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Bedouin Resist Israeli Plan to Build Jewish Towns on Ancestral Lands •
Rice Faults Israel on West Bank Settlements •
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Israel Planning to Build Hundreds of New Homes on Occupied Land
By Griff Witte
The Washington Post
Tuesday 01 April 2008
Jerusalem - Israel said Monday that it would build hundreds of new homes on
occupied land it considers part of Jerusalem, just hours after U.S. Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice wrapped up a three-day visit to the region by saying
the peace process is "moving in the right direction."
The announcement of the new construction, the latest in a series of similar
projects advanced by Israel in recent months, was likely to anger Palestinians.
The issue also elicited criticism from Rice, who called on Israel to stop building
in contested territory even before Monday's announcement.
"Settlement activity should stop - expansion should stop," Rice
said at a news conference after meeting with Palestinian Authority President
Mahmoud Abbas.
Rice was on her second trip to the region this month. In recent days, she met
with top leaders, trying to build momentum in negotiations that thus far have
yielded little public progress. President Bush has said he wants to have a "signed
peace treaty" by the time he leaves office next January.
After prodding by Rice, Israel said on Sunday it would remove 50 roadblocks
out of nearly 600 in the West Bank that inhibit the movement of people and goods
in the name of safeguarding Israelis from Palestinian attack.
Settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem has been a persistent
flash point in Israel's negotiations with the Palestinians, who claim the territory
for their future state and want East Jerusalem as their capital.
Israel, which captured the land in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and considers
an undivided Jerusalem its capital, says it has the right to continue building
in Jewish neighborhoods in and around the city.
The new housing would consist of 800 apartment units in the northeastern Jerusalem
neighborhood of Pisgat Zeev, which is within the expanded but internationally
unrecognized boundaries of the city set by Israel after the 1967 war.
Shas, an ultra-Orthodox party in the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert, also said Monday it had secured his backing for the construction of
hundreds of new homes in the West Bank settlement of Betar Illit. A spokesman
for Olmert could not confirm that report but said Israel is allowed to build
in the settlement because it will be part of Israel under any future peace deal.
Israel has justified the expansions in part by citing a 2004 letter Bush sent
to then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in which he acknowledged "already existing
major Israeli population centers" that would prevent a return to the pre-1967
boundaries.
Olmert on Monday told fellow members of his Kadima party that the expansion
of existing settlements is acceptable. "All the reports of dramatic construction
projects in the territories are not true," he said, "and it's not
true that we're building in violation of commitments that were made."
The Israel-based advocacy group Peace Now released a report Monday saying that
construction in West Bank settlements has boomed since the Annapolis peace conference
four months ago. The organization documented new construction in 101 settlements.
"It's a slap in the face to the political process," said Hagit Ofran,
head of the organization's settlement watch program. "This is the same
mistake Israel has made since Oslo - building in the settlements and not understanding
that it's a sign to the Palestinians that Israel does not want peace."
Ofran said the move hurts moderate forces such as Abbas's Palestinian Authority
and strengthens more radical groups. "It plays into the hands of Hamas,
which says there's no use talking to the Israelis because they'll just build
more and more," she said.
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Special correspondent Samuel Sockol contributed to this report.
Go to Original
Bedouin Resist Israeli Plan to Build Jewish Towns on Ancestral Lands
By Dion Nissenbaum
McClatchy Newspapers
Sunday 30 March 2008
Wadi Sa'awa, Israel - There's no street sign on the dirt road leading
to Hassan al Finesh's corrugated tin shack in Israel's rolling southern desert,
only a large concrete block with a spray-painted warning: "Danger -
Firing Area. Entrance Forbidden."
Finesh and his extended Bedouin family didn't intend to live in the middle
of the Israeli military's training grounds. The Israeli government came along
a few years ago and transformed the unauthorized Bedouin community into a military
training site.
Last month, Israeli officials returned with a new warning for Finesh and the
200 other Bedouin residents: Move, or we'll demolish your homes.
"Where shall I go?" asked Finesh, a dejected, 67-year-old father
of nine who walks unsteadily with a hand-carved wooden cane. "Do they want
me to go to heaven?"
Israeli leaders have a $3.6 billion plan to transform the vast Negev desert
into prospering Jewish communities. Finesh and 80,000 other Bedouin say the
land is theirs, however.
As Israel presses ahead with the development, a Human Rights Watch report released
Monday concludes that it's using "discriminatory, exclusionary and punitive"
policies to push the aside the Bedouin, who are descendants of Arab tribes that
once roamed the Negev.
"Israeli policies have created a situation whereby tens of thousands of
Bedouin citizens in the Negev have little or no alternative but to live in ramshackle
villages and build illegally in order to meet their most basic shelter needs,"
the report says.
Since Israel was founded nearly 60 years ago, its leaders have been wrestling
with what to do with its small Bedouin minority, now climbing above 160,000.
Israel has pushed about half the Bedouin into sterile, depressed new desert
towns, demolished thousands of illegal shanties and transformed their sheep-grazing
pastures into dangerous military zones.
About 80,000 Bedouin living in more than three dozen unauthorized shantytowns
and villages refuse to move, even though they receive no electricity or water
from Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has set up a commission to come up with
innovative ways to handle the holdouts.
"The government of Israel understands that it needs to solve the problem
of the Bedouin," said Yehuda Bachar, the director general of a newly established
government department for Bedouin affairs. "If it is not solved now, it
will not be solved for many years."
The intent behind the plans is clear: Israeli leaders want to move the Arab
residents to make way for Jewish developments.
The Israeli government is looking to spend $3.6 billion over the next seven
years to lure more Jewish residents to the Negev, a triangular desert that makes
up more than half of the nation's land.
"The only chance for the development of the Negev is that we bring more
Jews," said Shmuel Rifman, the mayor of the local Ramat Negev Regional
Council, who supports a trickle-down theory when it comes to the Bedouin.
"When there are more jobs for the Jews, there will be more jobs for them."
As with Israel's clash with the Palestinians, the battle with the Bedouin is
over land.
Finesh was a young boy in what was then Palestine when Jewish militants beat
back Arab armies in 1948 after Israel declared its independence.
Most Bedouin fled. Israeli leaders debated what to do about those who stayed.
Ultimately, they relocated thousands of Bedouin, such as Finesh, to make way
for new Jewish arrivals. The Bedouin, who accepted Israeli citizenship, set
up villages that the government still refuses to sanction.
Because Israel doesn't recognize these communities, they receive no running
water, no state electricity and no local services. Power lines serving Jewish
towns run over Bedouin homes. A toxic waste site sits not far from one Bedouin
community. Compared with Jewish settlers at illegal West Bank outposts that
often receive basic power and security, the Bedouin get second-class treatment.
A few years ago, Finesh said, Israeli officials came and declared their homes
a military firing zone. Israel set up concrete blocks along the narrow road
with warnings in Hebrew and English but not Arabic.
Throughout the year, Israeli soldiers converge on the area to take part in
disruptive military exercises in the surrounding hillsides.
The threat to raze homes, which came last month, is real. Last year, Israel
demolished at least 225 homes, more than twice as many as in 2006, according
to the Regional Council for Unrecognized Villages. At the moment, Israel has
curtailed the demolitions while the Bedouin commission crafts new solutions.
Israel has tried various ways to eliminate the shantytowns, which have been
dubbed "unrecognized villages."
It's offered to pay the Bedouin about $40,000 per acre to give up their land
claims, a price that many consider too low for abandoning their historic family
rights. Israel also has encouraged them to move to seven specially created towns
that are among the country's poorest.
Meanwhile, it's established a kind of homesteading program that's encouraged
Jewish farmers to move to the Negev. It offers them cheap land - with rents
of as little as $3 an acre per year - and good deals to set up ranches, wineries
and farms.
That's led to long-standing rivalries between Bedouin families and Jewish farmers
that sometimes have exploded into fatal confrontations.
Last year, a Jewish farmer in the Negev became a vigilante cult hero after
he shot and killed a Bedouin trespasser on his land. Though Shai Dromi has been
charged with manslaughter, he's been celebrated by Negev residents who want
police to stop thieves who steal the farmer's sheep.
Negev farmers have slapped "We are all Shai Dromi" bumper stickers
on their cars. The Israeli parliament is debating a law that would give citizens
more protections when they fight off intruders.
Dromi's mother, Maya, is wary of government attempts to solve the problem.
"I used to be much more optimistic than I am today," said the 75-year-old,
who lives with her son. "It's hard today because I feel there is so much
mistrust that's built up over the years, and it puts a big question mark in
my belief that if you sit down honestly you can come up with a real solution."
--------
McClatchy special correspondent Cliff Churgin contributed to this
article from Jerusalem.
Go to Original
Rice Faults Israel on West Bank Settlements
The Chicago Tribune
Tuesday 01 April 2008
The top US diplomat, concluding a Mideast
visit, says construction of homes should stop.
Jerusalem - Wrapping up a Middle East visit to push forward Israeli-Palestinian
peace talks, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Monday criticized Israel's
continued building in West Bank settlements.
The Jerusalem municipality said it had approved plans for building 600 new
homes in Pisgat Zeev, a neighborhood built on West Bank land annexed to the
city after the 1967 Middle East War.
In addition, the ultra-Orthodox Shas party said Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
had promised to build 800 more homes in Betar Ilit, a town of strictly Orthodox
Jews near Jerusalem that is one of the fastest-growing settlements in the West
Bank.
"We continue to state America's position that settlement activity should
stop, that its expansion should stop," Rice said at a news conference after
talks in Amman, Jordan, with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
The U.S.-backed peace plan known as the road map, the basis of the renewed
negotiations, requires Israel to freeze all settlement activity and obliges
the Palestinians to break up and disarm militant groups.
Disputes over continued Israeli settlement construction hampered early rounds
of the talks, which were relaunched in November at a conference in the United
States.
The Palestinians assert that continued settlement expansion undermines the
negotiations and prospects for a territorially viable Palestinian state.
Rice, who met Monday with the Israeli and Palestinian chief negotiators, Foreign
Minister Tzipi Livni and Ahmed Korei, said the talks, about which neither side
has disclosed anything of substance, were making progress.
She gave no specific account of what had been achieved but expressed confidence
that an agreement could be reached before President Bush leaves office in January.
"I fully believe that it is a goal we can reach," she said. Bush is
expected in Israel in May to participate in celebrations marking the 60th anniversary
of the state's creation.
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