News

Influential Israeli org ‘Regavim’ focused on expelling Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line

Regavim2
Regavim2

There is a frightening article at +972 about an extremist national-religious social movement  whose influence is on the rise in Israel. They are being recieved with open arms by much of the government apparatus.  They call themselves Regavim.

Their goal is to promote “a Jewish Zionist agenda for the State of Israel” but what that agenda amounts to is the expulsion of the Palestinian population from what they consider to be Jewish Land.

+972: Rightist group’s creeping state influence, on both sides of Green Line

Regavim does not deal with settling the land with Jewish Israelis, but rather with the expulsion of the Palestinian population on both sides of the Green Line. The association is active in Area C of the West Bank, in the Negev, the Galilee and the “mixed cities.” In all of these arenas, Regavim has one clear goal: the brutal and selective implementation of planning and construction laws, encouraging the state to demolish Palestinian homes or public buildings. The demolition orders issued lately for the entire Palestinian village of Susya in the South Hebron Hills are the fruit of its labors.

Their rhetoric about ‘Arabs taking over the land of Israel’ in the video is blatant. We referenced Regavim recently in Michael Sfard: Addicted to the process, seems they’re in like flint with Gerald Steinberg and his NGO Monitor.

A central theme of its recent critiques has been of NGO “lawfare,” achieving “political” goals through the courts. There are at least three examples of pro-settler Israeli NGOs engaged in “lawfare,” as defined by NGO Monitor: the Legal Forum for the Land of Israel, the Israel Law Center and Regavim, but you will not find even an acknowledgment of their existence among the hundreds of documents on its Web site. We have another option. Steinberg’s and Dermer’s cynicism has created an opportunity to dismantle the power structure that forces Israelis to continue defending Palestinian human rights, 42 years after the “temporary” occupation of the West Bank and Gaza began.

Regavin makes some outlandish allegations on their website claiming Israel’s Supreme Court shows ‘extremely’ preferential treatment for the ‘Extreme Left‘. Interestingly, unlike B’tselem, nowhere do they link to their ‘data’ backing up these allegations.

From their homepage:

This issue is so important, complex and widespread that we believe that only the state holds the key to a realistic overall solution to rooting out this problem. Based on this assumption, Regavim’s activities are directed at influencing all the State of Israel’s government systems in order to bring them, and effectively the whole country, to act based on the fundamental principles of Zionism and protect Israel’s lands and national properties.

More from  Rona Moran and Miryam Wijler’s +972  must read article.

In recent years, since the Israeli disengagement in the Gaza Strip and the dismantling of the settlements there, the extreme right in Israel has embarked on a campaign of settling the “mixed cities” of Israel (cities with sizable Arab and Jewish populations) by forming “Torah clusters” (Garinim Toraniim) – in Jaffa, Acco as well as Lod. At the same time, Jewish nationalist shows of force have escalated within Arab localities. Regavim is a characteristic expression of this wider campaign. It takes a considerable amount of cruelty to encourage the state to tighten even further the veritable noose of planning restrictions around the neck of Palestinian communities within the Green Line. Palestinian citizens of Israel own a very small percentage of the lands they had owned before 1948, most of their localities do not have master zoning plans, and the local and regional planning committees are staffed exclusively by Jewish Israelis.

……..

Regavim’s activity is based first and foremost on the work of coordinators on the ground, who systematically document construction in Palestinian communities. This documentation serves the association in lobbying planning committees, local authorities, the Civil Administration in the occupied territories, and others. They have a single demand: to force these institutions to place sanctions on Palestinians. In some cases, the association appeals to court in order to force the implementation of standing demolition orders, or to produce a planning policy that is as Zionist as possible. Regavim promotes existing transfer plans such as its efforts to influence the Prawer Committee recommendations to take a harder line against the Bedouin community.

In April 2009, Regavim sued the Abu Basma Regional Council in the Negev, where the number of inhabitants in all known localities in the council’s area is about 45,000, but in fact the council provides services to another 35,000 citizens who live in unrecognized villages. The council ranks dead last in the socio-economic scale of the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics and where the council is not providing inhabitants within its jurisdiction area with the most basic services: connection to the water supply grid, regular garbage collection, sanitation infrastructure, and where access roads are not paved and the council’s welfare services are collapsing.

Here, of all places, is where the Regavim association suddenly discovered an urgent need to intervene “for the sake of the council’s inhabitants.” In its petition, the association demands the demolition of eight structures, which describes as “villas” and whose owners it describes as “real estate barons.” For Regavim, then, they have no qualms about using whatever means necessary to “protect the nation’s lands.” To that end, they encourage the state to beat to a pulp its most oppressed population.

27 Comments
Most Voted
Newest Oldest
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

these extremist zionist groups breaking into the open is helpful – the situation can be framed as the ongoing ethnic-cleansing started in 1947 by an apartheid regime which employs serial war-crimes to achieve its ends – including the systematic torture and murder of children … think that about sums it up

Zionism is dying. No middle class ideology can survive when it is driven by extremists who don’t understand the basic rule of law.

http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/after-zionism-into-the-void.premium-1.462826#

This summer was the toughest summer Israel has known, apart from wartime. Because the Zionist project – in its secular, liberal, civil and egalitarian form – failed. Not “will fail,” but “failed.” The reasons can be listed one after the other, but it’s enough to think about the little four and a half-year-old boy whose hands and face were covered with burns after a Molotov cocktail was hurled at the car in which his family was traveling on August 16, near the Bat Ayin settlement. The boy’s name is Mohammed Hassan Jayada. All six family members, Palestinians from Nahalin, were wounded, two of them critically.

Not long after the attack, pictures appeared in the media of the three children who were being held for the crime. They were arrested on August 26 at the Jerusalem yeshiva they attend. The boys were just 12 and 13 years old, with long, fair sidelocks hanging down below broad skullcaps, their faces blurred because of their status as minors, wearing striped shirts with their tzitzit visible underneath, handcuffed. These young boys are the suspects in this terror attack.

It’s impossible not to feel the pain when a child is a victim of terror, and it’s impossible not to cringe when a child is a terrorist. But by the look of these children – whose guilt is yet to be proven, and one wholeheartedly hopes that they were not the ones who did this – it’s clear that something has become completely twisted. The boys are suspected of deliberately hurling a Molotov cocktail at a car and setting six people on fire, permanently scarring the children in the car. It’s clear something has become twisted because the moment that nationalist crimes are being committed by children, we have entered a void.

Whoever treats other people this way has no understanding of what it means to inflict disability, to cause charred skin and horrible agony. And whoever has lost this understanding has lost his humanity. So the child suspects, if they turn out to be the actual perpetrators, are also victims. They are victims of an upbringing that preaches violence and hatred, and voids the term “human being” of all meaning. The father of one of the suspects told Haaretz that his son did not do anything, adding that, in any case, the incident cannot be seen as completely divorced from the reality in Judea and Samaria. He meant the reality from his point of view, naturally, whereby the land belongs to him by divine right and he is redeeming it from the hands of the evil nation of Amalek.

Wow. Just a caricature, amazing. It’s really spoon feeding the information to people, with almost no nuance at all.
Anybody taken in by this propaganda is already on board anyway though, and needs no convincing of anything, hence the lack of factual information and the non-existence of any real arguments and the couching of everything in this shallow, vague rhetoric of “the great nation”, “our people”, etc. Always this fear of being overrun by a nefarious group usurping the “rightful owners” of their property and rights. Anything considered not part of the “nation” (however it’s defined) is a malignant foreign influence to be eradicated, but they can’t come out and say it openly, so they’re forced to go through legal channels. In other words, a typical extreme right-wing movement, with fascist tendencies.
I’m reminded of the same hollow rhetoric in interviews with members of the US Nazi party, for example.

Such ideologies are sometimes derided as “anti-government” by liberals, but quite the contrary; they’re very pro-government, they just don’t think the government is doing its job – keeping out the “rabble”.

Crazy ziofreaks!
I noticed their cut-out Eretz Israel includes a chunk of Jordan. Wonder when and how they plan to pressure the government to invade and take that over.
The place is NOT their ‘homeland’. It’s the place maybe a handful of their ancestors came from, and the source of their religion. Same is true for those who are Christian.

Hey, Annie, check out Urban Dictionary’s definition of the expression “in like flint”:

Used by morons who are either too stupid, young, or lazy to make themselves aware of the original meaning of the phrase “In like FLYNN.” Originated from the actor ERROL FLYNN, who was an early twentieth century actor well known for being a ladies man.

Next time you hear someone say ‘in like flint’ slap them unless they’re talking about the 1967 movie by the same title.

:-)