Welcome to FMEP’s Weekly Settlement Report, covering everything you need to know about Israeli settlement activity this week.
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August 4, 2023
- High Court Dismisses Petition Against Homesh Outpost
- Israel to Advance More East Jerusalem Settlement Construction
- Israeli Government Funding “Red Heifer” Project that Will Obliterate Temple Mount Status Quo
- Yesh Din Makes Legal Case That Israel’s Occupation Has Lost Any Veneer of Temporality
- Bonus Reads
High Court Dismisses Petition Against Homesh Outpost
On August 2nd, the Israeli High Court dismissed a petition seeking the removal of the Homesh outpost and the return of the land to its Palestinian owners. The Court decided that the settlers’ relocation of the illegal outpost to a small sliver of nearby land that Israel considers to be “state land” has negated the basis for the petition to remove the outpost’s buildings from privately owned Palestinian land. This decision ignores the fact that the access road to the relocated outpost goes through privately owned Palestinian land, and the IDF protection of the Homesh outpost continues to deny Palestinian land owners access to their land.
Nasser Hijja, a village council member of Burqa – the Palestinian village which has historically owned the land on which Homesh settlement was built – told Reuters:
“This settlement is a nightmare for the residents of Burqa…[Israel] does not want any Palestinian presence on this land,” said Hijja.
Yesh Din, the Israeli human rights group which assisted Palestinian landowners in filing the petition, said in response:
“While Israelis everywhere are fighting to protect our High Court as a symbol of democracy, the justices yesterday have clearly reaffirmed what we already know: Palestinians in the West Bank are undeserving of protection under the law. This disgraceful ruling is yet another testament to the apartheid regime in the West Bank, which is being further entrenched every day and which the High Court has grown comfortable with normalizing.”
The Court’s rejection of the petition is yet another step towards granting retroactive legalization to the Homesh yeshiva, which settlers established in contravention of Israeli law on land that Israel had previously recognized as privately owned Palestinian land. The current Israeli government agreed to re-establish the Homesh settlement (which the government dismantled in 2005) as a matter of its founding coalition deals. Earlier this year, the Knesset repealed parts of the 2005 Disengagement Law in order to advance the Homesh project, and after the settlers moved the Homesh yeshiva’s buildings to a small sliver of “state land,” the government connected the outpost to water service.
Israel to Advance More East Jerusalem Settlement Construction
Peace Now reports that the Jerusalem District Planning Committee is scheduled to convene on August 7th and is expected to advance a number of East Jerusalem settlement plans, including:
- Nof Zion/”Nof Zahav” settlement enclave – a plan for 100 settlement units and two hotels (550 rooms total), located in the heart of the Palestinian neighborhood Jabal al-Mukaber. The construction projects are slated for the north eastern slope of the enclave in an area referred to by settlers as Nof Zahav. For more information, see FMEP’s previous reporting. At the upcoming meeting, the committee can decide to deposit this plan for public review.
- Ramat Alon settlement – two plans for a total of 1,918 new settlement units will be discussed for deposit. The Ramat Alon settlement is located northern Jerusalem
Israeli Government Funding “Red Heifer” Project that Will Obliterate Temple Mount Status Quo
The Israeli NGO Ir Amim has uncovered documentation showing that the Israeli government has been involved in securing special breed of cow (“red heifers”) from the United States that are intended to be used in a ritual sacrifice, a ceremony which Jewish law requires to be performed prior to entering and/or rebuilding the Jewish temple on the Haram Al-Sharif/Temple Mount. Ir Amim explains, “The quest to find a ‘red heifer’ has been long considered a fringe endeavor, yet the discovery of government involvement in such an initiative requires serious attention.”
Five cows believed to fit the criteria for the ritual sacrifice were imported from the U.S. to Israel in 2022, an endeavor which required special permission from the Bennett/Lapid government because it is illegal under Israeli law to import livestock from the U.S.. If there was any doubt that the government of Israel is aware of and supports the religious agenda behind the importation of these special cows, those doubts should be dismissed when considering that the government allowed the cows to be imported without inserting a tracking chip into their ears, which under Jewish law would defile the bovine.
Ir Amim further reports that the Director General of the Ministry of Jerusalem Affairs and Heritage attended and delivered a speech at the ceremony to welcome the cows’ arrival to Ben Gurion airport in September 2022. In the speech, it was revealed that the government funds the development of the ceremonial site intended to host the “red heifer ceremony.” The current government continues to support a scheme to build facilities for housing the cows at the Tel Shiloh archaeological site in the West Bank.
The project is being lead by the Temple Mount Movement and a U.S. Evangelical Christian group. The Temple Mount Movement used to be considered a radical, fringe interest group – which advocates for Jewish domination over the Holy Esplanade, the demolition of the Dome of the Rock, and for the Third Temple to be built. The U.S. evangelical group, Boneh Israel, was involved in sending the cows to Israel. Some evangelical Christians believe that the Messiah will return only after the “red heifer” ceremony kicks off the apocalypse.
The government’s involvement in such a scheme shows how flagrantly it disregards the status quo of the Temple Mount (for a more detailed explanation see here and listen here), and once again how what was once fringe is now official Israeli government policy. Case in point, a vocal supporter of the Temple Mount Movement, Amichai Eliyahu, serves as the Minister of Heritage and is active in advancing the Tel Shiloh project to house the cows. This week Eliyahu drew headlines for calling for the government to annex the entire West Bank, calling the “Green Line” fictitious.
For all the wild details of this story, see Ir Amim’s reporting.
Yesh Din Makes Legal Case That Israel’s Occupation Has Lost Any Veneer of Temporality
The Israeli NGO Yesh Din issued a new legal opinion arguing that the policies and practices of the Israeli government over the past 56 has transformed the legal status of its occupation, making it an illegal occupation that must be ended immediately. The paper analyzes key policies which demonstrate that Israel seeks to make its control of occupied Palestinian land permanent, most significantly through demographic engineering (the settlement enterprise), the creation of a nationality-based separation, both physically and legally, of individuals living in the occupied lands, and via the application of Israeli sovereignty.
The report’s summary reads:
“Throughout the 56 years of occupation, Israel pursued a policy aimed at demographically altering the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and physically and legally separating between the protected Palestinian civilians and Jewish-Israeli settlers, all of this while belligerently and unilaterally asserting Israeli sovereignty over the territory. The cumulative effect of these policies is the perpetuation of Israeli control and the subversion of its temporary nature.
Additionally, the nature of the regime in the West Bank as described above, which is a “regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group,” and many actions taken by the Israeli authorities constituting “inhumane acts,” according to its meaning in international criminal law and taken with the aim of maintaining the aforementioned regime, lead to the conclusion that the crime of apartheid is being committed in the West Bank.
The opinion asserts that the fact that successive Israeli governments and authorities have abused the powers granted to them by the laws of occupation in order to violate the rights of the protected persons and exploit the occupied territory, attaching it to sovereign Israel with the tentacles of annexation renders the Israeli occupation of the West Bank an illegal occupation, i.e., control the occupier has an obligation to end immediately, and which the international community must take steps to immediately terminate.”
Bonus Reads
- “Annexation in the name of archeology” (+972 Magazine)
- “Israeli Soldiers Remove Palestinians, Permit Settlers at West Bank Well” (Haaretz)
- “Kafkaesque Rules Keep East Jerusalem Residents Away From Work” (Haaretz)
- “Israeli Settlers Break Into Palestinian Homes Accompanied by Soldiers” (Haaretz)
- “While Israelis were in the streets, Smotrich unveiled his annexation plans” (+972 Magazine)
- “Settlers and Protesters Have an Unusual Encounter in Illegal Outpost in Northern Israel” (Haaretz)
- “UN agency reports nearly 600 settler attacks over past six months” (The Times of Israel)