Mitzpe Danny, West Bank: One night in the fall of 1998, a self-professed “outpost entrepreneur” brought three trailers to a rugged hilltop in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and established his first pirate colony.
Dozens of youthful supporters came to cheer on the illegal claimant, Shimon Riklin, whose wife, newborn and toddler joined him a few days later. A second family also moved in. To their initial surprise, nobody from the military or government came to remove them. “After six months,” Riklin said, “I understood it was a done deal.”
They went on over the next few months to help establish Mitzpe Hagit and then Neve Erez a short drive away. “I jumped from hill to hill,” Riklin said.
Today, more than 40 Orthodox Jewish families live in Mitzpe Danny, one of a string of colonies on a strategic ridge with breathtaking views southwest to occupied Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives and east all the way to Jordan. They are part of an expansive network of about 100 colonies established mostly over the past two decades without government authorisation.
At least one-third of these have either been retroactively legalised or — like Mitzpe Danny — are on their way, in what anti-colonist groups that track the process see as a quiet but methodical effort by the government to change the map of the West Bank, now in its 50th year under Israeli occupation, by entrenching the colonies that spread like fingers across it.
With the Israeli-Palestinian peace process dormant and the international community increasingly suspicious of the right-wing Israeli government’s commitment to the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state, the colonies are being seized on as evidence that the conflict may be impossible to unwind. In its July report, the so-called Quartet of Middle East peacemakers — made up of the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia — listed it as a trend “imperiling the viability of the two-state solution”.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was in his first term when Mitzpe Danny was founded, has since endorsed the idea of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, and said that his government would not build new colonies or expropriate land for existing ones. But Ziv Stahl, the research director at Yesh Din, one of the left-wing advocacy groups, said “they are authorising them in disguise.”
Israel, Stahl said, has tried to avoid international censure by registering colonies like Mitzpe Danny as “neighbourhoods” of established colonies, though some are far apart and function as separate enclaves.
Pointing to other Israeli measures, including the demolitions of unauthorised Palestinian structures in the West Bank, she added, “We see it as a very gradual move toward annexation.”
Asked about the legalisation of colonies — and the international criticism — Netanyahu’s spokesman, David Keyes, did not respond directly, but instead turned the question to the Palestinian leaders’ stance that no colonies could remain in the West Bank under a future deal.
“The frequently echoed Palestinian demand to ethnically cleanse their future state of Jews,” Keyes said via email, “is outrageous, immoral and antithetical to peace.”
The colonies are strategically located alongside more than 120 colonies that were formally approved by Israel, and are home to a fraction of the West Bank’s 350,000 Jewish colonists.
One group stretches east of Shilo, like beads on a chain: Shvut Rahel, Adei Ad, Ahiya, Kida, Esh Kodesh. These colonies command the hilltops between Palestinian villages like Qusra, Jalud, Al Mughayyer and Duma, the scene of last year’s deadly arson attack in which one young Israeli has been charged with murder and another with conspiracy.
Rabbah Hazameh, a Palestinian whose family owns olive orchards and agricultural fields in the area, said that colonists prevented him and his relatives from working their land close to Adei Ad, and that trees had been damaged and poisoned. He said that his uncle had submitted 86 complaints to the Israeli police over the years, but “nothing happened.”
While most of the world considers all of these colonists a violation of international law, Israel itself makes distinctions, including whether they sit on privately owned Palestinian land and whether they had government approval for construction.
A government-commissioned 2005 survey by Talia Sasson, a former state prosecutor, counted at least 105 colonies that were established in “blatant violation of the law” and called for “drastic steps,” including the immediate removal of those on private lands.
But in 2012, Netanyahu commissioned another panel that came to starkly different conclusions.
Led by Edmund Levy, a retired Israeli supreme court justice, this report concluded that the West Bank is not actually occupied — in part because Jordan’s previous 19-year hold there was never internationally recognised — and that there was no impediment to approving colonies that were built on state land with what it called the “implied agreement” of senior Israeli officials. The Levy report, though, upheld the Israeli policy that colonies on private Palestinian land are illegal.
Under international pressure, Israel has repeatedly pledged to remove unauthorised colonies. But it has also tried to salvage some, even on private land, such as Amona, which is scheduled to be dismantled by December 25 under an order of Israel’s supreme court. The residents of another such colony, Migron, which Riklin also helped establish, were moved in 2012 to temporary homes on nearby public land.
Netanyahu’s government in 2011 had already quietly introduced what it called a new “combined policy.” The idea was that Israel would remove colony structures built on privately owned Palestinian land, but, in areas that Israel has declared as state land, would instead “regulate the planning status” — or, in other words, legalise construction after the fact.
The first indications of changes in status of specific outposts have mostly emerged in the Israeli government’s responses to court petitions by anti-colony groups.
This was the case late last year, when the Israeli Supreme Court dismissed a petition for the demolition of an illegal structure in Mitzpe Danny after the state told the court that it was advancing a process to authorise the colony.
The court cited an October 2015 decision of an Israeli planning committee to promote an old master plan for Jewish population growth in that area.
Mitzpe Danny is defined in the plan as a “neighborhood” of Ma’ale Michmash, the mother colony across the highway, though part of it lies outside the colony’s broadest boundaries. According to the blueprint, Mitzpe Danny is projected to accommodate 189 permanent homes by 2040.
The colony lacks the kind of detailed urban plan required to be fully authorised by Israel, and the court acknowledged that the planning process was moving slowly. But Peace Now, another anti-colony group, says at least 20 colonies have already completed the planning process or have detailed plans in the works with the defence minister’s approval; 14 others are in the pipeline.
Hagit Ofran, the director of Peace Now’s colony watch programme, said the government’s message was “build and we will sort it out retroactively.”