Israeli Map Says West Bank Posts Sit on Arab Land
Steven Erlanger picks up this important story for the NY Times — Israeli Map Says West Bank Posts Sit on Arab Land; it first appeared a month ago and has finally made its way to the US media mainstream. Also picked up at Ha’aretz. Nice work to the Peace Now activist who brought it to light:
JERUSALEM, Nov. 20 — An Israeli advocacy group, using maps and figures leaked from inside the government, says that 39 percent of the land held by Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank is privately owned by Palestinians.Israel has long asserted that it fully respects Palestinian private property in the West Bank and only takes land there legally or, for security reasons, temporarily.
If big sections of those settlements are indeed privately held Palestinian land, that is bound to create embarrassment for Israel and further complicate the already distant prospect of a negotiated peace. The data indicate that 40 percent of the land that Israel plans to keep in any future deal with the Palestinians is private.
The new claims regarding Palestinian property are said to come from the 2004 database of the Civil Administration, which controls the civilian aspects of Israel’s presence in the West Bank. Peace Now, an Israeli group that advocates Palestinian self-determination in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, plans to publish the information on Tuesday. An advance copy was made available to The New York Times.
The data — maps that show the government’s registry of the land by category — was given to Peace Now by someone who obtained it from an official inside the Civil Administration. The Times spoke to the person who received it from the Civil Administration official and agreed not to identify him because of the delicate nature of the material.
That person, who has frequent contact with the Civil Administration, said he and the official wanted to expose what they consider to be wide-scale violations of private Palestinian property rights by the government and settlers. The government has refused to give the material directly to Peace Now, which requested it under Israel’s freedom of information law. READ rest of article here
I’ve worked out a detailed legal plan for how the zionists can solve this problem. I propose that instead of sending out tax dollars to Israel, the United States should manage a fund for zionists to contribute who want to appropriate the West Bank through less than honorable means. There are still large unused tracts of the western United States that are available for creative people who just want to live in peace. Water rights can still be a problem, but the Palestinians are well equiped to deal with those if they could get access to a fair hearing in court. And I’d like to see the Palestinians take advantage of it to create their own country right here in the middle of the land of opportunity.