicity, religion, or culture, and we have a future supporter of a one state Palestine; and in time another country enters the brotherhood is man.
January 27, 2012
8:57 am
In the minds of people like Orlev, non-Jews aren’t people, and the places they live aren’t homes.
January 27, 2012
9:03 am
“No civilized country demolishes homes..” unless those homes belong to Palestinians. For Palestinians are officially defined by those such as Orlev as ‘non-people’ without rights that Israeli Jews are bound to accept. There is no cause for optimism. This is merely one more ‘redefinition’ promulgated by Zionists who believe that every action they take is somehow God-approved as ‘good for the Jews’ without regard to anyone not Jewish, or sufficiently ‘Jewish’ to the powers-that-be.
January 27, 2012
2:50 pm
It reminds me a book on early Middle Ages in Europe when the nobility was treating the religion with utmost seriousness, believing every word in the Bible (that was read to them if they were not literate). However, nobody could conceive that the passage that God created all people equal, as sons of Adam and Eve, refers also to peasants.
[Several hundred years later some peasants got that notion and this heresy was eradicated. Anabaptists were slaughtered by both Catholic and Lutheran princes. Some survived in Palatinate.]
There are some dots that a pius patriotic person never connects.
January 27, 2012
5:00 pm
The penultimate photograph of the soldier gripping the elderly man’s shoulders hit me like a jolt in the guts. I know this man. I have spoken to him often over the course of several visits to Umm al-Khair; he is the first one of the villagers I ever met. He is sixty-two years old, born in Umm al-Khair in the aftermath of the community’s displacement from the Negev. There are two qualities that always stand out for me when I see him. The first is his gentleness, and the second is his self-possession.
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This is the same man who once pointed to the settlement of Karmel and told me and the group I was with, “We should share. We are brothers of Abraham. They are our brothers too.” That was not two weeks after Karmel settlers had physically assaulted international peace activists from Operation Dove and seized their video camera. Not one night after children from the settlement had been hurling stones and rubbish at the huts the community lives in. The harassment does not let up for this community, it is constant – they weren’t even allowed to have proper washrooms completed (funded by an NGO) because settlers complained. Standing in that village and looking at houses with full plumbing and mains electricity, I always wonder how any human beings can be content to inflict this condition on their neighbours. And how the neighbours can remain possessed of such grace and kindness in spite of the staggering injustice that they are subjected to by state-supported thieves.
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This community elder usually has his scarf (plain white) folded neatly over his head. He is always the picture of calmness. To see him stripped of his self-possession and dignity like this is pretty harrowing. I am not in Palestine in the moment, but on the off-chance that any activists are reading this who might be going to Umm al-Khair soon, could you track down Aziz and tell him that I’m following the community’s news from England and that they are always in my prayers? Thank you.
January 28, 2012
12:13 am
Vicky,
You do not write to keep battles going. You write as a real witness. I have no doubt that several people are better off, directly, by your presence. I thank you for this comment, for you know more in some ways than most of us here (I suspect).
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I urge others to read her web site, just click on her name. She is a real budding writer.
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Most States exclude some of personhood. Israel is not unique in this. Perhaps we should be strangely gratful that such mouths as Orlev’s exist, as they unconceal part of what humans can be.
January 28, 2012
4:44 am
I was in Anata yesterday afternoon. In one tent there were 22 members of the same family, without toilet facilities, electricity, water.
Most of them were children: I have never seen something like that in all my life
January 28, 2012
7:52 am
And still nothing about this in the news.