Fifteen Jewish homes were destroyed by Israeli security forces this week in the Judean town of Elazar’s Netiv HaAvot neighborhood.
Elazar, which is part of Gush Etzion, is built on the site of ancient Beit Zekharia, where Elazar ben-Matityahu – younger brother of Yehuda Maccabi – sacrificed his life in order to kill a Greek war elephant.
In 2016, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of the European-funded Peace Now organization that claimed the 15 homes stood on private Palestinian property.
In October 2017, the court rejected a petition from six of the families who’s homes were built partially on state land and partially on the land ruled to belong to Palestinians. The families asked that they be allowed to keep their homes if they would remove the portions standing on private property. But the court rejected that petition, claiming it was an attempt to reopen the case.
But this isn’t really about the “rule of law” or property rights, which have been ridiculously politicized like so much else in this country. The cowardice and indecisiveness of successive Israeli governments has created a situation of injustice, lawlessness and the politicization of how laws are enforced. At the end of the day, most people’s positions on Netiv HaAvot come down to how they generally feel about an Israeli presence in the West Bank.
Most West Bank Jews see it simply. The Jewish people was unjustly displaced from our land. We struggled to come home for thousands of years and finally succeeded against all odds. Now the international community is trying to separate us from our land again. And the only way we know to resist is through populating as much of our disputed heartland as we can until expelling us all becomes impossible.
Many see our Supreme Court and European-funded NGOs as agents of foreign powers collaborating in Jewish displacement. And the irresponsibility and schizophrenia of our political leadership has only created the conditions for further injustice and conflict with our Palestinian neighbors.
Those who tried to save the 15 homes destroyed in Elazar this week saw themselves resisting an injustice being inflicted on the Jewish people. Peace Now and the Supreme Court desire the partition of our homeland into two states and therefore seek to reduce the number of Jewish families in the territories.
But house demolitions don’t solve or accomplish anything, especially when Israel’s security establishment won’t even allow Palestinian owners access to the land in question. Any Palestinian landowners should be generously compensated by the state, which bears major responsibility for creating this mess. And making state land throughout the West Bank accessible for Jewish development would greatly reduce the need for Jews to unilaterally establish new communities on land that might actually be private property belonging to Palestinians (this issue was essentially non-existent under Israeli governments that actually built Jewish communities in the West Bank as official policy).
