If Israel's government fully intended to destroy whatever sympathy remained for it in the rest of the world, there would be few better ways to do so than to undertake policies as mendacious and unfair as those outlined in this report.
ISRAEL has ordered an urgent review of the seizure of thousands of acres of land from Palestinian farmers, who were cut off from their ancient olive groves by the separation barrier built in the West Bank.
Menachem Mazuz, Israel’s Attorney-General, admitted yesterday that the policy of seizing land in east Jerusalem from so-called “absentees” had been approved secretly by Cabinet ministers last summer without his consent.
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Hundreds of farmers in Bethlehem have been unable to tend their olive groves and citrus orchards because of the electric fence that cuts through their land. In November they were told that the land had been seized for the expansion of Jewish settlements.
“How are we absent?” Jonny Atik, a 55-year-old farmer, asked as he surveyed his eight acres of inaccessible fields just metres away yesterday. “I can see my land, but we were never able to get permits to allow us to go there. It was my family’s land even before the Israelis established their state.”
In July 2004 the Israeli Cabinet approved the land seizure using legislation from 1950 that allowed confiscation without compensation from Arab “absentee” landlords who fled during Israel’s independence war.
Farmers such as Mr Atik and his neighbours had continued to farm their land, as their families had done for generations, without hindrance until Israel began construction of its separation barrier almost two years ago. Now he is unable to harvest his olive crop because Daniel Seidemann, his Israeli lawyer, could not secure a permit.
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Hanna Nasser, the Mayor of Bethlehem, said: “This is nothing other than land theft.”
Mr. Nasser is right: that is all this is, and no spin is going to convince me that secretly passing legislation to rob Arabs of their land, without even the promise of compensation, is anything other than state-sanctioned robbery. How does the Israeli government expect any sort of meaningful negotiations to ever get off the ground if it embarks on such egregious criminality even as it claims to be willing to make "hard decisions?"
It is very similar to what the South African government did during the apartheid years.
Posted by: John | February 01, 2005 at 10:01 AM