There have been a number of apparently related articles in the usual Israeli papers in the days I have been off doing battle with custard that won't gel, the use of stevia, how to make dishes without fat, sugar salt cholesterol and eggs when they are desserts, and things that might lure a family member to eat at all but won't hurt gramma if she does, and the like.
This article is about the origins of a settler outpost called Migron, now supposedly scheduled to be destroyed by next March by High Court order, if the Knesset doesn't get there first. This article is well worth a careful read. The origin of the outpost according to Ha'aretz' review of the entire file, was this:
Haaretz has obtained the full Migron files from both the Civil Administration and the Housing and Construction Ministry. They paint a picture of the bureaucratic snafus that led to the birth and development of the outpost. While the left hand was making intensive efforts to identify illegal construction and preparing to demolish it, the right hand was pouring enormous resources into building it.
When, after the Oslo Accords, the construction of the Ramallah bypass road made the mountain overlooking the road a strategic spot, Pinhas Wallerstein, then head of the Binyamin Regional Council, decided to find a way to settle it.
The article then goes on to explain a number of points made in the governmental file, including the fact that the land was not while this was going on abandoned at all but was being actively worked, and that one scheme and then another was put in place to enable the Israeli government to control what it considered a strategic location overlooking the road to Ramallah which it wanted to control, and how many governmental assets were put into the site now ordered to be destroyed unless it is rescued by the Knesset before its High Court destruction date, as the same may be delayed. This article also brings to mind why the settlement Ariel is a strategic location, because it controls access to an essential source of water for that area of WB. In this one case, the origin of the 'settlement' was not settlers at all, but a strategic governmental purpose which at one point the presence of settlers could resolve after other efforts had not worked.
The reference to the Knesset is to a series of proposals reported in the usual Israeli papers by which right wing MKs say they intend to legislate procedures by which the now illegal settlements, not just this one, are retroactively legalized and thus cannot be ordered destroyed by High Court order. There is something of a pattern in Israeli governmental officials faced with destruction orders or findings in favor of dispossessed Palestinians of obtaining delays in the enforcement of such orders often years long, thus providing the opportunity for the Knesset to 'rectify' the situation in a manner that negates the substance of the High Court orders.
I also note in this connection articles which appeared some time ago in connection with the displacement of Bedouin Israeli citizens from parts of southern Israel by means of demanding they obtain permits for villages and such, but then moving the permitting offices to places inaccessible to them, because the existence of the villages were in a stragetic location which could in time of war be used as a connector between WB and Gaza, not because of any desperate governmental need for permitting. Of course, the Israeli government has also fouled up on permitting settler building, as a case reported earlier this week demonstrated when settlers sued because the houses they had bought from the government agencies or their nominees in WB could not be expanded because although the seller was the government, it had not obtained permits for them either.
This article is about a new Israeli governmental program alloting ten percent of solar projects of a certain size to Judea and Samaria, but only to Israeli citizens. Judea and Samaria are the nationalist Israeli political terms for the WB. And Solar is also an issue in areas of Israel itself which are at present subject to substantial efforts to displace Bedouin Israeli citizens which have been commented on here before.
This article is about subjecting museums in the West Bank to Israeli law, possibly as a step in subjecting many things in WB to Israeli law, and de facto annexing them a bit at a time. The initial museum for which this was proposed some months back is well into WB, but what is new here is the notion that this is possibly intended to be part of a series of such bills which collectively are intended to subject land and people to Israeli law, and therefore make them effectively part of Israel, by topic rather than by GPS site.
This one, which I linked to a comment before the diary, concerns a large settlement east of Jerusalem making Arab workers there subject to Israeli labor laws, rather than the prior Jordanian laws. While Israeli law may give different and better benefits, WB including the large settlement are not part of Israel, and the workers so subjected are specifically noted as "Arab" workers, definitely not citizens of Israel.
And then there is this, a report issued on a regular basis by an NGO ranking Knesset members by their activities which support settlements and settlers, a number of the actions mentioned in which have not IIRC made the Israeli papers at all, such as improved cell phone services for some. This article also notes that the NGO follows matters involving Israeli Arabs, including destruction of factories in a given area, noted as an activity for which the doer should apparently been given some sort of affirmative credit.
I note these articles as part of a context which includes the Israel governments' continued and intentional withholding of the excise and other taxes which it collects and is supposed to remit to the PA but which it refuses to remit, and which refusal endangers the essential funding of existing PA governmental activity, including policing.
The context also includes the now long running series of articles in Ma'an about IDF destroying schools, homes and wells of Palestinians in WB, with no reason stated, and the blockading of Palestinian villages and towns. In one of the current cases, the Ma'an article stated that a villages whose wells were being destroyed was in an areas full of wells which was near a new Israeli settlment line, but whose water was being diverted in whole to the new Israeli settlement. Another also reported destruction of solar panels. I suggest you read back through the last two or three months of Ma'an for this long line of articles, which also includes the remedyless acts of settlers destroying olive groves, wells and the like and committing violent attacks on Palestinians and their property.
IF Ha'aretz is correct and I am in the connection of these matters, these matters may be part of a distinct Israeli governmental policy designed so completely to wipe out any pattern other than their own on the ground, quietly and by small acts in themselves, which will make after a time any two state solution impossible, because so much of everything useful in WB is already specifically governed, by acts of the Knesset, by Israeli law. And which they will insist are enforceable AND irreversible acts if we ever get to the point where they will in fact show up at any bargaining table. Particularly the first article in the group, wherein Ha'aretz says that the initial and basic purpose of what became the Migron settlement was not a settler choice as such, but a military one, to have a location from which control of the Ramallah road could be controlled if the controllers so chose, this may no new plan. Certainly the Israeli government has put in and continues to put in huge amounts of money to build and maintain and expand the settlements, although the only file Ha'aretz pulled by the Israeli equivalent of FOIL, is discussed in these articles.
These articles raise for me a question or questions, about the degree to which these smaller actions are indeed part of a plan whose intended effect is, piece by piece to give control of more and more of the West Bank to the Israeli government by making one piece at a time subject to its laws, backed up by IDF, not any laws made by Palestinians or the predecessor Jordanians, and specifically directed to increasing the rights of Israeli citizens in WB, a land not in Israel, but not the actual residents thereof who are not Israeli citizens, and who are thus left in legal limbo, a limbo for which the Israeli government as with access to courts and unequal provision of internet services to Arab Israelis until called upon it,denies responsibility for extended periods of time.
Part of this question involves the particular group of Israeli citizens we usually call settlers here, and I don't mean particularly the ones within a few meters of the Green Line, whom right wingers believe are part of their legal constituency, voters after a fashion, who Israeli right wingers believe deserve the financial and legal and military support of their government, without any thought to any non Israeli citizens of WB having any rights at all which likewise require protection. The support of solar farms for Israeli citizens at the same time the IDF is destroying solar panels in Palestinian villages is downright creepy in this light, as if only the Israeli government may allow such, and only to its own citizens in a place which is not part of Israel, and may not become so under international law. At a time when the selfsame government's withholding of cash from PA limits the ability of PA to do anything about it to protect rights or equalities of Palestinians in its own territory.
Please comment on these matters subject to the usual householder rules for these diaries, no flame wars, no OT comments, no personal attacks or insults, claims of stupidity or denials of intelligence as if fact and the like, no commentaries on my Thanksgiving cooking, and full citations for those factual matters you desire to rely upon in argument, and any others I have cited before.
3:48 PM PT: Thank you all for the recc list. Twice in one awful day. Wow.