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…
http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/77378/girls-at-war/?all=1
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.
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.
http://www.peacenow.org.il/eng/content/hayovel-and-haresha-illegal-construction
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.
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].