Liberation from Aaron Barak's Belligerent Occupation

In an April interview, Talia Sasson said in an interview with TOI's David Horwitz that

if Edmund Levy’s committee decides to tell the government that the territory of Migron can be taken despite the Supreme Court’s decision and they decide to do it, who knows? They can do anything. It’s 11 o’clock in the morning now? They can say it’s 11 at night. What can I tell you? I have no words.

Well, Makor Rishon this past Friday has reported that the special experts' committee of the outpost/satellite communities is adopting the legal position which I, and others, have been promoting for years.

On its front page, we can read that the committee members, former Supreme Court Justice Edmund Levy, District Court Judge Techiya Shapira and former Ambassador and Foreign Ministry Legal Advisor Allan Baker will be recommending to the Prime Minister that the opinion of former Supreme Court President Justice Aaron Barak be rejected.

That opinion, which accepted the clearly wrong concept that Judea, Samaria and Gaza were to be considered as "belligerently occupied", (see: "...such also is the law of belligerent occupation, in the framework of which Israel acts in the occupied territories" and in 2002's HCJ 7015 & 7019/02: Judaea and Samaria and the Gaza Strip are effectively one territory subject to one belligerent occupation by one occupying power, and they are regarded as one entity by all concerned, as can be seen, inter alia, from the Israeli-Palestinian interim agreements" although revpages 615-616 here but see Howard Grief here) may finally be overruled and the correct, just and correct legal standing of those areas will be established.


Those areas of the former Mandate for Palestine were illegally occupied by Jordan. They cannot have been "occupied" by Israel as they were a part of the territory to become the Jewish National Home. The state and waste lands in those regions were to be used, if not privately owned, to facilitate "close Jewish settlement". And as I have been championing, all property that was a gratis gift of the rulers of Jordan and upon which no building was built, no house was constructed, no field was planted and harvested nor any taxes paid should be returned to its previous legal status as state land and we have solved the articially created problem of "illegal construction".

As the Jewish Press has it, too:

The 90-page report, including addenda, discusses at length the issue of the outposts. Levy, Baker and Shapira fundamentally reject the legal line used by Attorney Talia Sasson in her report on the outposts. To their understanding, the vast majority of outposts can be defined as legal, since they are within the master planned areas of legal settlements whose establishment was approved by the government. The committee further recommends that the Nature and Parks Authority [headed by former Yesha Council senior member and Gush Etzion Regional Council Chairman Shaul Goldstein - YM] declare thousands of acres in the Judea and Samaria as national parks, to facilitate the preservation of their environmental resources. With the conclusion of the committee’s work the ball returns to the court of Prime Minister Netanyahu and Justice Minister Ne’eman, who ordered the report.

Could it be that we are on the brink of a major legal revolution, or, actually, a restoration?

A restoration of national sovereignty, of national standing, of national pride?

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Another 'Illegal Outpost Settlement'?

I hadn't heard of Dale Camp before.

I learned that

Dale Farm is a plot of land on Oak Lane in Crays Hill, Essex, United Kingdom. Until October 2011, it was an Irish Traveller halting site which had been established without planning permission. The site is owned by members of the travelling community and is located within the Green Belt. In October 2011, to give bailiffs safe access to allow a clearance order to be executed, some residents and activists had to be removed from the Dale Farm site - this action gained international press coverage.

At its height, Dale Farm, along with the adjacent Oak Lane site, housed over 1,000 people, the largest Traveller concentration in the UK.

In essence,

in 2001. At this time unplanned development started...Various planning breaches were reported. Basildon Council first served enforcement notices in 2001 and the Travellers brought legal action in an attempt to have these repealed. The council has said that planning applications for the caravans and chalets on the site were rejected because the land was green belt.

And now this, found here:

After the hard-fought, violent and costly eviction of the Dale Farm illegal traveller camp, some may have thought the decade-long saga had finally reached an end. But...the battleground has merely moved a few yards away...since Dale Farm was cleared in October at an estimated cost to the taxpayer of £18million, there has been an extraordinary explosion in the number of caravans pitched on the legal Oak Lane site next door...Basildon Council is preparing to serve eviction notices on half of the site’s 34 pitches by the end of January. The notices would give the travellers 28 days to vacate the land...the travellers say they are determined to fight any council moves to evict them. One, who would give her name only as Kathleen, said: ‘We are going nowhere. When they serve the notices we will ignore them.


‘People are ready to fight for their homes again. It will be like another Dale Farm situation all over again.’ Kathleen, 23, added: ‘They may send in the police and the bailiffs but we will stay here.’

...A total of 43 people were arrested and several injured after Dale Farm protesters fought running battles with riot police in October in the eviction of about 80 families from what was the UK’s largest illegal traveller settlement. A decade-long legal battle was declared a success and Basildon Council announced that the six-acre site, which was built illegally on green belt land, was clear...campaigner Mary Anne McCarthy, who lived on the Dale Farm site for ten years, said: ‘There will be another Dale Farm stand-off, there is no doubt about it. The travellers have nowhere else to go and this is their home. They will fight for their homes and livelihood.

In the UK, the legal process had taken ten years and in Israel, they sweep in overnight even before all legal avenues have been exhausted.

It even went international:

a mediation offer by Jan Jařab, the regional representative of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, was rejected by the Foreign Office

New costs for removal, under 8million pounds.

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Posters On the Outpost Campaign

Posters that have gone up relating to Givat Assaf and Migron threats of dismantlement.

a)  Givat Assaf Valiantly Struggles to Halt the Expulsion; Stop the Tools of Destruction

b)  Mass public prayer assembly

c)  Yesha Rabbis' Committee urges determined action

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Are The Givat Assaf Residents Comfortable?

Will Oz Tziyon help Givat Assaf?

Or harm its future existence?

After today's events, the new outpost set up by Daniella Weiss (1:45) and Rabbi Levinger (at 1:00), do the residents of Givat Assaf feel comfortable?

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Alei-Ayin Destroyed

The satellite outpost of Alei-Ayin was destroyed this morning as has been reported to me.

It is located north-east of Shiloh, behind Esh-Kodesh and opposite the old radar station post of Keida.

It is approximately located here:

A recently married young couple, the Zeevs, lived there in one stone house with another stone-structured sheep pen. They tended to 120 trees.

The work was done by the Civil Administration and the Yassam riot police unit.


P.S. Just informed that property damage to Arab vehicles was done near the entrance to Shiloh which is to be condemned as illegal, immoral and stupid.

P.P.S.   Pictures:

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He Took The High Road

The View from a West Bank Hilltop

“The water is out again,” Batsie Zar shouts to her husband, Itai, from the kitchen.

He quickly gets on his cell phone, trying to get one of the other young men in this isolated hilltop—one of about 100 illegal settlement outposts across the West Bank—to turn it back on.

If it’s not the water, it’s the creaky generator for electricity that fails, Itai Zar cheerfully complains as a pitched wind whistles against the window panes of his compact home in Havat Gilad. In the winter, a fire crackles in the wood stove Zar welded together himself to cook meals for the family.

...During a quieter period, Zar walks through the outpost, past chicken coops, grazing horses and young men driving a tractor through a wheat field. He points out the new houses built here in the six years since he and his wife first came, setting up a home in a shipping container.

The army evacuated them once; they promptly returned. The outpost was built as an act of revenge, Zar said, for the shooting death of his brother, Gilad, on a nearby road in May 2001. His brother had been the head of security for Karnei Shomron, a West Bank settlement where the brothers grew up.

There is a rustic, almost Old West feeling to the outpost. Overlooking a Palestinian village, Havat Gilad is accessible only by a dirt path off the main road. At the entrance, a wooden Star of David built into a pair of wooden posts welcomes visitors. One of the posts bears a faded orange ribbon left over from the campaign in 2005 against Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

Some of the outpost’s scattering of homes are made of wooden siding. One even boasts a front porch. Another has a bright red roof.

The settlers here say they are proud they used Jewish labor to build their homes; most Jewish houses in the West Bank are built by Palestinian laborers. Private donations paid for their generators and water tanks.

Zar says an American Jewish donor provided $30,000 for initial infrastructure costs in Havat Gilad...

Read it all

The Raising...and Lowering of Outpost "Pnei Shiloh"

A few people decided to "establish" an outpost community next to Shiloh, on the other side of Highway 60, on an abandoned army base.

I didn't take part but Yonah Tzoref provdied me with a few pictures from which I have selected these:


It's up:

It's being reviewed:

It's being filmed and recorded:

It's down:

The Border Police woman making sure it becomes history:

Water, Water, Everywhere...

On Wednesday morning, the Israelis did take one small step, but that effort fell short. The Israelis sent a small force to an illegal hilltop settlement outpost in the northern West Bank. The site, Esh Kodesh, falls into the category of outposts that Israel has pledged to dismantle.

The forces disconnected a pipe bringing water from the settlement’s tower, then left. An hour later, the settlers had reconnected the pipe, witnesses said.

Dani Dayan's Op-ed on the Outposts

Legal, and then some
By Dani Dayan, Chairman of the Yesha Council

"What made the government - our government - decide to build outposts on the hilltops? Was it by chance? Someone's capricious move? Not at all. The outposts on the hilltops were meant to allow the Jewish settlements to live in security."

These unequivocal statements were made in October 1999 by the man who would, years later, father the Sasson report on outposts, the head of the opposition, Ariel Sharon.

And so, the common fib alleging that the so-called "hilltop youth" group of settlers came at night to take control of the hill of their choosing against the will of the authorities is nothing more than legend.

The settlements referred to as "outposts" were set up by the government, which decided to form small towns before the completion of the relevant formal procedures. The settlers were that government's envoys.

That is how the government chose to populate the land then. The government found it convenient - mostly because of foreign policy considerations - to pursue that policy rather than implement more transparent policies. That policy was a legitimate tool for a country engaged in a regional struggle, and it makes ridiculous the claim that the outposts were never approved.

The town of Bruchin lies near the Trans-Samaria Highway. What makes it seem illegal to Attorney Talia Sasson, who heads the committee on the so-called illegal outposts?

The decision to form Bruchin came from the ministerial committee on settlement in 1983. Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin approved the decision in 1988. Former defense minister Moshe Arens also gave his approval to Bruchin's construction several years later. The area designated for Bruchin was all state-owned.

The state approved the development of infrastructures for the town. The non-governmental pacifist organization Peace Now argues the state invested over $3 million in the town. Bruchin is now home to some 80 families, who most ly reside in permanent homes.

The government, following Sasson's lead and the media, claims that Bruchin is unauthorized and illegal.

Bruchin was authorized by the appropriate state authorities. The land it occupies is state land, and it has a detailed municipal outline. But since its formal approval process isn't completed, Sasson calls Bruchin an illegal outpost. And so, the Israel Electric Corporation does not upgrade the town's infrastructure.

On the western side of the Green Line lies Lehavot Haviva, a veteran kibbutz belonging to the Hashomer Hatzair movement. I do not know whether in 1949, when the kibbutz was established, or in 1951 when it was moved to its current locale, it was done as a government resolution.

What is certain is that the kibbutz was set up on lands that did not belong to the state.

Before it was moved to its current location, the authorities evicted the people of the Arab village Jalameh, in the framework of a plan by the Prime Minister's Office to "remove small Arab shanties and move their inhabitants to larger villages." The residents of the land were transferred to neighboring Arab villages.

Sasson is troubled by municipal blueprints that have been lawfully approved. Well, Lehavot Haviva has a blueprint which was approved in 1980 - 31 years (!) after the kibbutz was formed. For 31 years, the kibbutz had been, according to Sasson philosophy, an illegal outpost. And yet, no one demanded it be removed.

That was how the country was populated in the 1950s - and that's a good thing. Otherwise, the borders of Israel before the 1967 Six-Day War would have been without Jewish settlements to protect the bulk of its civilian population.

That used to be the procedure through which town and settlements were approved, and it was law. Compared to what went on in those years, the procedure for setting up the "outposts" is a temple of decorum and of justice. No one had been evicted from their homes for the formation of a Jewish settlement.

That was how the land was populated in the 1990s and in the early 2000s, and that's a good thing too. Otherwise, the government's policy for furthering Jewish settlement in the heart of the land would have gone unimplemented. That was the procedure for approving settlements. It was also the law.

The issue of the outposts is not a legal one, but a matter of foreign policy. Otherwise, the pledge to evacuate them would have been made to the president of the Supreme Court instead of the U.S. Secretary of State.

Among the bad inheritances that Sharon's cabinet bequeathed its successor is the asinine formula, which is also in the road map, which binds the war on terrorism with the freeze in construction in settlements and the uprooting of outposts.

It links the duty to fight a terrorist planning on exploding a man or a woman at a crowded cafe to the war against a young couple seeking nothing more sinister than building their home next to the parents' home.

We need to evict that immoral formula from our agenda.

Haaretz's List of the Satellite Communities

Source

See this story.

They sure know how to beat a dead horse.