This is Part 7 of a 10-part series exposing the underreported joint European and Palestinian program to bypass international law and establish a de facto Palestinian state on Israeli land.
While Israel’s Civil Administration (COGAT), which governs Area C of the West Bank, technically receives orders from the defense minister, on a day-to-day basis it operates with unchallenged autonomy.
Israeli laws mandate that attempts to trespass and commandeer land must be intercepted, but COGAT commanders are wary of action and weary of global condemnation. They have learned to expect international headlines, along with formal complaints, threats and lawsuits from the Europeans, when they so much as remove a corrugated roof from an illegal structure, which the European Union will likely rebuild anyway. For every razed structure, five new ones take its place.
That Palestinians are legally permitted to bring grievances against COGAT to Israel’s Supreme Court further undermines enforcement. Both foreign and Israeli NGOs receive millions of euros every year to “protect” the Palestinians in the court system, which is backed up with appeals.
In the meantime, the Palestinians build and build, engaging in a brilliant strategy of setting Israel’s own system against itself.
While COGAT generals have a diverse array of personal views about the conflict, the Israel Defense Forces tend to be conformist and technically oriented, concerned with tactical training, readiness and counterterrorism, and focused on immediate, critical threats from Lebanon, Gaza and Iran. The defense establishment views the West Bank as a political dispute as opposed to a national security issue.
But COGAT is well aware of the scope of the hostile takeover in Area C and is choosing not to enforce its legal mandate. Due to intense pressure from the EU, COGAT generals routinely speak with Palestinian Authority officials and work out agreements to refrain from demolishing infrastructure unveiled in Salim Fayyad’s master plan.
While COGAT does occasionally destroy unauthorized structures deemed to be dangerous from a security or safety point of view, such as those built close to IDF training or firing zones, on major traffic arteries, or those that were used as launching pads for terrorists, these demolitions are exceedingly rare, and almost always receive massive media coverage and condemnation.
Through a Supreme Court case, Regavim, an Israeli NGO, succeeded in forcing COGAT to reveal its list of established enforcement priorities. At the top of the list was prevention of Jewish construction on privately owned or state land, while at the very bottom of the list were PA-EU orchestrated takeovers.
In other words, Israel’s Defense Ministry was forced to admit by court order that its enforcement guidelines for land use policy were tilted against Jews and in favor of Arabs.
“They let the Palestinians do things they’d never think about allowing Jewish people to do,” alleges Dr. Yishai Spivak, an investigative researcher with Ad Kan, an Israeli nonprofit that studies organizations and trends that harm Israel’s sovereignty and Zionist identity.
In addition, the PA never reports deaths in or emigration from Area C and pads the population statistics with people who have never set foot in the Middle East — for instance, children who were actually born and raised abroad but had parents who once lived in the region. This serves the goal of portraying the area as flooded with Arabs.
But a far more serious problem may be that the PA actively and publicly encourages residents of Areas A and B to move into Area C, which is possibly a violation of the Geneva Accords. The Civil Administration, meanwhile, does nothing to protect Israeli national interests in this regard, as it does not keep population figures, enabling itself to conveniently claim that it serves an enormous number of residents, thereby justifying its budget.
But if a conversation about squandered Israeli and international resources and the needs of the current and future population is to begin, a census is the first step.
Part 8 will be published next week.
Part 6 can be read here.
Part 5 can be read here.
Part 4 can be read here.
Part 3 can be read here.
Part 2 can be read here.
Part 1 can be read here.
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