Dror Etkes Doesn't Read My Blog, Apparently

Or maybe he does.

Dror Etkes headed up the Peace Now Settlement Watch Team and is now much more radical and heads up that of Yesh Din.

I found this in Der Spiegel:-

A gray pick-up truck speeds up to the metal gate at the entrance to Shilo, a Jewish settlement halfway between the Palestinian cities of Ramallah and Nablus and which is home to 2,500 people.

Dror Etkes, 41, puts on sunglasses and a blue cap. He is hoping not to be recognized. Settlers in the West Bank consider Etkes, who has spent more than nine years making note of every new house built in the more than 120 Israeli settlements here, their number one enemy. A settlers' newspaper once printed his picture with the caption "Dror Etkes, head of the peace movement's intelligence service."

So Etkes employs various tricks to gain admittance to the settlements. Nearly every one of them, for example, contains a minimarket. When the guard at the Shilo gate asks where he's headed, Etkes replies, looking bored, "To the minimarket." The guard believes him and opens the metal gate.

'A Bad Joke'

Just a couple hundred meters on, Etkes finds what he's looking for -- a "For Sale" sign advertising "10 family homes." From the top of a hill, Etkes watches Palestinian workers who are using wooden slats to prepare a framework for concrete. "The foundations are from December," Etkes states knowledgeably and clicks his camera shutter button.

Now Etkes has further proof that there has not in fact been a "freeze" on settlement building since November, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would have the world believe. In any case, the Israeli cabinet also made exceptions in the moratorium for public buildings such as synagogues and preschools, as well as allowing private homes already under construction to be completed...

My gosh.

a. this site (and this one) has a about a dozen photos of our construction work which the Americans have observed (just last week a relatively senior diplomat was by). no secret as they also have satellite overpass photography. better than Etkes' overflights.

b. the foundations were a bit earlier but we have had permission to build there from about a dozen years ago and had done infrastructure work years ago.

c. those 10 homes are already sold, and 6 are occupied (or should that be lived in?).

d. we have more under construction if Dror wants to know. all legal.



And don't mix this construction company up with my Shiloh.


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