Journalist Dahlia Scheindlin har skrevet om israelsk politikk i Area C. Samlet i EN artikkel får man her en oppsummering av den skvisingen som foregår av palestinerne.
Skal man kun ta for seg EN artikkel å forså det som skjer hver dag på bakken på Vestbredden ... - da leser man denne ene av Dahlia Scheindlin.
The New Battle in the Israeli Right's Relentless War on Palestinians
The
West Bank's Area C represents every layer of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict: Annexation vs. self-determination, inequality, violence and,
most recently, as the new front in the Israeli right's shameless
reversal of the truth.
Area
C represents every layer of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:
Annexation vs self-determination, inequality, violence and, most
recently, as the new front in the war over truth Credit: Avi Ohayon/La'am, Sven Nackstrand/AFP, Mussa Issa Qawasma/Reuters, Moti Milrod. Artwork: Anastasia Shub
Dalia is a wispy eight-year old with a brushed-back ponytail whose
heart-melting smile reveals terrible teeth. When she wasn’t proudly
handing out cookies to guests, she cuddled with her dad, Nasser Nawaja,
through his lecture on a sweltering Saturday in the Palestinian village
of Sussia.
Dalia is clearly comfortable hosting
visitors. The scrap of land in the South Hebron Hills has gained
attention in recent years for the partly-successful international campaign to stave off what would have been yet another demolition in Sussia’s long history of destruction and dislocation since 1986.
But when a threat recedes in one place it crops up in another: a few kilometers away lies Masafer Yatta, or "Firing Zone 918,"
where a smattering of Palestinian villages and approximately 1400
people have been have been fighting in court to keep their homes since
the late 1990s. In May, Israel’s High Court ruled against them, clearing the way for expulsion.
These territorial struggles represent the
fine-grain detail of life under occupation, but the big picture is Area
C. This region represents every layer of the conflict: The front-line
political struggle between Israeli annexation and Palestinian
self-determination, the tortured inequality and frequent violence in daily life. And, most recently, Area C has become the new front in the war over truth.
The geopolitical designations A, B and C are, well, the ABCs of the post-Oslo era in the West Bank. According to the 1995 Oslo II agreement, Area
A is governed by Palestinian civil and security control – fragments on
the map totaling about 18 percent of the West Bank, where the large
Palestinian cities and the bulk of the population are located. Area B
falls under Palestinian Authority control for civil affairs, but Israeli
military control.
Israeli
troops move an elderly Palestinian man during a protest against the
eviction of Palestinians and razing eight hamlets in Masafer Yatta,
south of Hebron, in Area CCredit: MUSSA ISSA QAWASMA/ REUTERS
Area C sprawls over roughly 60 percent of
the West Bank, with a thick north-south band along the Jordan River, an
unruly length along the Green Line and tangled east-west "C" regions
connecting everything. C looks like a cocoon for the future Palestinian
state, but acts like a straitjacket.
All
Israeli settlements are located here, with about 450,000 settlers (not
including East Jerusalem, which is annexed to Israel and therefore not
included in A, B and C); in Area C Israel’s army controls all civil and
military affairs – in other words, Israel controls C completely.
The political struggle is the top layer of
the big picture. In December 2012, Naftali Bennett, then the new leader
of the Jewish Home party, presented his big plan: Annex Area C.
His YouTube video
explains Areas A, B, and C, incorrectly depicting each one as nearly
equal in size. The narrator explains that Palestinians control A and B
(disregarding Israel’s military control over Area B). Area C, falsely
portrayed in the video as roughly one-third of the territory, is under
Israeli control – therefore annexation makes sense. The video is
helpfully subtitled into Arabic.
Screenshot from Naftali Bennett's factually dubious YouTube 'explainer' about Area C and his solution: AnnexationCredit: YourTube screenshot
Israel’s right wing had already openly embraced the idea by then. Tzipi Hotovely of Likud called to annex Area C back in 2010 and again as
deputy foreign minister in 2015, to a rising chorus of settler support
for annexation of Judea and Samaria in general. Benjamin
Netanyahu declared his support
for formal sovereignty over settlements in April 2019, for the Jordan
Valley in September that year, and for large portions of Area C again
via the Trump peace plan in 2020. Netanyahu suspended plans for de jure annexation in return for the normalization accord with the UAE signed that year.
This open commitment to annexation for years should remove any lingering
illusion that Israel’s right-wing political leadership supports a two
state solution: Carving Area C out of the West Bank would leave a
Palestinian state looking not even like Swiss cheese, but a cut-out
paper snowflake with precious little snow.
The Abraham Accords kicked de jure
annexation off the agenda for now, but on the ground itself, Israel’s
physical annexation long preceded Netanyahu, and continues unabated. In
visible and less obvious ways, Israel does everything to anchor its
control and make life untenable for Palestinians in Area C, presumably
hoping they’ll conveniently remove themselves to slivers of Areas A and
B.
By 2013, a policy brief by the European Parliament reported alarming acceleration
of demolitions of "houses, shelters, schools, clinics" – perhaps
including a shortage of dentists – "water wells, cisterns, playgrounds,
mosques." Hundreds of demolitions each year led to many hundreds
Palestinians displaced annually, the report stated.
These trends have only worsened since then, says Alon Cohen-Lifshitz of Bimkom,
a human rights NGO focused on spatial planning in Israel and in the
occupied territories. Once, demolition orders were issued weeks in
advance of being carried out, allowing residents time to appeal; now
they are served just days ahead.
In
Sussia, Nawaja relates that the orders might be delivered on a
Thursday, just as Israeli administration offices close for the weekend,
for demolition on Sunday. Cohen-Lifshitz explains that a single order
can cover numerous structures. He reported a new practice for "mobile"
structures: the IDF dismantles them, and serves the order afterwards.
Children play in the Palestinian village of Susya, south-east of Hebron, in the Israeli-occupied West BankCredit: HAZEM BADER / AFP
These structures are built illegally – without permits – because
Palestinians simply can’t get permits. From 2009-2018, the Civil
Administration approved 98 Palestinian building permits, out of nearly
4500 requests. In contrast, in 2019 and 2020 alone, about 18,000 settlement-related
permit requests were approved, according to Peace Now and Bimkom, based
on data from the Civil Administration. Bimkom found that of 1065
Palestinian applications in the same time, just seven were approved.
The planning committees (under Israel’s
Civil Administration, which comes under the aegis of the Ministry of
Defense) do not include any Palestinians. In 2014, petitioners asked the
High Court to restore Palestinian representation canceled decades earlier; in 2015, the High Court rejected the petition.
The
IDF also declares massive swathes of land to be "closed firing zones"
(like Masafer Yatta), or state-owned land, zoned for Israeli use – for
settlements, but also for parks, and a more recent push for settlement
agriculture. The most aggressive of the settlers regularly use raw
violence to keep Palestinians from accessing their land, or for general
harassment; while settlers and their land grabs are backed by the IDF.
Only 0.5 percent
of Area C is allotted for Palestinian development, according to
Cohen-Lifshitz. The current Israeli government has made a show of plans to permit new
Palestinian housing units – but the big picture remains. In May, among
frantic efforts to salvage the coalition by mollifying the most
right-wing members, the planning committee approved over 4000 new settler housing units.
For
Palestinians, nearly all construction in these villages is deemed
illegal by the Civil Administration, meaning they can’t access normal
electricity, infrastructure or, the ultimate prize, water.
A
Palestinian woman gives water to livestock from a water tanker, as
Israel's Supreme Court rejects a petition against the eviction of more
than 1,000 Palestinian inhabitants of Masafer YattaCredit: MUSSA ISSA QAWASMA/ REUTERS
Yet pipes crisscross the land, connecting settler outposts like Avigayil to freshly-painted (blue and white) water stations of Israel’s national water company while skipping past Palestinian villages. Some Palestinians erect solar-powered pumps to access well-water or improvised pipes – and then the IDF destroys them.
Some pay exorbitant fees for tanker water instead, while a big sign
near Ma’on – by all accounts one of the most violent settler outposts –
points to a "cherry plantation."
Between being squeezed off their land, the
constant threat of demolition or expulsion, starved of water, vulnerable
to rising, brazen settler violence
and tired of fighting just to survive, many leave for Palestinian
cities or towns – Areas A or B – serving the overarching Israeli
political aim: the fewest possible number of Palestinians in Area C.
But proof of Area C’s towering importance to Israel is the psychological warfare, in recent years, over the truth itself. The most
bitterly fought aspects of the Israeli Palestinian conflict have always
been subject to manipulation of "narrative." Lately, Israel’s narrative
is that Area C is threatened by – wait for it – a Palestinian takeover.
Settlers throw stones at Palestinians near the settlement of Yitzhar in the northern West Bank.Credit: AP
This is worse than bygone quibbles over
details. One such detail was the argument that Israeli settlements were
all located in large blocs in Area C adjacent to Israel. Therefore, in
that argument, settlement expansion in those areas wasn’t a problem, the
"blocs" could simply be awarded to Israel in a peace agreement, and the
rest of Area C was fully available for a future Palestinian
state. Netanyahu’s 2019 annexation plan put a spotlight
on the 30 settlements, 18 outposts, and nearly 13,000 settlers in the
Jordan Valley, which ought to have dispelled the myth of neatly
contained settlement geography.
Demography
is another longtime battleground for the truth. Right-wingers insist
that there are hardly any Palestinians in Area C, to argue the logic of
Israel’s permanent ownership. Bennett’s 2012 video asserted that a
paltry 48,000 Palestinians live there.
The most serious, field-based study by a UN humanitarian agency counted just under 300,000 in 2013. Btselem cites 180-300,000, and the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics estimates even more.
To be sure, no one knows how many Palestinians have left, but natural
population growth could offset any decline. The credible Palestinian
population sources are not updated, and Bennett gave no source at all.
Pulling
these threads together, the new Israeli narrative wants to own the big
picture. In 2019, Gideon Saar (then still in Likud) told Israeli radio:
"Illegal Palestinian construction in Area C is going wild,
with European financing, and the aim of the construction is to try and
suffocate settlements and take over the land – we need to fight over
this."
People
run from tear gas fired by the IDF during a demonstration by Israeli,
Palestinian and foreign activists against the eviction of Palestinians
for an Israeli military training zone in Area C Credit: HAZEM BADER - AFP
In March 2021, the right-wing extremist Ad Kan group "investigated"
the "massive plans" for Palestinian illegal construction in Area C.
Three months later, Saar’s key party member Zeev Elkin insisted on
leading the fight against Palestinian "spread" in Area C as a condition for joining the coalition.
Bennett’s own 2019 election manifesto explicitly promised to annex the whole of Area C to put it under Israeli sovereignty. In 2020, as Defense Minister, Bennett announced a "battle" for the future of Area C, to be formally managed within the Defense Ministry.
This January, following haranguing by far-right wing groups, the Knesset’s Security and Foreign Affairs committee held a discussion
on "illegal Palestinian construction" and "lack of enforcement” by the
Civil Administration – a shameless reversal of the truth. That didn't
stop the heads of the Knesset’s Land of Israel caucus from accusing
Bennett of actively assisting "the Palestinian Authority’s plan to take over areas of Judea and Samaria [the West Bank]."
Nasser Nawaja has been fighting to stay in
his home since he was first displaced from the original Palestinian
Sussia, in 1986 – he was three years old. At eight, his daughter is
already learning how to plead the case to visitors. It’s hard to fight a
juggernaut; but the fight isn’t over. Knowing and maintaining the truth
is a start.
Dahlia Scheindlin is a political scientist and public opinion expert, and a policy fellow at The Century Foundation. Twitter: @dahliasc
