Settlement Construction Update
Settlement Report | Vol. 18 No. 6 | November-December 2008
Peace Now estimates that over 1,000 new buildings (2,600 housing units) are being constructed in West Bank settlements. One hundred twenty-five new structures have been added to so-called outpost settlements, including 30 permanent houses. Housing starts in the West Bank during the second quarter of 2008 increased by 42 percent from the same period last year. Seven percent of all new housing starts in Israel in 2008 are located in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem).
Construction continues in the settlements east of the barrier. At least 425 new buildings have been constructed there this year, including:
Kiryat Arba—approximately 50 housing units
Shilo—approximately 20 housing units
Dolev—approximately 17 housing units
Talmon (and its outpost)—around 30 housing units
Yitzhar—approximately 14 housing units
Eli—approximately 59 housing units
Itamar—approximately 10 housing units
Kochav Ha’Shachar—about 16 housing units
Kfar Tapuah—approximately 12 housing units
Nahaliel—approximately 10 housing units
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For the past 30 years, I have considered the settlements a destructive phenomenon that raises a large question mark over Israel’s future. In fact, the settlement enterprise is an ideological, political and social phenomenon that has succeeded in creating an original androgynous creation: Colonial Zionism . . . based on ethnic and religious inequality, which considers itself the exclusive emissary of Jewish history. The Divine promise and not the natural rights of human beings to freedom, independence and self-government is, in its eyes, the one and only source of legitimacy for the return of the Jews to the Land of Israel. According to this viewpoint, the land belongs not only to living Jews, but to all the past generations and those yet unborn; therefore, members of the present generation have no right to share possession of the land with members of another nation. . . .
[I]ts leaders and spokespersons show disdain for both the weak politicians and the basic tenets of democracy itself. They know how to exploit democratic institutions, but they ignore human rights and recognize only the rights of the Jews. Since the High Court of Justice decision on Elon Moreh in 1979, in which the court ruled that seizing private lands is illegal, they have been attacking this basic institution of Israeli democracy, the guardian of individual rights.
. . . The situation in the territories in general and the lawless outposts in particular, along with the theft of private lands, is testimony to the bankruptcy of the state when faced with the daring of the settler and his determination not to retreat before ethical or legal obstacles. In that way the settlement movement is perforce creating daily violations of the law and a culture of violence: Ofra and Beit El may be quiet and pleasant places settled by idealists, but together with their satellite outposts—Amona, Beit Hagedud and Ofra Northeast, Beit El East and Hill 909—they have seized an area that, according to aerial photos and information conveyed to the Peace Now monitoring committee by government authorities, over 90 percent of which is composed of private Palestinian land [figures from October 2006]. . . .
I have already written in the past in this newspaper, and I repeat it today: If Israeli society is unable to muster the courage necessary to put an end to the settlements, the settlements will put an end to the state of the Jews and will turn it into a binational state.
Ze’ev Sternhal, who was lightly injured in an assassination attempt on September 26, 2008, Ha’aretz, October 17, 2008
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