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A courtroom in Israel's High Court building in Jerusalem, where 11 judges have met to deliberate on petitions against the Evacuation Compensation Law.
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| By israelinsider staff and partners May 3, 2005 |
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Eleven High Court judges met today for a second round of deliberations regarding 12 petitions filed by settlers to declare the Evacuation Compensation Law illegal.
Each petition was allocated only 30 minutes, enraging right-wing pullout opponents. "Tens of thousands of people have been crippled by this process," said Yitzhak Maron of Legal Forum for Israel, referring to the short amount of time allocated to each petition. "Is it not important enough for the court to assign four or five days of discussion?"
He said he believes it is important for each of the 11 judges to visit the area slated for evacuation prior to making a decision. "The State presented the court with three speeches by the Prime Minister, in which he speaks about the importance of the pullout plan," he said. "The court deserves more. This just demonstrates that the State assumes the court will say 'Amen' to the disengagement plan.
"There is nothing more immoral than a murderer receiving property of the murdered," he said. "The Palestinians violated the Oslo Accords and created targeted terror; is this the balance Israel has found?
"Any country in the world that would propose separating Jews from Muslims in the name of internal peace, by uprooting people from their homes, would be looked upon as distorted," he said. "The only country where Jews are allowed to uproot other Jews is Israel."
The Gaza Regional Council, 43 private citizens, two factory owners in the Gaza Strip Erez industrial zone, 21 West Bank "settlers" and Knesset member Benny Alon (National Union) have also filed petitions.
Meanwhile, far-right movement "Women in Green" staged a protest outside the courthouse and carried signs saying: "No to the transfer of Jews" and "Supreme Court under PLO jurisdiction."
At the same time, after a series of confidence-building meetings, "settler" leaders met with Justice Minister Tzipi Livni to discuss the 'Nitzanim Plan'. The plan would give "settlers" until May 10 to sign up to move.
As presented by Livni, the plan would entail building four communities in Nitzanim, just north of the coastal city of Ashkelon.
If the population of those communities were to reach 10,000, the evacuees would have the right to establish a regional council, as the settlers had requested. A regional council would give the settlers standing, funding and authority to run some of their own municipal affairs.
The government offered to build 1,000 housing units in the area. Additionally, another 400 units would be built in the southern section of Nitzan.
The meeting also tackled the issue of temporary communities established in Nitzan, Sapir and Yad Binyamin.
"It?s not an ultimatum, but it has to be understood that this is a very serious and large task," one government source said.
Officials present at the meeting said that if May 10 passes without a clear answer from the settlers about how many are wiling to accept the 'Nitzanim Plan,' the government would take matters into its own hands.
Government officials promised that evacuees would be housed in mobile homes from the time pullout is set to begin, to the date scheduled for the official move to Nitzanim. The "settlers" asked for "exit tickets" for those who, as a group, have second thoughts about the move to Niztanim.
In the meeting, which took place in Livni's Tel Aviv office, it was agreed that teams from the Finance Ministry and Justice Ministry, working with settler representatives, would be established in the coming days to deal with day-to-day problems arising during the move.
The settlers also asked for a larger financial compensation package for those forced from their homes. But, the government said that the amount had already been fixed by law. This is yet another issue of contention that may prove to delay the execution of the "disengagement" plan.
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