Israeli guard tower on road near Migron settlement in the occupied West Bank
Watch this space. Migron is an illegal Jewish outpost of 50 families in the hills east of Ramallah. The Israeli Supreme Court has now ruled that it must be demolished by March 2012. Will it be? Also: Peace Now has concentrated great resources on trying to uproot Migron. Haaretz reports on earlier efforts to remove the settlement:
At the end of 2003, Migron was up in arms. Then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had told the heads of the Council of Jewish Communities in the West Bank that he was planning to evacuate Migron.
On December 14, there was a meeting with OC Central Command Maj. Gen. Moshe Kaplinsky and other senior officers that dealt with preparing for the evacuation. The operation was given the code name "Exposed Hill."
After that meeting, Kaplinsky wrote to the chief of General Staff that his men were ready for action, and asked him to "speed up the decision-making by the political echelon." The settler community began to mobilize, and people began to stream to the site to prevent its evacuation....
Within weeks of all this, Sharon began speaking publicly about the disengagement from Gaza, and the evacuation of Migron dropped off the agenda.
In 2006, some of the landowners and Peace Now petitioned the High Court of Justice, asking it to order the evacuation of the outpost. The state admitted in court that the outpost had been built on private land, and would be evacuated by the end of 2007.
Then the evacuation was canceled...
link to tabletmag.com
A child of God, Bat El had found her own Woodstock—one made even more alluring by the imminent threat of violence. There was a swing on an old olive tree. A mangy dog with tics the size of beetles that frightened the living daylights out of her. For water the hilltop girls had to make their way back down the road to the gas station and fill up plastic bottles. They had no electricity. She pointed to the shack where the boys slept. Total separation of the sexes, she said. Pieces of wood and aluminum were flung about, remnants of the last time the police had ripped up the place.
Soon, a few other girls from Ma’ale Levona arrived. For each of them, hiking up to the hilltop outpost was a political act, but it also had the feeling of a simple teenage hang-out—someplace far away from adults. A bright articulate girl from Ramat Gan near Tel Aviv had also come along. Her name was Lea Kop, and she was a web activist and disciple of Daniella Weiss, the old Gush Emunim member who grandmothers the Bnai Akiva youth movement. She’d photographed most of the evacuations and expulsions and posted the albums on the web. “Wherever there’s an atmosphere of destruction, we need to change the intention and expand. It’s the program of the hilltops,” she told me.
Apparently the government and the Yesha Council had nearly convinced the families of Migron proper—those 15 to 20 trailers where we’d left the car—to relocate to a settlement closer to Jerusalem. This place was too close to Ramallah. When Daniella Weiss got wind of the plan, she sent out her troops. It was a humiliation tactic: A 14-year-old girl can live outside the fence but you cannot?
“We say, ‘Don’t be afraid to go beyond the fence,’ ” Lea explained, her enormous green eyes inflamed with fervor and pride. “It’s strange to say it, but you look at Arabs and they are not scared to go anywhere, to hitchhike anywhere. They go around the whole area freely without fear. Why is that?
“I think it starts with fences,” she said, answering her own question. “The moment you are in the fence you feel what’s in the fence belongs to you, and outside the fence is not yours. Now we go everywhere and Arabs are scared. Why? Because they see we are not scared.”
They have a system set up so that if anyone sees a convoy of police vehicles coming to destroy their shacks, they send out SMS to the youth. And the youth come to face down the police. I asked her what her parents think about her being here.
“They are scared,” she said. “But I explained to them I am not here for myself; I am here for the people of Israel. So I have no choice whether to be here or not. I’m obligated.” Her parents, she said derogatively, are state people. They follow the law. “I think if there are clashes between the laws of Torah and the laws of the state, I will allow myself to violate the laws of the state.”
Bat El was lying in the grass. The birds were singing. A soft wind was blowing. Another girl was inside the shack smoking and studying for an exam. This was every rebel teenager’s paradise—nature and a cause.
The whole article is worth a read- How an outpost becomes a settlement, and the delusions folks tell themselves that allow land theft.
and how impressionable teenage girls are used by older men
“Aren’t they beautiful?” a psychiatrist and playwright from Jerusalem asked me, of such girls. “Pure faith mixed with youth. It’s the most EROTIC thing.” …………..Hmm????……….
“In the clip, Tamar is seen alternately sobbing into her grandmother’s arms and raging back at Bibi—angry not just at her loss, but at the official hypocrisies.
“What will happen if you do something?” she asked the prime minister. “YOUR AMERICA WILL BE ANGRY? America will do something to you?”
When the prime minister tells her, “THEY MURDER. WE BUILD ,” she challenged him. ”
link to tabletmag.com
Oh, they are so brave, so young, so beautiful, and sooo “erotic”.
They probably will offer Bibi a free sex, day and night, if he can make Big, Bad AMERICA to listen to him. Not only the Congress ,but also the whole “Bibi’s America”.
“Pure faith mixed with youth.”
Run away, as fast as you can!
more of the craiziness.
“Lenny’s all about strength, fighting back, looking like nut jobs. “We shouldn’t complain if CNN and BBC make us look like crazies,” he said. “That’s our trump card. The greatest deterrent factor you have with the Arab is they think you’re crazy.”
He put on the voice of a namby-pamby teacher: “We love and they hate.
We build and they destroy,” he whined. “No! King David killed.”
He mentioned the famous Golda Meir quote: “ ‘I can forgive the Arabs for killing our boys but I can’t forgive them for making us kill them.’
That’s this, like, Jewish form of AIDS. Jews feel guilty about everything. They feel guilty about winning. … We’re so used to losing, getting killed all the time, Auschwitz, Holocaust.”
His philosophy is simple: Violence pays. Look at Egypt, he said. That’s how you get things done. “The intifada. Self-sacrifice is how they got land. So I am proud of my kids getting arrested. If they do things for God, I’m proud.”
I followed him and his daughters Moriya and Roni outside to the backyard. The land is rocky, conducive to cactus, and sprinkled with yellow wildflowers. On the hilltop across the road there’s a warehouse and tractors, where Benjamin Kahane’s father-in-law keeps some 200 goats. Sometimes they’re stolen, said Moriya. It’s a shepherd’s war between him and the Palestinians. Moriya loves that he lives and harvests in the open fields, outside the barbed-wire fences.
“You plant a tree in Israel for roots. But goats move. The land becomes yours by using it,” said Lenny. “It’s not just Arabs who graze. We don’t have to be in a ghetto. It’s law of the jungle: Use it or lose it.”
Looking out over the windblown hills, the rugged earth, and white-stone beauty—the donkey braying, the rooster crowing, the pumpkins and watermelons across the way—it was easy to see the romanticism of Lenny’s messianic, anti-consumer, anti-technology, agrarian, grazing war.
He worried that without ideology, his kids would go soft. “The Arabs have Islam. The Quran gives them motivation and that’s why they are dangerous,” he said. “You can’t be a technical robot. We need Judaism.”
another “golden ” sentence from the article.
It show the massive scale of the total brainwashing.
How do you reverse THAT??
“God punished us because we probably don’t do what he wants.
I think we need to do revenge against the Arabs.
And we don’t do nothing, our army.
But I’m not blaming the army, I blame the government.
They’re stupid .”
“‘I can forgive the Arabs for killing our boys but I can’t forgive them for making us kill them”
“I can forgive the Nazis for killing our people but I can’t forgive them for making us hunt them down for 60 years.”
What puke.
Will it be removed?
The colonists raise hell when a so-called outpost consisting of two and half trailers is removed. The potential removal of 50 colonist families will spark an uproar that could unseat Netanyahu. So the answer is, “Highly unlikely.” After all, this ain’t 2005 (See Gaza colonies).
In addition, whether Netanyahu is PM or not, as with the Apartheid Wall in Bil’in, a court ruling doesn’t necessarily translate to an execution of the court’s orders.
YESHA is like Citibank . Too big to fail. Untouchable. Which means when the sh*t really hits the fan the repercussions will be dreadful.
Zionism has always been about audacity. Build a fort . Secure it. Build another. Migron is the same logic. But the stakes are too high now. The risk is coming back to Israel and it is too big for Israel to manage.
“But the stakes are too high now.”
Why do you say that? Seems like a win-win for Israel. They can build more settlements until they acquire all the “facts on the ground” they want. If there is a massacre of settlers, then Israel has the excuse it needs for even more direct ethnic cleasing, even annexation.
Did that settler apartment block in EJ that has who knows how many demolition orders get demolished yet? Weren’t the five extra floors illegal? The settlers rule the whole country. Between now and March (being in UK, I’d initially thought it meant 3rd Dec) Yahu may have his bill to ‘legalize’ these settlements organised. Foresee compulsory purchase orders for pennies on the land value.
link to peacenow.org.il
I remember Hagit Ofran said in a lecture a few years ago that most of the illegal settlements, that is the settlements that did not seek permits from the Judea and Sumaria regional council of the state’s Ministry of Housing and Construction, have multiple pending demolition orders.
Did you read the page to which you linked?
At the very bottom it states:
This means that the government is taking its time in issuing a final determination on the demolitions so as to slowly annex the land as State Land, whether by declaring it a Closed Military Zone, Abandoned Property etc.
Meanwhile demolitions of Palestinian structures on Palestinian land proceed at breakneck speed. And sometimes, that’s literal.
Chaos, that is not true, Arabs build far more illegal structures in the Land of Israel than Jews do.
and that will continue as long as palestininas can’t get building permits. do you want them to all live in tents? they bulldoze them too.
Considering Israelis generally make it illegal for Arabs to build at all?
“Arabs build far more illegal structures ”
Yea like Arab familes who put up tents after Isr bulldozes their homes …and then Isr calls those shelters illegal.
You are an upside down person.
Hill, House, Road, Protection, Army…, Next Hill. Sounds like little baby-steps, but as you can see for yourself/ves, over time it becomes a giant leap [into the abyss of moral despotism].
You cannot immerse yourself in the particulars of these issues while ignoring the root cause of the current debacle. You can talk all day long about each specific atrocity and wax eloquent about the racist proclivity of the Israelis or Israeli settlers, but the fact of the matter is that these people think they are ushering in an Eretz Yisrael based on ancient fairy tales regarding the region. The racism is taught in the text, the theft is seen as redemption, and they glory in the perceived fact that they fulfill the will of some deity no matter how morally repugnant to the common course of humanity. It is time to face up to the fact that we are facing horrible activity proceeding from a flawed foundation, a sort of turning the clock back where the land in central because of the supposed promise of some deity – and the longer you ignore and deny it the worse it will become, until genocide proper is reveled in by the perpetrators. You cannot reform the activity or adjust it, because it is inherently rotten.
VR,
Jewish history in the Land of Israel is not a “fairy tale”
right, and the seas parted.
Life ,in general, is not a fairy tale, unless you are a child of Rotschild’s, Gates’s or Rockefeler’s alike.
What is your point?
The Israeli made a living for Palestinians, for the last 60+ years, sort of like their version of Grimms Fairy Tales ,where they are the racists, aggressive villains who take a great , malicious pleasure in destroying their poor victims.
But this is not a fairy tale.
It is a sad, scary, accepted by many politicians and leaders reality.
“The Israeli made a living for Palestinians, for the last 60+ years, sort of like their version of Grimms Fairy Tales ,where they are the racists, aggressive villains who take a great , malicious pleasure in destroying their poor victims.”
Actually, dumvitae, you have described exactly what is your ‘fairy tale’.
“Jewish history in the Land of Israel is not a “fairy tale””
Hell no, it isn’t. It is a tragedy with a worse tragedy in the making. Couldn’t have put it better myself.
maximalistNarrative, what is your definition of a fairy tale? What is your definition of the “Land of Israel” for that matter? What do you consider Jewish history?
The “Land of Israel” is a biblical metaphor which can be interpreted as all of planet Earth. The modern militarized state of Israel is just a place named after a mythological one. Just like the Mt. Olympuses of the world. If the world ended and people thought the state of Georgia was Greece because of Athens, GA it would be the same method of thinking. Modern archaeology has proven that the ‘great kingdom’ and 12 tribes of Israel were very tiny in reality. Not great fortified kingdoms. They named the land off of their mythology and that doesn’t give any modern day people (other than the indigenous Palestinians) any right to live there. By that logic, the unorganized tribe of Manasseh (lit “Good Man”) belongs to all good men so the claim to the land is invalid.
The modern definition of Jewish is far removed from the biblical one. Early Christians considered themselves Jews. Metaphorically, it can even be extended to mean humans. We all sort of have a history with it then, eh? Don’t believe everything you read or are told. Especially if it’s in the newspapers.. then it is probably a fairy tale.
Jewish history in our land spans thousands of years.
This comment does not violate the comments policy.
“This comment does not violate the comments policy.”
Poor Maxi! Reduced to pleading with the moderators.
Gosh, Maxi, what do you think is responsible for this state of affairs? I mean, why do you think the other commenters seem to reject your, and I would guess, Israel’s, narrative? Why do they persist in seeing the Palestinians as redeemable, and fail to see the “Arabs” as evil? To what do you attribute this lamentable state of public ignorance?
Palestinian history in their land (which was stolen and renamed Israel by European Zionists) spans thousands of years.
This comment does not violate the comments policy.
My comment asking you a simple question apparently did violate comment policy. Though I can’t imagine how. You really have nothing to complain about, Max.
“Jewish history in our land spans thousands of years.”
The fairy tale narrative is old, so is the Christian one, and the Muslim (because the theos based seems to be unusually long lasting and repugnant) – and all of the other imagined deities they are based on (if you want to talk history of mythology). That any would persist and be the basis of daily atrocities is unacceptable in the 21st century, of course there is more to their longevity than belief – particular gain through theft (the fastest way to gain ascendance) and the elite use of these fairy tales among the ignorant population.
SKEWED SCIENCE, COLONIALISM AND ETHNIC CLEANSING
Added to the above title should be FALLACIOUS HISTORY. It is a cursory treatment, but worth the read. I find it ludicrous that someone would persist in these fairy tales that even our scholars have exposed. Before you try to take on what I say max, I suggest you think twice, you do not even know who you are conversing with – but the ignorant barge through where the studied fear to tread.
INCOMPLETE BUT TENABLE
It’s no use, VR. When somebody believes in something so religiously, it will take a miracle to persuade them otherwise. All religion and mythology have common elements. Even on islands isolated from each other for thousands of years.
In the beginning there was nothing, two deities (heaven and earth) came from nothing and created the physical world and life including man. Man becomes sinful and the planet is destroyed with fire and a flood. One of the creator beings intervened and saved some of original man. The other deity creates a new and different man. The old and new mate and their hybrid offspring creates a third hybrid deity and cuts off heaven from the earth. This forms a trinity. It’s in every single religion and mythology and it is a recurring element where these people go by new names. Sometimes the names are flipped to demonize the other. Neither of the original two deities is bad, they are just opposite. The third deity has both good and bad in them granting humans free will but the power to be both good and evil. That deity goes by several names but originally is Inanna/Ishtar (Lillith).
That trinity goes be so many different names. Cain, Abel, Seth. Issac, Abraham, Ismael. Osiris, Horus, Set. David, Solomon, Adonijah. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Same story told several different ways. The problem is the people taking it literally at face value. If there is a message buried in the story, they definitely don’t understand it
true to bad your land ain’t palestine
No it does not, most of it is Israelite history, and Caananite history, hard luck, but facts prove you wrong. I’m afraid that fairy stories is all you got.
Jewish history spans, etc. This comment violates facts, evidence, archaeology, and history.
All judicial systems require the ability to enforce their findings which is maybe why the Israeli courts drag their feet. If a judicial system is not able to enforce its findings then it will be reluctant to take on a case since what actually happens is up to the most powerful contender. This was the situation in Europe in the Middle Ages, laws but no justice. Oddly, it does not apply to Israel’s ‘despised’ Arab neighbours since however some of their laws may offend Western sensitivities they have no problem enforcing them.
link to nytimes.com
long answer no