Ramallah: The Israeli regime has claimed that the Palestinians benefit from the West Bank-based Israeli colonies, citing employment opportunities for the Palestinians in those colonies and industrial zones set up by the colonists.
In its response to the Israeli Higher Court of Justice, Israel said the Palestinians benefited most from the spreading Israeli colonies and the expropriation of their lands as it gives them employment.
Villagers of Anata near Jerusalem petitioned the Israeli court about the expropriation of 30,000 dunums of their private land. The Israeli daily Haaretz reported that the Palestinian petition requested the cancellation of a 1975 order to expropriate territories from Palestinians in order to build the colony of Ma’ale Adumim, a key colony bloc near Jerusalem.
In the state’s reply to the court, it was claimed that “the expropriation has fulfilled its objectives, and therefore should not be returned to its original owners as both of the populations, the Israelis and the Palestinians, benefited from the expropriation.”
Attorney Netta Oron, of the State Prosecution Office Higher Court Division, who represents the state of Israel, said in the state’s reply that “about 194 Palestinian workers are employed in Ma’ale Adumim area and about 2,800 are employed in Ma’ale Adumim industrial zone in industry, services and construction.”
“There is no justification on earth that can justify land grab and expropriation,” said Ghassan Doghlous, the Palestinian official in charge of overseeing Israeli colonial activities in northern areas of the West Bank. “Colonists set up their colonies on Palestinian private lands, which comes in total violation to all international conventions and treaties,” he told Gulf News. “The fake, weak and baseless response of the state cannot make an excuse for the Israeli daily land grab and the Palestinians will never forget what is theirs.”
Doghlous stressed that the Palestinians do not benefit from the colonies set up on their private territories at all, but currently find no other alternative for bread winning other than working in those colonies. “Had the Palestinians been able to keep their private lands, they would have cultivated those lands and never needed to work in the colonies,” he said.
Israel often seizes Palestinian lands citing military purposes, but after a short while those lands are passed to major colonial organisations which use the lands to build new colonies or expand already existing ones. Israel also declared “abandoned lands” as state lands which were also used to build colonies or expand existing ones. He said that all Palestinian lands whose owners lived outside the Palestinian territories (who were expelled or forced to flee the territories either in 1948 or 1967) were put under auspices of the Israeli Absentee’s Property Guardian which turned them to state lands on which Israeli colonies were built.
