Sixty kilometres south of Jerusalem, in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank, there sits on a hill the large Israeli settlement of Susiya. The settlement is illegal in international law, condemned in those terms by the British Government.
Source/Credit: The Times
By Jack Straw | December 27, 2013
West Bank families should be given building permits but not gratuitously harassed
I was in the middle of my Law finals, in June 1967, when the Six-Day War erupted. Neither I nor my friends shed a tear when the Egyptians and their allies were decisively beaten by Israel. Support for this young country was, if anything, stronger on the left in Britain than it was on the right.
I still support Israel, and its right to live securely within its international borders. But my reservations about its conduct towards the Palestinians have grown year by year.
On a visit this month I was shocked by what I saw of the Israelis’ actions towards Palestinian shepherd families in the South Hebron hills. The Israeli daily Haaretz described its Government’s explanation for these actions, as “sugar-coated lies”, which had won “this month’s George Orwell Prize for misleading language”.
Sixty kilometres south of Jerusalem, in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank, there sits on a hill the large Israeli settlement of Susiya. The settlement is illegal in international law, condemned in those terms by the British Government. Still, it’s there, and has all modern conveniences, including water and electricity.
Some Israeli settlers in these hills breed chickens. They have piped water, and electricity from the grid. But families in the Palestinian village of Susiya, just down the hill from the main Israeli settlement, have neither, even though the water pipes go through their land. The settlers pay 9 shekels (£1.57) a cubic metre for their water, piped. The Palestinians have to pay up to 35 shekels (£6.14) per cubic metre — from a tanker.
These Palestinian families, scattered across the bleak landscape, are now about 250 in all. They once had warm dry homes, built into caves in the hillsides. The Israeli Defence Force filled them in. They used to have many cisterns, large tanks excavated from the rocks. The IDF have filled many of those in, too. Meanwhile the families have to live in temporary structures — scaffold frames covered in plastic sheeting.
This land is the Palestinians’. They tell me they can prove their title back to Ottoman days. Ah, claims the Israeli Government, but as the occupying powers we have to follow the planning law of the Jordanians, the sovereign power before the 1967 war. The Palestinians have to have a permit for any structure. They don’t, so the structures have to come down.
The Palestinians say they won’t leave their land. They rebuild their tents. Their plight is repeated by other local herding communities and Bedouin across the West Bank.
These communities fight to stay, not by force of arms but by force of argument. They are supported in their fight by some courageous groups of Israelis: such as Rabbis for Human Rights and Breaking the Silence, a group of veterans from the IDF, who have broken the silence culturally expected of all who serve in the Israeli armed forces.
It was one member of this group who took me to Susiya. He told me of the patrols of his fellow soldiers in neighbouring Hebron to “make their presence felt”— through nocturnal break-ins to random Palestinian houses, pour encourager les autres.
With the help of these Israeli groups, the Palestinian shepherd families in Susiya applied for building permits. They were turned down. Try for a “master plan”, they were told. They did, to be turned down again, with language whose implausibility would not only have graced Orwell’s pages, but Kafka’s too. “The current [master] plan constitutes yet another attempt to keep a weak and downtrodden population from having the possibility of making progress,” said the Israeli Civil Administration sub-committee, in its rejection decision.
This population is not “weak”. I’ve rarely met such determined people. “Downtrodden” they are — by the Israelis. But that could easily be resolved if the IDF stopped trashing their land, and the Administration did what they do for Israeli Jewish settlers in similar circumstances — gave them building permits and connected them to the water and electricity grids.
If this happened, Israel would start to regain the natural support it had in 1967, but which by its own gratuitous actions it has been so carelessly throwing away.
Read original post here: Israel must learn that cruelty does not pay
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