Last week, the Israeli military deemed the entire village was constructed illegally, setting the stage for the school and other buildings here to be razed. A lawyer for the village said he expected an Israeli demolition order on Thursday.
The ruling put this ramshackle village of 35 Bedouin families settled over half a century ago at the center of the conflict over who should govern the West Bank.
..Some opponents of the demolitions say Israel is trying to force Palestinian communities in Area C to move closer to Palestinian cities so they won’t vie with Israelis for land.“This larger policy is designed to allow Israel to hold as much land as possible with as few Palestinians on it as possible,” said Amit Gilutz, spokesman for B’Tselem, a left-wing nongovernmental organization that monitors demolitions of Palestinian homes... Israeli officials reject such allegations. They say demolitions are the result of court rulings against illegal construction and aren’t connected to settlement expansion. Israel doesn’t consider settlements or demolitions an obstacle to a peace agreement.
..Israeli officials note that buildings constructed illegally in Jewish settlements also are demolished. On Tuesday, the military began evacuating nine homes in a Jewish settlement that the high court said were built on Palestinian land. Last month, the army evicted 300 Israelis from an illegal outpost, called Amona, for a similar reason... U.N. officials argue that the situation is different for Palestinians, who seldom receive permission from the Israeli military’s Civil Administration, which administers the West Bank, to legally build... Khan Al Ahmar was settled by Bedouins displaced during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The village, with its school and dwellings of wood and corrugated metal are now wedged between two Jewish settlements.Some Israeli lawmakers in Mr. Netanyahu’s ruling coalition hope to expand one of the settlements, Ma’ale Adumim, and make it the first Jewish settlement the government formally annexes. They have drafted a bill to achieve that end.
.. The Civil Administration said it plans to move the Palestinian Bedouin in Khan Al Ahmar and other Bedouin in Area C to a planned community near Jericho where “the families will be assigned plots of land that include residential infrastructure such as water, electricity, and sewage, while maintaining the population’s lifestyle.”
President Trump, Will You Save the Jews?
Hopefully Israel’s Supreme Court will strike down the law, but, in the meantime, Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, did not mince words. He reportedly warned at a private meeting that Israel can’t just “apply and enforce its laws on territories that are not under its sovereignty. If it does so, it is a legal cacophony. It will cause Israel to be seen as an apartheid state, which it is not.” Seen as an apartheid state!
.. That debate will not be about which are the best borders to defend the state of Israel, said the Hebrew University philosopher Moshe Halbertal, “but whether the state is worth defending in moral terms.”
.. I don’t expect Israel to just up and leave the West Bank without a Palestinian partner for a secure peace, which Israel doesn’t now have. But legalizing this land grab by settlers deep in Palestinian areas is not an act of security — it will actually create security problems.
Trump May Turn to Arab Allies for Help With Israeli-Palestinian Relations
The emerging approach mirrors the thinking of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who will visit the United States next week, and would build on his de facto alignment with Sunni Muslim countries in trying to counter the rise of Shiite-led Iran.
.. The difference is that in the last eight years, Israel has grown closer to Sunni Arab nations because of their shared concern about Iranian hegemony in the region, opening the possibility that this newfound, if not always public, affiliation could change the dynamics.
.. “The logic of outside-in is that because the Palestinians are so weak and divided — and because there’s a new, tacit relationship between the Sunni Arabs and Israel — there’s the hope the Arabs would be prepared to do more,” said Dennis B. Ross
.. That is a departure from the countervailing assumption that if Israel first made peace with the Palestinians, it would lead to peace with the larger Arab world — the “inside-out” approach.
.. Jordan’s King Abdullah II seems to have played a particularly pivotal role. Concerned that an embassy move would anger the many Palestinians living in his country, the king rushed to Washington without an invitation
.. The king appealed to the administration’s fixation with the Islamic State, arguing that it should not alienate Arab allies who could help.
.. The statement was worded in a way that let different parties focus on different parts. The “may not be helpful” phrase was the first time Mr. Trump had warned against new housing in the West Bank.
But the “beyond their current borders” phrase suggested a return to George W. Bush’s policy of essentially acquiescing to additional construction within existing settlement blocs as long as Israel did not expand their geographical reach or build entirely new settlements.
.. undeterred, Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition pushed through Parliament a bill to retroactively authorize thousands of homes in the West Bank that even under Israeli law had been built illegally on Palestinian-owned land.
.. The challenge now is whether Mr. Trump can use this ambiguity to his benefit.
Five myths about anti-Semitism
According to the FBI, Jews in the United States are annually subject to the most hate crimes of any religious group, despite constituting only 2 percent of the American population. The picture is considerably darker in Europe, where Jews were the target of 51 percent of racist attacks in France in 2014, even as they made up less than 1 percent of that country’s population. In recent years, synagogues and Jewish schools and museums have been subject to terrorist attacks in France, Denmark and Belgium. A 2013 E.U. survey found that nearly 40 percent of European Jews fear to publicly identify as Jewish, including 60 percent of Swedish Jews.
.. The state of Israel often confounds the anti-Semitism conversation. Some assume that an attack on Israel and its policies must necessarily be an attack on Jews; evangelical leader Franklin Graham, for instance, dubbed criticism of Israeli settlers an assault on God’s “chosen people.” Others justify their attacks on Jews around the world by pointing to Israel, claiming to be anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic. Much of this confusion stems from the conflation of all Jews with the state of Israel, its government and its policies.
.. Anti-Semitism, however, is a unique case — and uniquely corrosive to those societies that embrace it. That’s because it often takes the form of a conspiracy theory about how the world works. By blaming real problems on imagined Jewish culprits, anti-Semitism prevents societies from rationally solving them. In one of the most famous examples, Nazi scientists shunned Einstein’s advances as “Jüdische Physik,” as opposed to “Deutsche Physik,” enfeebling their understanding.