Israel's Land Discrimination: Unrecognized Villages vs. "Unauthorized" Outposts

A comprehensive legal analysis by the Dirasat - Arab Center for Law and Policy found that Palestinian and Bedouin citizens of Israel engage in so much illegal construction as a direct result of biased state policies and regulations. Israel's land regime has long privileged Jewish demographic growth over that of the Palestinians. Israel's foundation and national history since then has been oriented around the goal of maximal land acquisition for Israeli Jews while minimizing Palestinian residential areas.

The study found that the excessive prohibitions and lack of accommodations for Arab population growth result in unjustifiably prohibitive permit and license rules. Many Arab communities have neither a local nor privatized master building plan and so they cannot receive building permits from the state. Others have old or outdated plans. Some of those with plans, find the hurdles put up by the state to be too great, effectively blocking the plans' implementation.

The timing of the study's release coincided with Israel's demolition of dozens of buildings in the Bedouin town of Arakib. It is one of Israel's many "unrecognized villages," meaning areas of residence the state of Israel does not consider legal. They do not get state services, get placement on the electric grid and appear on no official maps. Palestinians, mainly Bedouin, with Israeli citizenship are the primary residents.

There are an estimated 45,000 "illegal constructions" in the unrecognized villages in the Negev region. According to the Knesset, some 1,500 illegal structures are built each year in the unrecognized villages. Israel can demolish them at any moment, as events in Arakib showed.

Israel's history is testimony to the systematic favoring of its Jewish citizens. Aside seven Bedouin communities established in Negev, Israel has not seen the foundation of a single Arab town since 1948. At the same time, it established some 1,000 Jewish settlements.

Israel claims that its rules around land are driven by the rule of law. It cited state ownership of land as giving the legal impetus to raze homes in Arakib. Lacking impossible-to-obtain permits was also the legal justification given for demolishing Palestinian residences in Jerusalem.

However, the same principles of discrimination in land use clearly flout international law and agreements as they are practiced in the West Bank.

In the West Bank, Israel is privileging the Israeli settlers over the Palestinian population in terms of land. There are more than 121 illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, housing more than 300,000 settlers (nearly half of whom reside in Occupied East Jerusalem). In all, the settlements take up 42% of the West Bank, according to B'tselem.

Israel's increased prosecution of building in the unrecognized villages stands in stark contrast to the soft ball it is playing with ideologically zealous settlers who set up camps and quickly erected sites. They also set up dummy outposts - phony settlement outposts for Israel to remove - as a way of preventing the removal of their own. This is a game Israeli clearly plays along with.

As described in a piece on Electronic Intifada, Israel has termed the colonial outposts it wants to remove "unauthorized," which is a legal fiction intended to grant implicit authorization to the rest of the colonies despite their blanket illegality under international law.

This distinction is clearly a shell game: of the most recent 15 unauthorized outposts slated for removal, 11 were dummies. And these 15 ordered removals, which are so clearly performed for the sake of outside audiences, represent such a minute percentage of the colonial activity in the Palestinian territory.

Even when Israel agrees to freeze only partially the colonial growth in the West Bank, it fails to live up to its obligations. The Israeli group Peace Now documented 492 violations of the U.S.-brokered partial moratorium on new construction in the occupied West Bank.

Peace Now found that construction had begun on at least 600 housing units in 60 different settlements (as well as 2,000 housing units approved just before the freeze announcement in November 2009). The moratorium may have led to a decrease in building. Usually, 1,130 new homes go up in an eight-month period. Still, there were many violations of the agreement.

The clear pattern of aggressive Israeli colonization in the West Bank, combined with growing state actions against Arab citizens building in Israel shows there is no clear rule of law, but that an ideologically motivated system of discrimination between peoples is at work. Israel's state-building and now state-expanding project is fundamentally at the root of this conflict. Policymakers should see this is a basic and systematic process that crosses the green line and will likely set the frame of the future. The current direction towards greater discrimination -- even apartheid -- must be addressed at its core.

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