"We could just end up with more settlements overall," Etkes said, adding that he doubted that the original Palestinian landowners would ever regain their property. "Sometimes you might find yourself in a position where you win legally but lose politically."
Etkes says an aerial photo shows that Israel has violated the agreement signed in Washington in September 1995. One clause states: “All civil powers and responsibilities, including planning and zoning, in Areas A and B set out in Annex III, will be transferred to and assumed by the Council [the Palestinian government] during the first phase of redeployment.”
ARTICLE XI - Land
1. The two sides view the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as a single territorial unit, the integrity and status of which will be preserved during the interim period.
2. The two sides agree that West Bank and Gaza Strip territory, except for issues that will be negotiated in the permanent status negotiations, will come under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Council in a phased manner, to be completed within 18 months from the date of the inauguration of the Council, as specified below:
a. Land in populated areas (Areas A and B), including government and Al Waqf land, will come under the jurisdiction of the Council during the first phase of redeployment.
b. All civil powers and responsibilities, including planning and zoning, in Areas A and B, set out in Annex III, will be transferred to and assumed by the Council during the first phase of redeployment
The paragraph refers to the assumption of powers by the PA in areas A and B upon Israeli redeployment in 1995. This already happened. The PA did assume those powers including planning and zoning. Clause fulfilled.
Individual residents of Amona — and other Israeli individuals — were not parties to the agreement, and cannot be held to have violated it. Even if they could, they never had any authority over planning and zoning to transfer or fail to transfer. Israel was a party to the agreement, but nothing in that or any part of the agreement committed Israel to preventing Jews from construction in area B. Israel maintained security control in areas A and B and therefore maintained authority to, among other things, restrict movements of Palestinians in the area.
Article 10.4 of the agreement specified that “Israel shall continue to carry the responsibility for external security, as well as the responsibility for overall security of Israelis for the purpose of safeguarding their internal security and public order.” Article 12.2 stated that “Israel shall continue to carry … the responsibility for overall security of Israelis and Settlements, for the purpose of safeguarding their internal security and public order, and will have all the powers to take the steps necessary to meet this responsibility.” Article 13.1.a stated that “Israel shall have the overriding responsibility for security for the purpose of protecting Israelis and confronting the threat of terrorism.”
And, by the way, how exactly is it possible for aerial photographs to establish whether Israel did or not transfer the authority to regulate building and planning to the Palestinians in 1995?
the Haaretz report [was defined] as “political” and “nothing new.”...in total, the settlements are built on 6 percent of the West Bank land, and that the issue of private land ownership is “complicated,” given the different administrations of the West Bank going back to the Ottoman Empire, the British mandate, Jordan and now Israel.
Israeli officials add that some Palestinians sold their land to Jews but cannot admit it for fear of being labeled collaborators, while others have no papers to prove ownership of the land they claim.
...Peace Now is using satellite photos to track the growth of settlements and to show where building is going on without permits or in defiance of court orders to stop. B’Tselem, an Israeli human-rights organisation, has given small video cameras to Palestinians who suffer frequent attacks from extremist settlers...Also new is a shift in emphasis: turning the settlements from a political issue, which seems to have little traction with a cynical public, into a legal one. “We’re not saying that Israel shouldn’t have settlements,” says Dror Etkes, who headed the Peace Now anti-settlement project. “Go settle on the moon if you want to. Just show us that you are applying your own laws in what you’re doing.” Using the database he compiled, he is now working with B’Tselem and another group, Yesh Din. They plan to pepper the court system with dozens of cases of illegal building.
It often transpires that the work of propagandists is done by others, who are sometimes truly convinced of the frankness of their jabber, and at times are even willing to withhold details and tell tales just to serve the idea they wish to propegate.
It is hard to say what to attribute the declaration by Peace Now's Dror Etkes, who argued that "the conflict in this country is between Israelis, most of them the children, grandchildren and great- grandchildren of immigrants, and the Palestinians, who are the natives of this land," in his article titled "Israel's hollow declarations."
Etkes is not the most important thing here, and not even the organization that sent him on his "noble objectives" of monitoring and snitching, Peace Now. Neither he nor his movement has exclusive rights over the claim that "Palestinians are the natives of this land," and they are certainly not the only ones who carry the burden of the robbed Palestinian nativeness tale.
"Historical religious edicts" of this type were present alongside Arab propaganda almost from the very beginning of Zionism – and as we know, such "historical edicts" are superior to steadfast historical facts, particularly if these "edicts" come from old Arab religious schools or the schools of new Jewish historians.
And indeed, why the hell should we be strict with dry archival findings, such as the 1931 Land of Israel census, which showed that the place of birth of non-Jewish Jerusalem district residents spans dozens of countries? And why the hell should we tamper with well-constructed "edicts" and annul them because of trivial archival exhibits, such as the fact that the number of mother tongues of area residents is above 50, and includes among others Afghani, Persian, Kurdish, Bosnian, Sudanese, and Spanish?
And what point is there in paying attention to the point of annulling edicts, to declarations such as the one by the Mandate committee from 1936, which bemoaned the extensive free entry of Trans-Jordanians to Palestine, or the fact that in 1934 alone, 30,000-36,000 Syrians entered from one region alone? After all, even on the Israeli side, Mideastern politics has taught us that lies spread and even have many loyal customers who come back for more.
And after we equip ourselves with the historical-Etkes-ish ruling that all Palestinians are natives and most Jews are immigrants, this should make it easier for us to determine exactly where the line of compromise between us and "the natives of this country " should be drawn.
And so, the exaggeration and fabrication in describing the extent of the robbery of the "natives" by the "Jewish outsiders" are designed to grant substantive moral support to the "historical compromise" proposed by Etkes and his friends. After all, the worthiness of any diplomatic agreement is also measured on the basis of what each party to the conflict lost or gained in light of its initial state. The description of our initial situation as poor immigrants is supposed to provide us with a sense of substantive gain over the Peace Now compromise deal presented to us.
However, when "peace" ventures, withdrawals, and disengagements collapse like a house of cards before the eyes of Etkes and his movement, and when they and their leftist comrades discover that the threshold of Palestinian concessions is increasingly looking like a deceptive horizon, which moves further away as one approaches it, there is no wonder then that the industry of modifications, adaptations, and continued concessions does not rest for a moment.
And so, when it is clear to at least some of them that what was offered in the past, by their camp, is not even close to satisfying the hunger of the Palestinian partner, and when the vision documents recently formulated by Arab Israelis show us the futility of the claims that everything hinges on the question of "occupation" – we slowly begin to see a shift from the Zionist Left to its "post" and "anti" versions.
Perhaps the defiant reality, which is taking over any "good peace prospects" and among other things forces upon some leftists this shift to post-Zionism and anti-Zionism, is also responsible for the death certificate issued to Zionist leftist ideas. It is a pity…but then again perhaps it's not.
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