Canadian Politics Today

Appreciate the arguments, but these are all pro-Israel claims from a pro-Israel source, that's not trying to be objective.

https://www.cnn.com/2015/03/16/middleeast/israel-netanyahu-palestinian-state/index.html

Not all Palestinians are victims of Israel. In fact more Palestinians are victims of fellow Palestinian terrorists than
Israeli soldiers.

Violence by settlers (and sometimes by other Israeli civilians) toward Palestinians has long since become part of daily life under occupation in the West Bank. These actions range from blocking roads, throwing stones at cars and houses, raiding villages and farmland, torching fields and olive groves, and damaging crops and property to physical assault, sometimes to the point of hurling Molotov cocktails or using live fire. Over the years, this widespread violence toward Palestinians has resulted in injuries to life and limb, as well as damage to property and land.

Under international law, Israel has a duty to protect Palestinians in the West Bank from this conduct. However, Israeli authorities routinely shirk this responsibility, even when the violent actions can be anticipated. Thousands of testimonies, videos and reports, as well as many years of close monitoring by B’Tselem and other organizations, reveal that Israeli security forces not only allow settlers to harm Palestinians and their property as a matter of course – they often provide the perpetrators escort and back-up. In some cases, they even join in on the attack. In other instances, security forces have prevented anticipated harm by removing the targeted Palestinians, rather than the Israeli assailants.

The law enforcement agencies, for their part, rarely make settlers face consequences for attacking Palestinians. In almost all cases, the investigations – if one was opened, in the first place – have not resulted in any action taken against the perpetrators. This undeclared policy of lenience toward settler violence aimed at Palestinians has been documented in numerous reports by human rights organizations, as well as in official state reports (such as the Karp Report of 1982 and the Shamgar Report of 1994).

In a ten-year review published in May 2015, human rights organization Yesh Din found that some 85% of investigations into such cases (including violence, arson, damage to property, mutilation of trees and takeover of land) ended with no further action taken, and that the odds of a police complaint filed by a Palestinian resulting in the conviction of an Israeli civilian were a mere 1.9%. Given the futility of this effort, many Palestinians choose to forgo filing a complaint altogether.

Since it was founded in 1989, B’Tselem has been documenting incidents of settler violence against Palestinians and advocating for security forces to fulfill their obligation to protect Palestinians and their property from such injury. For many years, B’Tselem has stressed the duty of Israeli authorities to make the necessary preparations, including allocating forces, to prevent attacks that can be predicted – especially when they are carried out in the open – and arrest the assailants. We have repeatedly called attention to the responsibility of the law enforcement agencies to quickly and efficiently investigate attacks after they take place. B’Tselem has provided the police and the military with documentation of such attacks, including video footage filmed by volunteers. We have also helped Palestinian victims file complaints with the police and have monitored the investigations – including appealing closed cases. After more than 25 years of this work, there is no escaping the conclusion that the authorities merely make a show of law enforcement in this context and that, with few exceptions, they have no interest in seriously investigating settler violence against Palestinians.

A stark example recurs every year during the olive harvest. After repeated settler attacks, the military forbade Palestinian farmers from entering their own land if it lies near a settlement – instead of protecting the farmers by enforcing the law on the settlers. In 2004, the heads of five Palestinian local councils petitioned Israel’s High Court of Justice (HCJ), demanding that the military allow them to access their lands and protect them from settler attacks during the olive harvest. The court accepted the petition about two years later, ruling that the military should not, in general, deny Palestinians access to their land in the name of protecting them. The justices also ruled that the security establishment must “give clear, unequivocal instructions to the forces operating in the field” and also “deploy forces to protect the property of the Palestinian inhabitants” (HCJ 9593/04 Murar et al. v. IDF Commander for Judea and Samaria et al.). As a result, the state created a “coordination system” for supposedly enabling Palestinians throughout the West Bank to access their land for several days, twice a year – during the harvest and plowing seasons. This requires prior coordination with the military, which assigns them a security detail.

In practice, the system does little to resolve this violent reality and is largely another empty show of law enforcement. First, it furthers the assumption that the solution lies with restricting the Palestinian victims, rather than the violent settlers. Second, it is relevant to two specific periods every year, leaving settlers free to roam and vandalize land and trees the rest of the time, while the Palestinian owners are barred access. Third, the military requires Palestinians to undergo such a complicated coordination process and meet so many requirements that, in many cases, attaining access is impossible.

Settler violence has a pervasive impact on life in the West Bank, creating a lingering sense of intimidation. Countless attacks have left their traumatic mark on individual Palestinians and on the collective memory. As a result, many Palestinians now avoid approaching “danger zones” near settlements. Landowners do not dare enter these areas without military escort or Israeli civilians accompanying them. As a result, in some plots, the yield has become so poor that the owners have given up trying to reach the land and tend it. This dynamic has created invisible walls throughout the West Bank, beyond which Palestinians know they face violence to the point of risking their lives.

The rogue settlements euphemistically known as “illegal outposts” – since they were formally established in breach of Israeli law, although they enjoy broad government support and funding – contribute to this reality. These 100 or so outposts, established throughout the West Bank since the 1990s, have effectively taken over large swathes of land, expanding the scope of settlement control. This dispossession has been accompanied by violence towards Palestinian landowners that includes physical assaults, threats, attacks on shepherds and theft of land. Apart from very rare exceptions in which outposts were removed further to legal proceedings, virtually all outposts remain standing and are gradually gaining formal recognition as a substantial part of the settlement enterprise.

Violent actions of settlers against Palestinians are not exceptions to a rule. Rather, they form part of a broader strategy in which the state colludes, as it stands to benefit from the result. Over time, this unchecked violence is gradually driving Palestinians from more and more locations in the West Bank, making it easier for the state to take over land and resources.

From 1967 to the end of 2017, more than 200 Israeli settlements were established in the West Bank. They include:

    131 settlements officially recognized by the Israeli Ministry of the Interior;
    About 110 settlements built without official authorization but with governmental support and assistance (known as “illegal outposts”);
    Several settlement enclaves inside the city of Hebron;
    11 neighborhoods in the areas of the West Bank that Israel annexed to the municipal jurisdiction of Jerusalem in 1967, and several settlement enclaves within Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem.

Another 16 settlements that had been established in the Gaza Strip, and four in the northern West Bank, were dismantled in 2005 as part of the Disengagement Plan.

More than 620,000 Israeli citizens currently reside in settlements. Of these, about 209,270 live in the parts of the West Bank that Israel annexed to the municipal jurisdiction of Jerusalem (according to Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research figures from late 2016), and 413,400 live throughout the rest of the West Bank (according to Central Bureau of Statistics figures from late 2017).

The settlements are the single most important factor in shaping life in the West Bank. Their destructive impact on the human rights of Palestinians extends far beyond the thousands of hectares, including farmland and grazing areas, that Israel appropriated from Palestinians in order to build them. More land has been expropriated to pave hundreds of kilometers of roads for settler use only; roadblocks, checkpoints, and other measures that limit Palestinian movement only have been erected based on the location of settlements; Palestinian landowners have been effectively denied access to much of their farmland, both within settlements and outside them; and the winding route of the Separation Barrier, which severely violates the rights of Palestinians living near it, was established inside the West Bank in order to leave as many settlements as possible – and large tracts of land for expanding them – on the western side of the barrier.

All the settlement practices in the West Bank share the same objective, although those employed in the urban areas of Hebron and East Jerusalem – where Palestinians have also been dispossessed of their homes and of other structures – take a different form.

In the early years of the occupation, the main ploy that Israel used to take over land for building settlements was to seize the land “for military purposes”. Military seizure orders were issued for some 3,100 hectares of land, most of which were earmarked for building settlements. In June 1979, the military issued a seizure order for privately-owned land near Nablus, which was slated for establishing the settlement of Elon Moreh. Several Palestinians petitioned Israel’s High Court of Justice (HCJ), arguing that the seizure violated international law, since it served a civilian purpose of building a settlement rather than true military needs. The court had rejected this argument in previous petitions, accepting the state’s claim that settlements contribute to security.

In this case, however, top security officials stated that building a settlement at that location would serve no military purpose. Also, some of the settlers joined the proceedings as respondents, explaining to the court that it was their intention to settle in the area permanently, for religious and political reasons, rather than to promote security. Given these unique circumstances, the court could not rule that the establishment of the settlement would serve military needs – although it did not rule out such a possibility in general. The justices restricted their decision to the specific case of Elon Moreh, ruling that the land seizure was meant to serve a civilian rather than military purpose and therefore breached international law. The court did not completely deny the possibility of seizing private land for building settlements, but held that when the dominant reason for issuing a seizure order is the establishment of a civilian settlement rather than military considerations, the order is unlawful.

This ruling made it difficult for Israel to continue seizing Palestinian land as it had done until that point. Instead, it required the state to obtain agreement between top security officials on the military advantage of every planned settlement, and to ensure that the settlers kept their intentions to themselves. To circumvent this, the government announced that it would thereafter build settlements only on land that had been declared state land.

However, when the state sought such land, it discovered that only some 68,700 hectares of land were considered state land at the time, mostly in the Jordan Valley and in the Judean Desert. This frustrated the governmental plan to build settlements along the central mountain ridge of the West Bank. Therefore, the state came up with a new system for declaring state land.

This system was founded on rewriting legal provisions and applying a completely different approach to the Ottoman Land Code, which governs land ownership in the West Bank, than the standard interpretation applied until then. The new approach made it much easier to declare state land, even when the land in question was considered private or collective Palestinian property under British and later Jordanian rule. One method for achieving this was requiring Palestinians to regularly cultivate farmland as a prerequisite to acquiring ownership rights; another was to disregard the provisions of local law, which grants Palestinian communities collective rights to use grazing areas and other public land. By employing these new tactics, from 1979 to 2002 Israel declared more than 90,000 hectares of land as state land. There are now some 120,000 hectares of state land in Area C, constituting 36.5% of Area C and 22% of the entire West Bank. An additional 20,000 hectares of state land are located in areas A and B, where planning is in the hands of the Palestinian Authority.

A comparative survey carried out by B’Tselem in the area of Ramallah revealed massive differences between the amount of land that Jordan defined as government property in areas registered before the occupation, and the amount that Israel declared state land in areas that the Jordanians had not managed to register prior to 1967. The results of the survey indicate that a significant proportion of the land that Israel declared as state land is actually private Palestinian property that was taken from its lawful owners through legal maneuvering, in breach of both local and international law.

This process of land takeover also contravenes basic tenets of due process and natural justice. In many cases, the Palestinian residents were not aware that their land had been registered as state property and when they found out, it was too late to appeal. The burden of proof always lies with Palestinians claiming ownership; even if landowners did manage to prove their ownership over the land, in some cases it was registered state land based on the claim that it had been handed over to a settlement “in good faith”.

Even if all the declarations of state land were lawful, public land – including the land declared as government property prior to 1967 – is meant to serve the population of the occupied territory, i.e. the Palestinian public, not the State of Israel or its citizens. However, Israel prohibits Palestinian use of this land almost entirely and considers it Israeli property. In keeping with this policy, Israel has allocated to settlement vast tracts of this “state land”, stretching far beyond their built-up sections. The lands allocated to settlements have been declared closed military zones and are off limits to Palestinians, except by special permit. In contrast, Israeli citizens, Jews from around the world and tourists can enter them freely.

At present, settlements cover 53,813 hectares of land – almost 10% of the West Bank. Their regional councils control another 165,037 hectares, including vast open areas that have not been attached to any particular settlement. This brings the total area under the direct control of settlements to 40% of the West Bank, and 63% of Area C.

Along with this governmental land grab, settlers have exploited the forced separation between Palestinians and their land to build houses, outposts and roads, sow fields and groves, graze livestock and take over natural water sources – all outside the vast areas already allocated to the settlements. This is attended by routine violence against Palestinians. These actions play a major role in the implementation of Israel’s policy in the West Bank by complementing official measures. The settlers’ apparently independent actions serve as a privatized system for taking over land, allowing Israel to establish and expand entire settlement blocs through an unofficial sidetrack while formally disavowing these actions.

Unlike the restrictive planning policy enforced upon Palestinian communities, Israeli settlements are fully represented in the planning process, enjoying detailed outline plans and advanced infrastructure. Although the state uses the same professional and legal terms to refer to both Israeli and Palestinian construction in the West Bank with– such as building and planning laws, urban master plans, planning procedures and illegal construction – it applies them very differently in practice. When it comes to Israeli settlements, the state turns a blind eye and offers support and retroactive approval, all as part of an overarching policy to de-facto annex parts of the West Bank to Israel’s sovereign territory. Palestinian communities, on the other hand, are subjected to painstaking bureaucracy, stalled plans and widespread demolitions, in keeping with Israel’s policy to prevent Palestinian development in the West Bank and continue dispossessing Palestinians of their land.

The establishment of the settlements contravenes international humanitarian law (IHL), which states that an occupying power may not relocate its own citizens to the occupied territory or make permanent changes to that territory, unless these are needed for imperative military needs, in the narrow sense of the term, or undertaken for the benefit of the local population.

The existence of settlements also leads to the violation of many human rights of Palestinians, including the rights to property, equality, an adequate standard of living and freedom of movement. In addition, the radical changes that Israel has made to the map of the West Bank preclude any real possibility of establishing an independent, viable Palestinian state in fulfilment of the right to self-determination. Although the West Bank is not part of Israel's sovereign territory, Israeli has applied most of its domestic laws to the settlements and their residents. As a result, the settlers enjoy almost all the same privileges as citizens living within Israel. Meanwhile, Palestinians continue to live under martial law and are thereby systematically deprived of their rights and denied the ability to have any real impact on policymaking with respect to the territory in which they live. In creating this reality, Israel has formed a regime in which a person’s rights depend on his or her national identity.

Israel has refrained from formally annexing the West Bank (except in East Jerusalem). In practice, however, it treats the settlements established throughout Area C as extensions of its sovereign territory and has virtually eliminated the distinction for Israeli citizens – while concentrating the Palestinian population in 165 disconnected “islands” (Areas A and B). This double movement, of Israeli settlers taking over more and more West Bank land and Palestinians being pushed aside, has been a consistent mainstay of Israeli policy in the West Bank since 1967, with all Israeli legislative, legal, planning, funding and defense bodies working towards that end.

DEIR DIBWAN, West Bank — Palestinians in this town woke one morning last month to find their mosque vandalized, with a Star of David painted on the exterior alongside Hebrew graffiti accusing it of preaching “incitement.”

“We are at an alarming point,” said Barakat Mahmoud, the mosque’s imam. “We’ve never had direct confrontation with the settlers in this town.”

The incident was one in a recent spate of attacks blamed on Israeli settlers that officials on both sides of the conflict say are spiking. Israel’s security agency, Shin Bet, documented 295 of what it calls “Jewish terror” incidents last year, a 40 percent increase.

Although no Israeli government figures were available for January, the United Nations had recorded at least 30 incidents this year in which Israeli settlers were accused of causing casualties or damaging property, with a total of 14 Palestinians injured and one killed.

The most serious incident took place in January near the rural West Bank village of al-Mughayyir, when a Palestinian was shot dead, allegedly by settlers belonging to a volunteer security team for the nearby Israeli settlements. According to the United Nations, nine other Palestinians suffered gunshot wounds when the settlers opened fire during a confrontation on the outskirts of the village.

Israeli monitoring groups say the surge in settler violence, in part, reflects a lack of Israeli law enforcement and a response to a rash of particularly distressing attacks by Palestinians against Israelis.

While the number of Palestinian attacks in the West Bank dropped last year, their severity appeared to increase. According to Shin Bet figures, six civilians and five soldiers were killed. The agency said there were 1,153 Palestinian “terror” incidents in the West Bank, a figure that includes stone-throwing. 

Especially upsetting for many Israelis was the death of a baby boy who was born prematurely after his pregnant Israeli mother was injured in a December drive-by shooting near the settlement of Ofra, one of several such attacks. The recent **** and slaying of a 19-year-old girl from another West Bank settlement as she walked in woods in Jerusalem has shocked many Israelis and prompted calls for revenge from the extreme right.

Such incidents can trigger what are known as “price tag” attacks, a name originally given to vandalism and violence carried out by Jewish extremists against the Palestinian community and sometimes the Israeli security forces in response to violence or punitive action against settlements or settlers. Now, the phrase refers more generally to reprisals against Palestinian communities.

The United Nations and other organizations that track violence by the settlers have expressed alarm about the increase of Israeli attacks in the West Bank, which has been occupied by Israel since the 1967 war. Some 450,000 Israelis live in settlements deemed illegal by most of the international community.

Previous U.S. administrations criticized the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, saying they were an obstacle to peace. But that position has changed during the Trump administration. David M. Friedman, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, has said he sees settlements as part of Israel.

A more sympathetic U.S. policy toward settlements may have emboldened the extremist youths who carry out reprisal attacks, according to Lior Amihai, executive director of Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group that tracks abuses against Palestinians in the West Bank.

“Among that settler ideology, there are people that look and say there is no reason why anyone should stop us from meeting our political aspirations,” Amihai said. “There is a right-wing government in Israel and a friend in the White House.”

“When they don’t meet them, they are frustrated,” he said, noting the existence of right-wing groups that use attacks to advance their political interests.

But, he added, attacks may also be increasing because Israeli authorities are turning a blind eye.

In 2016 and 2017, settler violence had dropped sharply, which some observers attributed to a crackdown by Israeli authorities. 

After a 2015 arson attack in the village of Duma that killed a Palestinian couple and their 18-month-old child and was blamed on Jewish extremists, the Israeli army used administrative orders to ban those involved in such violent activities from entering the West Bank or detain them without due process. 

Trials are rare, but last month, a 16-year-old Israeli student at a West Bank religious school was indicted in the death of a Palestinian mother of nine who died after a rock hit her while she was driving. The teenager’s DNA was found on the rock. Four others arrested in the case have been released for lack of evidence.

An Israeli army official who declined to be named, in line with Israeli military protocol, said that most attacks by settlers are against property and that only rarely are people hurt. He said it is “simply not true” that the army does not intervene to protect Palestinians.

Yizrael Gantz, a settler leader in the West Bank, sought to downplay the extent of the problem, saying the violence is perpetrated by a small group of troubled youths.
'Things got out of control'

It is in the olive groves, fields and hilltops surrounding Arab villages that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is fought day by day. The incident last month in al-Mughayyir is an example of how easy it is for events to spiral out of control.

Awad Naasam, a resident of the village, said he was spraying pesticides around his olive trees just after 2 p.m. when about 15 settlers wearing balaclavas tried to steal his tractor and then, when it got stuck, smashed it with iron bars. His cousin, who jointly owns the land, called the Israeli district office that deals with security coordination between Israelis and Palestinians for help. Naasam and his cousin say they were too scared to retaliate against their attackers.

But about 3 p.m., the volunteer security detail for the nearby Israeli settlements said it received a call from a young Israeli near al-Mughayyir in distress, saying he had been stabbed.

“We don’t know if the stabbing of the youth was connected to the tractor. All we know is, from a security perspective, that we were alerted and things got out of control,” said Moshe Tamir, the head of 49 “fast response” teams for settlements in the area. The teams include 2,000 armed volunteers, among them many retired army combat soldiers.

Tamir said his volunteers advanced down the hillside toward the village, concerned that Israelis had been kidnapped.

Al-Mughayyir’s mosque announced over its loudspeakers that settlers were “attacking,” and hundreds of villagers headed to the outskirts of town, throwing stones and using slingshots, villagers recalled. “We were afraid they were going to burn our houses,” a 55-year-old resident said.

The settlement security team opened fire with live ammunition, and Hamdi Nassan, 38, was shot dead. Several others were wounded, including Abdel Abu Alya, who said he was shot in the shoulder.

Members of the settlement security team later said they felt threatened.

Palestinians said the Israeli army did not intervene to stop the settlers. The army said it was investigating the incident.

Gantz, who heads the Binyamin regional council covering several dozen West Bank settlements north of Jerusalem, blamed the Israeli violence on a group of about 20 vagrant troublemakers who he said are estranged from their families and live in caves.

He said they are violent because of their emotional needs. “They want someone that will take care of them,” he said.

The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem stresses that the activity goes beyond a few “rotten apples” and says the Israeli government ignores extremist violence because it helps settlers expand their West Bank presence.

When Gantz met with an Israeli army division commander just before the al-Mughayyir incident, the settler leader said, he could “smell” that a “bad period” was on its way because the settlers were upset over Palestinian attacks.

“We had five terror attacks here in a small area,” he said, adding that the local settlers’ sense of “self-security” had been dented. “I can’t predict what someone will do when he’s afraid. Now everything is more sensitive,” he said.

Talk of retaliation for Palestinian violence is in the air.

At a demonstration in the West Bank city of Hebron last month, Rabbi Ariel Levy called for reprisals in response to the **** and slaying of 19-year-old Ori Ansbacher, allegedly by one of the city’s Arab residents. In comments published by the extreme right-wing website Jewish Voice, Levy urged, “Real revenge, not of individuals but of the entire public.”

Lol
Ya, It's long but mine was a bit long too, so I'm not complaining about that.
And It's more sensible than previous.
I'll take me some time to figure out how to respond concisely so ... leaving that to later.