The LA Times and NY Times both cover news of Israelis taking a wall down from around Gilo, described as the outskirts of Jerusalem. But it’s not as if the removal of the wall will give Palestinians access to Gilo. Or increase their freedom in any measure. No it’s a security barrier for the settlers, and its removal reflects greater sense of freedom among the colonizers. LA Times caption:
Israeli army engineers remove cement blocks from a security barrier in Gilo, a Jerusalem suburb annexed in 1967. The blocks were set up during the second Palestinian "’intifada" or uprising in 2000 to block gunfire from adjacent West Bank towns.
Nothing about Gilo being a settlement. And the Times story, by Isabel Kershner, also provides not an inkling that Gilo is a settlement, until the fourth paragraph, and then that view is ascribed to Palestinians.
In the past only the ravine separated Gilo, built by Israel on land it captured from Jordan in the 1967 war, from the predominantly Christian West Bank village, Beit Jala, and other localities sprawling over the opposite hills near Bethlehem. Within the Jerusalem city limits defined by Israel’s leaders after the war, Gilo is considered by most Israelis to be one of the city’s southern neighborhoods. But most Palestinians consider it a settlement built on occupied land.
It’s not just the Palestinians that regard it as illegal. I’ve seen Gilo. It’s a spanking new settlement that is gobbling rural Palestinian lands. Villagers sit on backhoes trying to stop the landgrab. The geneticist Mazim Qumsiyeh has been arrested for this conduct.
