Posted on 08/31/2014 4:54:15 PM PDT by xzins
The IDF on Sunday conferred the status of state land on 4,000 dunams in the Gush Etzion region of the West Bank, thereby ending the civil administration’s investigation into the possibility that parcels were private Palestinian property.
The new designation for an area known as Gevaot, opens the door for settlers to advance plans to build a fifth city in the West Bank on those dunams.
There is a 45(day)-period for objections to be raised. The land had previously been listed as survey land, a designation that prevented settlers and the army from moving building plans through the planning system.
The Office of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories said that it had acted under guidelines from the upper political echelon issued after the end of the IDF’s mission Brother’s Keeper to return the bodies of three teenagers which Hamas terrorists kidnapped and killed in June.
The Palestinian Authority immediately condemned what it called the “seizure” of its land in the West Bank that it said belonged to the districts of the two Palestinian cities located near the parcel, Bethlehem and Hebron.
This status change must be reversed, said Nabil Abu Rudaineh, a spokesman for the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
Such a move, he warned, “leads to a further deterioration of the situation.”
The news of the future Israeli building project broke less than one week since a cease-fire was declared between Hamas and Israel in the Gaza Strip.
Abbas has struggled throughout the period of hostilities to prove that a diplomatic path to statehood is more effective than a military one.
Peace Now Executive Director Yariv Oppenheimer charged that Israel had “stabbed Abu Mazen in the back. The same government that knows how to reach an agreement with Hamas, has once again turned its back on moderate Palestinians.”
Hagit Ofran of Peace Now added that four or five Palestinian villages have farm land in that area. She charged that the declaration prevented the villages from developing or using their land.
The 4,000 dunams are located just outside the Alon Shvut settlement in an area of Gush Etzion, that Israel believes will be included within its final borders in any final status solution.
Justice Minister Tzipi Livni (HaTenua) who has previously supported the building of Gevaot, objected to the Civil Administration’s announcement.
Livni, who headed Israel's negotiating team during the US brokered nine-month peace process with the PA that ended in April, warned that the move would significantly harm Israel's public diplomacy efforts.
“Now, when we need to mobilize the world to prevent processes against Israel, and work together with moderate forces, anything that could deflect attention on to us, and cause criticism of us, harms those things we are trying to achieve,” she said.
The Prime Minister’s Office had no response. But one government official dismissed Peace Now and Livni’s criticisms, noting that people were “commenting on automatic pilot.” The official rejected the idea that such a move stabbed Abbas in the back or “poisoned” the atmosphere with the PA.
“We remain serious about negotiating two states for two peoples,” the official said. “Nothing we have done today inhibits the ability to come to an agreement on a two-state solution.”
PLO Executive Committee member Hanan Ashrawi also condemned the Israeli decision, saying it would be added to “Israeli crimes in Gaza.”
Ashrawi accused Israel of practicing a “double aggression on the land of the occupied State of Palestine.”
She claimed that during Operation Protective Edge, Israel “escalated its other assault on the West Bank and occupied Jerusalem and intensified its efforts to practically remove the 1967 borders of the Palestinian state in order to establish the Great Israel.”
Gush Etzion Regional Council head Davidi Perl welcomed the announcement that the 4,000 dunams that helps create territorial contiguity between his communities and the pre-1967 lines, had been declared state land.
“This paves the way for the establishment of a new city in Gush Etzion,” Perl said.
The other four Israeli cities in the West Bank are: Modin Illit, Beitar Illit, Ma’aleh Adumim and Ariel.
The area of Gevaot was first developed as an IDF Nahal community in 1984, following a 1982 cabinet decision. The IDF close it in 1996. For the next decade a small yeshiva, Shvut Yisrael Yeshiva, made use of the site with small modular homes.
Since 1998 the Gush Etzion Regional Council has consistently pushed to build in a city in that area. Initial plans for 6,000 homes in Gevaot were abandoned in 2000 because the diplomatic climate was not supportive.
The plans were picked up again in 2008 and moved forward in 2009 after the Annapolis peace process fell apart.
In 2012, the Defense Ministry gave initial authorization to build 523 new homes there, but then froze the project.
In June of this year, the Gush Etzion Regional Council reissued its call for work to move forward on Gevaot, as a response to the deaths of Nafatli Fraenkel, 16, Gil-ad Shaer, 16, and Eyal Yifrach, 19.
The three teens were kidnapped at a bus-stop near the Gevaot property.
“Those who killed the three teens wanted to instill fear, disrupt our lives, and undermine our right to all of this land, and to Gush Etzion in specific,” Perl said.
“Our response is to strengthen the settlement enterprise, strengthen our sovereignty over Gush Etzion and Judea and Samaria and to build within in and without the settlement blocs,” Perl said.
“I trust that the government will continue to advance the construction of a new city, that will provide thousands of new homes. In this way it will prove to our enemies that wanted to uproot us, that they have only depend our hold on the land,” he said.
I expect the US state department to go bonkers over this
Israel’s deed to the land is right there in Genesis.
Gen 15:18
In the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates
So a dunum is a tenth of a hectare. I never knew that.
100% correct. I advocated something like this a while back. For every Hamas rocket launched into Israel, extend a bulldozed no-man’s land into Gaza by 1 hectare. For any Israeli killed or kidnapped, make it 100 hectares, for any injured, make it 20. Or something like that.
Gaza is only 36000 Hectares.
Either the Palis will get the message, or pretty soon some of them will have to take up swimming.
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