Rewarding the lawbreakers: New settlement homes on confiscated lands
http://972mag.com/rewarding-the-lawbreakers-new-settlement-homes-on-confiscated-lands/65971/
Israel approves 90 new settlement homes in Beit El to reward evacuees from the evacuated settlement neighborhood of Givat Ha’Ulpana. The problem? The homes are to be built on lands confiscated for security purposes, a practice the High Court ruled against decades ago.
Ynet reported earlier this week that the government intends to reward the evacuees from the illegal settlement of Givat Ha’Ulpana for their blatant violation of the law by building them 90 new apartments in the settlement of Beit El. Unfortunately, no lands are available in Beit El for such purposes.
The only land available in Beit El is land that was confiscated by the army in the 1970s, and it can only be used for military purposes. There was a short period in which the army and the settlers worked hand in hand in arguing that the settlements are a “security necessity,” but those halcyon days were over after the HCJ decision of Elon Moreh. Since then, the government and the settlers had to find new and innovative ways of stealing land, the most prominent of which is designating Palestinian land as “state land”, and then, strangely enough, giving it away to people residing in another country. But that’s a whole new story.
