Soccer Dad

Land claims for peace now

There is little to add to what co-blogger Daled Amos wrote about Peace Now's land grab or what fellow Maryland Blogger Alliance blogger Maryland Conservatarian has pithily observed about the attentant media coverage: Israeli Critics criticize Israel.

Steve Erlanger of the New York Times publicized Peace Now's press release

After noting that Peace Now is an advocacy group, Erlanger observes

The figures, together with detailed maps of the land distribution in every Israeli settlement in the West Bank, were put together by the Settlement Watch Project of Peace Now, led by Dror Etkes and Hagit Ofran, and has a record of careful and accurate reporting on settlement growth.

"Careful and accurate?" Leading up to this declaration Erlanger had described the process by which Peace Now had obtained its information from someone inside the government. Clearly they received from someone who shares their ideological convictions and who reads the data and understands the law the same way they do.

But there's more to Peace Now than its reporting on Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, which is freqently disputed by the residents themselves. The group has advocated making peace with the Palestinians and has been wrong about quite a bit. Leaders of Peace Now declared, for example, that Yasser Arafat was ready to make peace; something that his subsequent actions showed to be false. If one considers Peace Now's investment in Arafat as an indication of its political judgment, what exactly makes their legal judgment any more reliable?

Clearly Erlanger shares their premises; but that shouldn't be the determining factor in writing about news. Peace Now has issued another one of its biased reports and the media was perfectly willing to act as its megaphone, giving it publicity that it couldn't have bought.

There is another side to this issue that Peace Now doesn't address. Land ownership really isn't clear at all.

It's nice of Erlanger, for example to note:

Mr. Dror also said that sometimes Palestinians would sell land to Israelis but be unwilling to admit to the sale publicly because they feared retribution as collaborators.

According to Jordanian law and a law passed by the Palestinian Legislative Council (though apparently never signed by Arafat) the selling of land to Jews is a capital crime. This law was taken seriously.

Two Palestinians, suspected among other things of selling land to Jews, were killed in the West Bank under suspicious circumstances. In 1997 PA Justice Minister Freih Abu Middein announced that the death penalty would be imposed on anyone convicted of ceding "one inch" of land to Israel. A Palestinian land ownership law that was passed by the Palestinian Council and is awaiting Arafat's approval forbids Palestinians from brokering or facilitating the sale of Palestinian land to non-Palestinians and provides that such activities be considered "high treason." The PA has arrested and continues to hold several suspected land dealers for violating the Jordanian law in force in the West Bank that prohibits the sale of land to foreigners.

On April 6, Mohammed Anqawi, age 50, was found shot to death near Ramallah. Anqawi was suspected of selling land to Jews and collaborating with Israel, and family members say that he had been summoned to Palestinian intelligence headquarters in Ramallah immediately prior to his death. The Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group accused the PA of murdering Anqawi. On April 7, Riboi Musfi Awad was found dead in an Israeli-controlled area near Ramallah. Awad, who was reputed to be a collaborator, had been shot in the head. Palestinians say that he had been summoned to Palestinian police offices to discuss allegations that he sold land to Jews. Palestinian authorities say that because the body was found in an Israeli-controlled area, they did not investigate the death.

(Though they in now way emphasize this application of a Nuremberg type law, both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reported on these murders.)

Yisrael Medad (of My Right Word) wrote in the Jerusalem Post

A few months after my family and I moved to Shiloh in 1981, I witnessed a microcosm of the land problem between Jews and Arabs. A section of land was to be put aside for security purposes and, as the legal procedure dictated, the mukhtars of nearby villages were informed and asked to make sure that any resident claiming private ownership rights should show up on a certain day to stake his claim.

Sure enough, at the appointed hour, seven Arabs walked onto the area and then were asked to stand on what each claimed as his private plot. Within minutes a difficult situation developed when two villagers stood on the same fertile section, insisting that each owned it. A minute later and they were throwing stones at each other.

We, the residents of Shiloh, the IDF officers and legal officials all stood around amazed. In the end, with no documents, no tax receipts, no maps nor any other reliable proof of ownership, the land was confirmed as "state land" and assigned to its new use.

With no records, competing claims and fear of death it's hard to take Palestinian land claims at face value. Yet that's what Peace Now and its many allies did. And by the way, if Peace Now gets so exercised about the taking of private Palestinian land, how do they feel about the taking of private Jewish land?

The following is from Peace Now's Settlement in Focus about the Etzion Bloc (Gush Etzion.)

In January 1927, a group of ultra-orthodox Jews from Jerusalem, accompanied by a few Yemenites who had immigrated to Palestine for religious reasons, moved to an area south of Jerusalem. The small community was called “Migdal Eder,” named for a site mentioned in the bible (Genesis 35:21). This early community did not flourish, mainly due to economic hardships and escalating tension with neighboring Arab communities. In 1929 Arab riots broke out and the community was destroyed. The inhabitants of Migdal Eder were saved by the villagers of the neighboring Palestinian village of Beit Umar but were not able to return to the land they left behind.

In the early 1930s the land which had been the site of Migdal Eder was purchased by Shmuel Yosef Holtzman in order to establish a Jewish community in the area between Bethlehem and Hebron. Holtzman named the community “Kfar Etzion” (from his own name, Holtzman – in German “holtz” means “wood”, which translates to “etz” in Hebrew). This second attempt to establish a Jewish foothold in this area was once again derailed before any significant Jewish presence was achieved, this time in the course of the 1936 Arab uprising, which led the inhabitants of Kfar Etzion to abandon the area. Most of what Holtzman and his partners had constructed was subsequently demolished by the Arabs living in the area.

Jews again attempted to settle the area between 1943-1947, resulting in the establishment of four Jewish communities (Kfar Etzion, Ein Tzurim, Massu'ot Yitzhak, and Revadim). All four were destroyed in the course of the 1948 war, and the entire area came under Jordanian rule. From 1948-1967, the loss of the four Jewish communities of Gush Etzion was one of the most painful traumas in the Israeli collective memory.

Almost immediately after Israel gained control of the West Bank in June 1967, a new and successful initiative to settle the area was launched. In September 1967, Kfar Etzion became Israel’s first settlement in the newly-occupied West Bank. Among the group that founded the new Kfar Etzion were descendents of the people who fought (and many of whom died) in the area in 1948. They justified the establishment of the settlement on the argument that they had a right to return to land from which they had been violently uprooted 19 years earlier – a rationale that the government of Israel eventually accepted (even while denying any similar right of return to Arab civilians who had fled or been expelled from communities inside Israel during that same war). In this way, Kfar Etzion was not only the first Israeli settlement in the West Bank, but it was also the precedent for what would become the settlers’ favored – and highly successful – tactic: establish facts on the ground and then demand, and receive, government approval.

So here's Peace Now's brief history of the Etzion Bloc. One would assume that an organization that is dedicated to the proposition that the acquisition of land by force is inherently illegitimate would apply that principle in all cases. But in the case of the Etzion Bloc, Peace Now turns the proposition around and asks why Israeli didn't allow the "right of return" for the Arabs who lost land in 1948. But isn't there a difference when the aggressor loses his home and when victim of aggression loses his home? Such subtleties are beyond the scope of Peace Now's ideology as its clear in the case of Arabs and Jews, Peace Now favors the aggressors.

Technorati tags: Peace Now, New York Times, Israel.

Posted by SoccerDad at November 26, 2006 6:44 AM