Region | Palestinian Territories
Lawsuit brings murky Israeli land deals to light
offers a rare glimpse into the bureaucratic smoke screen that helps ensure a strong Jewish presence on lands claimed by the Palestinians for a future state.
- AP
- Published: 21:59 June 21, 2009
Ofra Colony, West Bank: It reads like a standard real estate contract between a Zionist institution and an Israeli couple.
But it offers a rare glimpse into the bureaucratic smoke screen that helps ensure a strong Jewish presence on lands claimed by the Palestinians for a future state.
The document, which surfaced in a case before Israel's Supreme Court, shows that the World Zionist Organisation (WZO), acting as an agent of the Israeli government, took private Palestinian land in the West Bank and gave it to Jewish colonists, even though the state itself had ordered the property declared off-limits to colonisation.
The affair points to a chaotic mix of a government at odds with itself and involved in murky real estate deals fronted by one of the Zionist movement's most respected organisations.
It's not the first time such land deals have come under fire, but in the year since the case went to court, the political context has been overturned.
US President Barack Obama, in a departure from Bush administration policy, is pressing for a complete freeze in colony development as a prelude to a new push for Mideast peace.
The contract authorised Netzach and Esther Brodt, a couple in their early 20s, to lease land in the colony of Ofra where their home and eight others are in contention.
When Israeli human rights groups and Palestinians who claim to own the land went to the Supreme Court to get the houses torn down, they went with the knowledge that demolition orders had been issued against construction at the site.
The court gave the state two weeks to explain itself, during which time the colonists hastily completed construction of the homes. Then, in another reversal, the Defence Ministry froze the demolition plan, and left the case no closer to resolution.
After Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip, east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights in the 1967 war, the government began settling Jews in the captured territories.
To avoid complications stemming from international law, it turned to the WZO, setting up a special colony division not technically part of the government but entirely funded by it. The manoeuvre has served to cloud the issues and confuse the finger-pointing when uncomfortable questions arise.
Such questions had already arisen in 2005, when a government-commissioned report accused the colony division of complicity in diverting funds and confiscating West Bank land to put up some of the more than 100 "outposts"- small wildcat colonies - that colonists have built, some on privately held Palestinian land.
They had no government sanction, yet a slew of former cabinet ministers, colony leaders and lawmakers have confirmed that they went up with the full knowledge of the state, and their removal is viewed by the US and others as a first step toward a broader rollback of colony expansion in the West Bank.
The case before the Supreme Court involves not a flimsy "outpost," but Ofra, a full-blown colony of 3,000 Jews, 24 kilometres north of occupied Jerusalem.
Yesh Din, one of the Israeli rights groups that went to court, says the land was stolen.
"It's like I was going to sell a house that didn't belong to me," said Dror Etkes, Yesh Din's colony expert. "It's an international organisation that is, simply put, stealing land."
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