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Ryan Jones is a Gentile believer from the United States who has lived and worked in Israel for the past six years. He is the News Editor of .
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By Ryan Jones
October 23, 2002
For the past several days, Israel and the international community have been subjected to scenes and media reports of what is made out to be an unruly group of Jewish "settlers" rebelling against IDF soldiers and Israeli police acting on orders from the Ministry of Defense.
Many are attempting to portray these sometimes physical clashes between the Jewish residents of Samaria and security forces at the Gilad Farm as an undemocratic revolt by "settlers" against the State of Israel.
Left-wing leaders have painted the Gilad Farm as an "illegal outpost," and the Jews who demonstrate against its destruction as "lawbreakers" who are threatening the very fabric of Israel's democracy.
"If the settlers' revolt is not crushed, it will be the end of democracy and the beginning of chaos in which each man will attack the other," opposition leader Yossi Sarid told the press over the weekend.
"The settlers are trying to kill Israeli democracy," Labor's Trade and Industry Minister Dalia Itzik said during Sunday's cabinet meeting.
Meanwhile, Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg, a leading member of the left-wing Labor Party, referred to the settlers as the "Jewish Hamas."
Even right-wing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has decried the settlers' disregard for the "rule of law" in their impassioned and sometimes physically violent attempts to prevent the unwarranted destruction of this private estate.
But while Jewish residents of Samaria should certainly refrain at all costs from physically harming members of Israel's security forces - and vice versa for soldiers and police, who are only carrying out what may be sickeningly undesirable orders - the concern for the "rule of law" has been sorely misplaced.
The specific "illegal outpost" in question is a 125-acre private estate known as the Gilad Farm. Its owner, Moshe Zar, named the property after his son Gilad, who was brutally murdered by Palestinian gunmen in May 2001.
Moshe Zar has owned the plot of land for more than 20 years, after legally purchasing it from Arab residents of the nearby villages. He has never attempted to establish a "settlement" on the land, but has rather set up a private farm that was worked primarily by his sons.
According to Jordanian land laws (Planning and Building Law no. 79, paragraph 34) - laws which are still in effect in Judea and Samaria - an individual does not need a government permit to establish an agricultural estate on privately owned land.
Furthermore, there is no Israeli law against the establishment of settlements or private farms by Jews in Judea, Samaria or the Gaza Strip, nor does a prohibition against such domains appear in the numerous agreements signed with the PLO over the past decade.
The so-called "Oslo Accords" simply call on both sides to refrain from changing the status of the disputed territories - meaning neither side is allowed to unilaterally annex the land or declare statehood.
Israeli governments over the past decade have on many occasions agreed to halt the building of new settlements or the expansion of those already in existence. What this constitutes, however, is temporary government policy and not Israeli law.
The simple fact is that by attempting to physically prevent the destruction of the Gilad Farm, the Jews of Samaria are not in violation of any Israeli laws, but rather are exercising their right to civil disobedience in the face of disagreeable government policy.
The rule of law has indeed been violated in the case of the Gilad Farm, though not by the Jewish residents of Samaria.
Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, who ordered the forcible evacuation of the Gilad Farm along with 24 other "illegal outposts" last week, chose to bypass a crucial High Court ruling in the case of inhabited areas.
According to a ruling by Supreme Court Justice Tova Strasberg-Cohen in June 2002, the government is obligated to provide residents of any outpost deemed "illegal" with a legal hearing prior to the destruction of their homes and property.
"I would assume the government will behave according to the law with regard to everything having to do with the evacuation of outposts - if it decides to evacuate them - and that outposts will not be evacuated without granting their residents the right to a hearing, if there is not a reason that has been clarified that denies them this right," Strasberg-Cohen wrote.
According to Moshe's wife, Yael Zar, the family has been granted no hearing.
Despite the exclamations of outrage on the part of the left, government watchers have noted that Ben-Eliezer's decision to destroy the outposts had less to do with the "rule of law" than with the Defense Minister's political survival.
Writes Ha'aretz's Yossi Verter: "Ben-Eliezer, whose position in the polls is not very good, if not to say disastrously bad, planned to reach the November 19 Labor primaries riding a carefully controlled political-diplomatic-economic coalition crisis."
For more than a year, Ben-Eliezer has watched his support among left-wing voters dwindle, as opponents from within his own party have labeled him a closet "right winger" and the personal lackey of "extremist" Ariel Sharon. This situation has thrust the Labor chairman into a precarious situation at best, with popular party rivals Haim Ramon and Amram Mitzna breathing down his neck.
His sudden war on the Jewish residents of Samaria is seen as nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to regain the trust of his former backers.
"Ben-Eliezer's dilemma is well-known: the position that gives him his political strength - the Defense Ministry - is also destroying him politically," writes Verter, noting that "as defense minister, day and night he's implementing a right-wing policy with which his party is fed up."
"Ben-Eliezer's only chance for political rehabilitation is to keep his job [as defense minister] and evacuate outposts while fighting non-stop against the right in the hope that Sharon doesn't get tired of the scuffling and get up one morning and put a stop to it," Verter adds.
Indeed, the cynical use of impressionable young soldiers to carry out a political ploy of this type - which has involved their physically confronting and forcibly ejecting civilian Jewish residents from their land - is far more distasteful than Ben-Eliezer's disregard for the law of the land.
In the case of the Gilad Farm, it appears the real "rule of law", that set out by legislation and court rulings, was in fact broken by Ben-Eliezer and those who supported his move.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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