The Alarming Israeli Public Apathy Regarding Palestinian Construction in Area C - by Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen

While Israeli Jews continue to move into urban centers, the Palestinians have been assuming sovereignty in the open lands and leaving the Jews with personal sovereignty solely in their areas of residence. This trend is not restricted to the West Bank. It is also occurring in the Negev, the Galilee, and the Jezreel Valley, where Jews are moving into high-rise buildings while non-Jews are taking control of the open spaces. A contributing factor to this dangerous trend is the complete lack of interest in the subject displayed by most of the Israeli public.

Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen..
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,274..
02 September '19..
Link: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/israeli-apathy-palestinian-construction-area-c/

Over the past decade, 28,650 illegal Arab structures have been built in Area C. Hundreds of kilometers of roads have been laid, and hundreds of thousands of agricultural dunams have been taken over in land that has never belonged to a Palestinian.

This invasion is being implemented with the involvement and guidance of the EU and with major financial support from abroad.

Meanwhile, PM Netanyahu has introduced a plan to build 700 housing units for Palestinians in Area C along with 6,000 housing units for Jews in the West Bank. Despite criticism from settler leadership, cabinet ministers, including Rafi Peretz and Bezalel Smotrich, have supported the plan out of a basic understanding that sovereignty in a territory entails not only setting restrictions on building but also issuing permits. In that regard, sovereignty in Area C is no different from sovereignty in other areas of the country.

The basis of a sovereign state – in Area C as in the Negev – is its ability to plan, which includes stipulating what and where it is forbidden to build and what and where it is permitted to build. These stipulations should apply to everyone, Jewish or Palestinian.

Apart from the threat Palestinian building in Area C poses to Israel’s national and security interests, one needs to ask why the issue has not gained traction among the Israeli public. It is this popular apathy that, among other things, allows the PM to keep ignoring this dangerous trend.

Netanyahu’s behavior on this matter is hard to understand. If it is fine with him to give the Palestinians open land for an eventual two-state solution, then presumably the land should be provided as a quid pro quo in an agreement – not simply taken over by the Palestinians in a unilateral process of attrition. If, on the other hand, Israel has an interest in retaining the land, why is Netanyahu allowing the invasion to proceed?

The Palestinians and Europeans understand something Israelis refuse to see. They grasp that while Maale Adumim is a fully-fledged city that will not be evacuated, it can be turned into a threatened and shrinking enclave by fast-tracking Palestinian building all around it and along the roads leading to it. Israeli disregard for the endgame of this tactic, including among most of the defense establishment, is amazing to the point of alarming.

What's Taking Root in Israel's Heartland? - by Regavim Advocacy Project

The PA's "Roots Project," funded by the EU and other foreign concerns, is a systematic program of land theft that is creating irreversible facts on the ground in Israel's heartland.

Olives, pomegranates - and annexation:
A deadly cocktail!

Regavim Advocacy Project..
08 November '18..








In the past five years, the Palestinian Authority has seized 146,500 dunams of Israeli state land through “agricultural” projects: New roads, planting, plowing, and more.

European funding: €45,608,214 in only 5 years!



Continue to the Full PDF Report: The Roots of Evil

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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E1 and the Roots Project: A pillar of the Fayyad plan and the newest expression of Palestinian intentions - by Naomi Kahn

This track is clearly and unmistakably guided by an organizational master plan engineered to facilitate the creation of Palestinian territorial contiguity, isolation of Israeli settlements, disruption of Israel’s territorial contiguity and more.

Naomi Kahn..
JNS.org..
01 November '18..

It is certainly not news that over the past few years, European support for the Palestinian cause has shifted from passive diplomatic and economic assistance to active participation in illegal projects initiated unilaterally by the Palestinian Authority. What may be news to some is that these projects are part of a strategic plan to establish a de facto Palestinian state and circumvent the need for negotiations with the government of Israel. The European Union’s massive support for these projects has, in effect, enabled the P.A. to maintain its intransigence and to reject all Israeli and American proposals for a negotiated settlement.

In 2009, P.A. Prime Minister Salim Fayyad publicized a systematic plan for the unilateral establishment of a Palestinian state through measures that would bypass the need for negotiations with Israel. [1] The vision for this Palestinian state, according to Fayyad, was to be “an independent Arab state with full sovereignty, on the entire area of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip within the 1967 borders, with Jerusalem as its capital.”

To achieve this, one of the central goals of the Fayyad Plan is the annexation of strategic parcels of land in Area C, land under full Israeli control under the Oslo Accords.

The Fayyad Plan is based on an array of infrastructure and physical projects that share a clear organizational rationale aimed at creating the physical foundations of the Palestinian state. It is geared to establish irreversible facts on the ground. If the Fayyad Plan achieves its stated goal of creating a swath of territorial contiguity stretching from the Hebron Hills through Samaria—as far as Jericho—this strip of land would threaten Israel’s security and its ability to protect itself within defensible borders, create a stranglehold around Israeli towns and pose a threat to the stability of the entire region.

(Continue to Full Column)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Ein al Hilweh, Umm Jamal, Leftist NGOs vs. Facts and Israeli Law - by Meir Deutsch

...Israeli law is more than merely a battering ram to be used against Jewish settlers by leftist NGOs. It is intended to create and preserve livable conditions throughout the country. We at Regavim will continue to demand that Israel’s laws are universally and equally applied and upheld by all sectors and segments of society – for our mutual benefit.

Meir Deutsch..
JPost/Opinion..
15 November '17..
Link: http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Ein-al-Hilweh-and-Umm-Jamal-Facts-on-the-ground-514374

Recently, various media outlets published news and editorial pieces about the Civil Administration’s intention to enforce “delimitation orders” on two Palestinian Beduin encampments in the Jordan Valley. Under the blazing headline “Stop the Evictions,” an editorial in Haaretz unleashed a full-scale attack, notifying readers in Israel and around the world that the State of Israel is planning to evict hundreds of unfortunate Palestinian Beduin, victims of recurring “illegal, unjustified and dangerous” Israeli actions, from two villages in Israel’s Jordan Valley – Ein al Hilweh and Umm Jamal.

Zehava Gal-On, who tweeted about it yesterday, told her readers that these villages “have been there for decades” and that they “are situated on private, Arab-owned land.” Yesterday, The Jerusalem Post’s Tova Lazaroff addressed the issue, as well.

Although Lazaroff’s article correctly described the “Palestinian Beduin villages” of Umm Jamal and Ein al Hilweh as illegal, that’s more or less where the factuality ends. Quoting attorney Tawfiq Jabareen, who represents these illegal encampments, Lazaroff repeated his patently false statement that “some of the families came 30 years ago from the South Hebron Hills and others were here before 1967.”

In fact, aerial photos taken as recently as 2004 show that there was no village – Beduin, Palestinian, or any other kind – in this area; aerial photos going back to 1999 debunk Jabareen’s claims altogether. At most, in certain seasons there were tents in the area, constructed for temporary shelter by the nomadic shepherds who passed through with their flocks. This hardly constitutes ownership, settlement, or historic claims to land.

Even worse, Lazaroff’s article fails to convey the absurdity of the situation on the ground in the Jordan Valley. The location of the “villages” of Ein al Hilweh and Umm Jamal endangers everyone who utilizes the roads and interchanges these illegal settlements are currently obstructing – including Jewish residents of Maskiot, Arab residents of Tubas, and the Beduin themselves. The Umm Jamal squatters’ camp has begun to encroach upon an IDF firing zone – putting the Beduin squatters themselves in grave danger. Why, we might well ask, would the United Nations Office for Coordination of Human Rights Affairs want the Civil Administration to permit their continued residence in a firing zone?

The UN’s Attempted Land Grab in Israel - by Barry Shaw

...When the Security Council calls the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem — with its synagogues, yeshivot, Jewish population and businesses, the Jewish Temple Mount and the Western Wall, the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives, the Hadassah Hospital and other profoundly Jewish Israeli institutions — “Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem,” this is a surrender that no Israeli government or any caring Jew is prepared to accept. The fact that the United States, New Zealand, the UK and France lent their hand to this infamous act is appalling.

Barry Shaw..
Algemeiner.com..
27 December '16..

The UN Security Council’s recent vote on Israel was not about “settlements.” It was a ruse to steal parts of Israel by calling these areas “illegally occupied Palestinian territory.”

Obama latched on to the idea, and helped lobby other countries to support the Resolution. Not too many people noticed John Kerry’s November New Zealand visit. Despite Kerry’s claim that the visit was about the Syrian conflict, I believe the true purpose was to discuss the impending Security Council meeting (New Zealand has a seat in the Security Council).

Egypt withdrew its sponsorship of the anti-Israel resolution due to Donald Trump. But it could have taken a quick phone call by Obama (or Biden) to get New Zealand to step in and join Malaysia, Senegal and Venezuela as co-sponsors of the treacherous act.

(Continue to Full Post)

Barry Shaw is the Senior Associate for Public Diplomacy at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies and the author of the upcoming and timely book ‘1917. From Palestine to the Land of Israel.’

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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(+Video) Khirbet Susiya? Who Played the American Friends Service Committee?

...These errors and omissions raise an important question: Does the AFSC know what it is talking about, or is it merely passing on anti-Israel propaganda handed to it by Palestinians and their ideological allies in Israel?

Aerial photos 1999, and
Khirbet Susiya? Just not
part of the landscape.

DVZ..
CAMERA Snapshots..
24 July '13..

The American Friends Service Committee, a so-called “peace and justice” organization supported by Quakers in the United States, has recently issued a report about Israeli policies in the West Bank. The report, which reads more like an indictment of Israel, laments the suffering of Palestinians whose homes have been demolished in the West Bank.

The report opens with a description of the plight of Palestinians living in the village of Susiya. The AFSC reports that the Israeli government issued 52 demolition orders in Susiya in August 2012 and that “Every structure in the village is now under the threat of demolition, and the community’s 250 residents are all at risk of being forcibly displaced from their homes.”

The report also states that Susiya was “[e]stablished in the early 1800s” and describes the locale as a “small herding community.”



What the AFSC fails to report, however, is that while herders may have historically used the site to graze their animals, there have not been permanent structures on the site until recently and that these structures were built illegally by inhabitants of a nearby town called Yatta.

Below the radar applying the Fayyad equation

While we have been distracted elsewhere, Abbas, the PA, with full consent of the EU, have been quietly implementing the Fayyad Plan, so called because the front man was former Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad. The PA’s July 2009 plan, to unilaterally create a de facto Palestinian state on the ground, is being implemented now at an accelerated rate, with our explicit consent or because of our fatal inaction, and with massive involvement of the international community specifically with funding from the European Union.

Jan Sokolovsky/Ari Briggs..
Op-Ed Contributors/JPost..
17 July '13..

The big show we’re all watching stars US Secretary of State John Kerry, skeptical but concerned about his attempts to restart negotiations between us and the Palestinians. What preconditions are being demanded? Will Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu give in? What will be left of our tiny little country? But this is really just street theater, expertly acted by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, as are his unilateral declarations at the UN.

Unfortunately, the real show is being played out on another channel, behind the scenes and not in the media.

While we have been distracted elsewhere, Abbas, the PA, with full consent of the EU, have been quietly implementing the Fayyad Plan, so called because the front man was former Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad.

The PA’s July 2009 plan, to unilaterally create a de facto Palestinian state on the ground, is being implemented now at an accelerated rate, with our explicit consent or because of our fatal inaction, and with massive involvement of the international community specifically with funding from the European Union. This is a call for the Israel public to demand that our government exercise its authority over areas within our control, before we reach the point of no return.

Three major pillars support the PA’s Plan to create facts on the ground – structural reform of the central and local governments, restoring the PA security system, and building the economic and physical infrastructures necessary for a state. Deliberate emphasis was placed on establishing large parts of this national infrastructure in Area C, defined by the Oslo Accords as under full Israeli civil and security control, including authority over all building permits.

However, the intention of the PA and the EU, made crystal clear by the EU’s latest binding directive on all European countries, is to subvert our authority, to silently “annex” these areas, create corridors and contiguous territories in them, thereby establishing irreversible facts on the ground.

The gradual annexation method is being pursued simultaneously on two tracks. One requires coordinating with Israeli authorities by requesting their approval to construct projects of special significance. Usually, these are projects where international financing is dependent on our “stamp of approval” – Israeli consent.

Israel normally has no option but to consent to these projects because of the enormous pressure exerted by the funding countries.

The other track establishes facts on the ground – by widespread illegal construction and development activities, without coordination or approval from the Israeli authorities. In this track, one can absolutely detect a systematic and deliberate hand, an organizing logic which seeks to create contiguous Palestinian territories, while isolating and cutting off Israeli communities.

Three examples show how our blind cooperation with the PA, because of our desire to appear cooperative to the international organizations, will if unchecked create an irreversible reality. First, the approval of the new town of Nu’eima in the Jericho region, including an allocation of 500 acres of state land, much of which was illegally taken over by Palestinians over the past few years.

Squeezing Out the Truth at The Economist

Sarit Catz..
CAMERA ..
16 May '13..



When it comes to reporting about Israel and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the influential Economist, a London-based weekly news and international affairs publication, regularly abandons responsible journalism. The magazine gives every indication of having an agenda to vilify Israel by presenting accusations of Israeli racism, ethnic cleansing, and discrimination without any basis in fact. (See CAMERA's previous debunking of some of these false claims.) The Economist's most recent smear of Israel comes in a May 4th article, published both in print and online, entitled “Squeeze them out; As Jewish settlements expand, the Palestinians are being driven away.”

The thesis of the story is that the Israeli government is “herding the West Bank's Palestinians out of the rural 60% of the territory, officially known as Area C” in order to hand the area over to Israelis. And, yet again, The Economist provides no evidence for its false claims and leaves out crucial information that negates its thesis.

As Ari Briggs of Regavim, an independent research institute and think tank, wrote in a Jerusalem Post Op-Ed the opposite phenomenon is occurring:

The illegal “building intifada” being waged by the Palestinian Authority on state lands in Area C of Judea and Samaria, (the West Bank), has become the latest battleground for the radical Left in conjunction with foreign-funded Israeli so called human rights NGO's such as B'tselem and Bimkom.

This unlawful land theft is being carried out with the full support of the EU, foreign aid organizations and the UN.

And seemingly also with the encouragement of much of the media –in this case, The Economist.

(Read full post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook.

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By shameless criminal activity, they have taken over the entire Negev

Fact: There are not 35 illegally built villages on state-owned land, but over 2,000 illegal settlements, spread out over 80,000 hectares (800,000 dunams). How do these NGOs imagine they can continue to hide the facts when the means of independent verification are so accessible? Do they really believe Israelis are that gullible?

Ari Briggs..
Op-Ed Contributor/JPost..
05 May 13..

Last Thursday TV personality Avri Gilad went on a trip to the northern Negev with Regavim – an independent, professional research institute and policy planning think tank involved in protecting Israel’s national lands. So disturbed was he by what he saw on that trip that upon his return he immediately penned the following post on Facebook: “I came back from a tour of the Negev conducted by Regavim. I’m appalled by what I’ve seen. There’s no more Negev.

The Beduin have taken it over completely by force....

By shameless criminal activity, with insolence met only by fear and submission, the Beduin have taken over the entire Negev.”

He noted that though he had visited Beersheva and Arad, he had never entered Beduin towns like Laqia, Hura or the others he saw on this trip. Gilad also wrote that the government of Israel has virtually agreed to give Beduin clans in the Negev over 60 percent of the state land they have illegally settled on. On top of this, former MK Benny Begin sweetened the deal recently, offering them more land and additional monetary compensation. Avri Gilad, in his post, called on the government “to stop the Begin plan immediately,” and said, “We have to re-conquer the Negev.”

He concluded by saying “we must have one law for everyone – both for a Jew who encloses his balcony [without authorization] and for a Beduin who uses a fence he stole from Omer to enclose five dunams [0.5 hectares] of land as his.”

Gilad’s post went viral, and when interviewed later on Army Radio, he stated over 450,000 people had seen it.

Israel "Ethnically Cleansing" Bedouin Arabs?

The demolition of an unrecognized Bedouin settlement in the Negev attracts some foreign media looking to fit the story into their own one-sided agenda.


Honest Reporting
Media Critiques
28 July '10

It had all the elements that the foreign press in Israel could have hoped for - a mass eviction accompanied by the destruction of homes, a large Israeli police presence, the potential for confrontation and, even better, the fact that those being evicted belong to the Arab minority within Israel.

So it was that CNN, BBC, AFP and the LA Times saw fit to cover the demolition of an unauthorized Bedouin settlement in the Negev region. Indeed, irrespective of the rights or wrongs of the issue, such scenes are never pleasant and involve some level of human suffering. The foreign media, however, based on the quotes of non-governmental organizations, managed to portray a complex story in very black and white terms.

Writing in The Guardian's Comment is Free, notorious anti-Zionist academic Neve Gordon, not even bothering to address the wider context of the demolition, even went as far as to state that he

suddenly understood how far the state is ready to go to accomplish its objective of Judaising the Negev region; what I witnessed was, after all, an act of ethnic cleansing.

While the rest of the media did not sink to Gordon's level of vitriol, most of them certainly did nothing to dispel a one-sided narrative that portrays Israel as the usurper of Arab land. The status of the Bedouin in Israel is far more complex, as is this particular case of the demolished unrecognized village. As the Jerusalem Post explains:

(Read full critique)

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Israel's Unwavering Guardsmen

Caroline Glick
Carolineglick.com
26 March '10

As the local and international press corps converged on Jerusalem's Old City to cover the Arab riots at the Temple Mount two weeks ago, little mention was made of the fact that Jerusalem was not the only flashpoint. In Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Israeli Arab rioters supported by far-left protesters stoned buses. Israeli Arabs firebombed motorists on Highway 443 and on the roads to Beersheba. In the North, cars were stoned.

These little-reported attacks are the consequence of one of the most dangerous emerging threats to Israel's national survival: the rapidly escalating radicalization of Israel's Arab citizens.

Over the past decade and at a frenzied pace since the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, acting at least partially at the direction of the Israeli Islamic Movement and with the active support of the far left, Israeli Arabs and Beduin have launched a massive assault on the state. The relevant national authorities including the courts, the state prosecution, the police, the IDF, the Jewish National Fund, the Israel Lands Authority and the Ministry of Interior have failed to defend against it.

Firebombing Jewish-owned vehicles is small potatoes in comparison to developments at the center of mass of the Israeli Arab onslaught: state land. Over the past decade, Israeli Arabs have seized millions of dunams of state land.

The dimensions of this phenomenon were spelled out in last year's State Comptroller's Report. While the local and international Left pillories Israel when the state tries to demolish a handful of the thousands of illegal Arab buildings in Jerusalem, what goes unmentioned is that by the end of 2007 there were more than 100,000 illegally built structures in Israel. The overwhelming majority were constructed on state land seized by Arab land thieves in the Negev and the Galilee. By the end of 2009, the number of illegal buildings grew to an estimated 150,000. The scope of the theft is so vast that the Comptroller's Report referred to it as a "national scourge."

(Read full article)

If you were inspired by the story of the New Israeli Guardsmen (Hashomer Hahadash) and would like to support their efforts, here is the information you need to contribute.
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