Amira Hass: cronaca di una demolizione
Otherwise occupied / Chronicle of a demolition foretold July 31, 2012
by Amira Hass - Haaretz - 30 July 2012
Today, Supreme Court Justices Edna Arbel, Hanan Melcer and Noam Sohlberg will hold in their hands a ticking time bomb. Or should I say: One more of the time bombs that are ticking amongst the dozens of Palestinian communities all over the West Bank, and which are occasionally handed to the High Court of Justice.
This time it is Zanuta, a Palestinian village in the southern West Bank. The craftsman, as usual, is the Civil Administration, which assembles time bombs inspired by higher authorities (the government, army, the Jewish public’s yearning for real estate and ancient landscapes ). The diligent apprentice is Regavim, a nonprofit organization whose objective is to protect what it calls national (Jewish ) land and to demolish Palestinian structures that were built without a permit. The organization, which calls itself apolitical, has asked to join the case as an amicus curiae, a party unrelated to the case that is offering information to assist the court in deciding the matter before it.
The proceedings relate to a petition brought by the residents of Zanuta, submitted via the Association of Civil Rights in Israel. The petitioners are requesting a detailed construction plan for their community, because without it, the authorities feel free to issue demolition orders against tents, water cisterns, field WCs, wooden poles and canvas sheets.
The cave community of Zanuta, like other small Palestinian villages in the south Hebron Hills, existed long before the establishment of the State of Israel. In an anthropological opinion submitted to the High Court, Shuli Hartman writes that the ancestors of the Zanuta residents came to the caves from the nearby town of Dahariya in the early 20th century.
After 1967, when Israeli markets were opened up to cheap Palestinian labor (a tendency that has been reversed since the 1990s, when the policy of free movement was revoked ), the caves no longer met the needs of the community members. In addition, the caves had disintegrated from within and had become safety hazards. The Civil Administration did not issue demolition orders for these caves. No, it simply doesn’t like their inhabitants living on ground level and in conditions suitable for the 21st century. Thus, it simply issued demolition orders to their simple makeshift structures. So many orders, that if carried out, the community will be wiped out.
Pottery shards found in the region indicate continuous settlement since the Iron Age (the seventh and even eighth century BCE ). Archaeologist Dr. Avi Ofer proposed that the site of Zanuta be identified with Dana, which was in the fifth group of Judean cities in the south Hebron Hills. People lived at the site during the Byzantine, medieval and Ottoman periods. But that does not impress the Civil Administration. It refuses to prepare a detailed plan for this old community (which it has done for the new Israeli settlements in the region ). Instead it orders the Palestinian residents to leave their homes in the thinly-populated area C (under Israeli civilian authority ), and to move to the densely-populated Dahariya or Shweika (in areas A and B, under Palestinian civilian authority ).
Hartman, in a fascinating anthropological-historical opinion, explains how transferring the dwellings of the shepherds in Zanuta would mean the obliteration of their way of life.
“Raising sheep is a family business that constitutes an entire way of life, and requires the daily coordinated activity of several men and women,” writes Hartman. This activity is associated with “animals whose diet is related to grazing and agriculture, which is carried out on land belonging to the families. Managing the herd – raising, milking and grazing, selling – are all done in close conjunction with the natural conditions and the changing precipitation conditions, and require foresight, strategic planning and tactical moves.
“Not everyone is suited to this occupation, and the father prepares one or two of his sons as heirs to the profession, which although it is not studied in a university, has sustained families and a way of life for hundreds of years. It includes a number of fields of expertise: planning ability, administration, leadership and being in charge of a team.” Raising the flock funds higher education for some of the sons.
“The community of shepherds relies on broad non-irrigated agricultural areas on the one hand, but also on an urban or semi-urban community to purchase the sheep for meat, or the dairy products. The mutual dependence between the two communities is clear precisely because of the differences and the complementary functions. This interdependence, in effect, relies on the existence of two separate entities: the city offers goods and services and the rural area offers the dairy products and the meat necessary for its residents.”
And for the people in this community, time is running out.
There are so many ticking time bombs at play that one could get lost. Only last week, the state informed the High Court that Defense Minister Ehud Barak had ordered the destruction of eight other villages south of Yatta, in order to enable the Israel Defense Forces to conduct military training exercises in the region. In a report in The New York Times these villages were described as “hamlets,” a correct definition, because these are in fact small villages. The problem with the definition is that it ignores the fact that a guiding and clearly visible hand braked the process of turning them into larger communities with permanent structures.
That was the process all over historic Palestine: Villages created offshoots around them, which developed into independent villages, although they maintained various links to the mother village. There were many reasons for leaving villages: natural population increases that led to population density, a shortage of land, seasonal departure as they followed the sheep that ultimately turned into permanent dwelling, a search for more water sources, interfamily conflicts.
Our diligent young men in the Civil Administration are very familiar with history and geography. They are well aware of the potential for natural growth that those offshoot villages have – from the northern Jordan Valley to the southern West Bank. That is why since the early 1970s, they have been planting explosive devices in the guise of IDF firing ranges, nature reserves, demolition orders, planning prohibitions, roads and fences.
That is how Area C – 62 percent of the West Bank – was created, and has been maintained as a sparsely populated area. Now our boys have made progress and are demanding the forced transfer of entire communities to Areas A and B. The High Court is requested to demonstrate courage and to suspend the mechanism designed to destroy Zanuta. But what is really needed is for the justices to press “Delete” on the software program that is titled, “the Elimination of Palestinian Existence in Area C.”
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HASS: Civil Administration calls for demolition of West Bank Palestinian village built on archaeological site 28Jul12 July 28, 2012
by Amira Hass - Haaretz - 26 July 2012
The Civil Administration is calling for the demolition of a Palestinian village in the southern West Bank, partly because it is built on an archaeological site.
The call for demolition comes despite the fact that Israeli authorities have approved the construction of Jewish settlements on much more important archaeological sites, such as the settlement at Tel Rumeida in Hebron and the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem.
In the past year, the High Court of Justice has been asked to rule on the state’s intentions to demolish at least 12 villages south of Hebron (Susia, Dekaika, Bir al-Id, Saala and eight villages that have been declared part of army firing zone No. 918) located in Area C, which is under Israeli control, and force their residents to move to Areas A and B, which are under Palestinian civil control. Next week it will also rule on the fate of Zanuta, a village that lies on the border of the West Bank.
Residents of Zanuta, who filed a joint petition to the High Court of Justice with the Association for Civil Rights in Israel are requesting that the Civil Administration complete a detailed construction plan for them. If the planning of their village were regularized, the demolition orders issued by the Civil Administration against their improvised structures would be reversed, and construction would be permitted in accordance with the natural growth of the population and their needs. The Civil Administration is refusing to comply with the request, and is instead demanding that the residents move to the town of Dahariya.
Zanuta, like other small Palestinian villages in the area, existed as a cave-settlement before the West Bank was occupied by Israel. Archaeological findings reveal that Zanuta had been inhabited continuously from the Byzantine to the Ottoman period, until eventually being reduced to “a settlement of shepherds and fellahs living in the remains of the ancient structures and the residential caves alongside them,” as archaeologist Dr. Avi Ofer described it. Once the caves began to crumble and became unsafe, the residents of Zanuta set up improvised structures and tents at ground level.
The Civil Administration states that the site was declared an archaeological site at the time of the British Mandate. The Administration found that the improvised structures, which were built without permits (in the absence of a master plan), are located directly on top of the center of the archaeological site, and that one of the structures is inside an ancient structure excavated by an archaeology staff officer in 2005.
“There is no possibility of retroactively authorizing unlawful construction that takes place in the middle of an archaeological site. No master plan can authorize construction in an archaeological site. Moreover, the petitioners made use of archaeologically valuable stones in the construction of the unlawful structures,” Yitzhak Bart, chief assistant to the State Prosecutor, wrote to the High Court on behalf of the Civil Administration’s subcommittee on supervision of construction in Judea and Samaria.
Avi Ofer confirms that “most of the tents and shelters in Zanuta are truly located on the archaeological site,” but says that this is not out of the ordinary, as finding “this type of settlement inside ancient ruins,” happens often, “in the past and in the present.”
Ofer, whose doctorate on the Judean Hills in the biblical period includes a summary of the region’s history of settlement extending from 6000 years ago to the present, emphasizes that as opposed to what is frequently found in other archaeology sites, “in the area of this site, there is a blessed lack of any signs of digging for the purpose of archaeological theft.” At the request of the ACRI and the non-profit organization Bimkom for Planning Rights, he prepared a written opinion on Zanuta. The opinion was appended this month to the High Court petition, which will be heard by Justices Edna Arbel, Noam Solberg and Hanan Meltzer.
Between 1982 and 1987, Ofer headed the Judean Hill team and the Tel Hebron (Tel Rumeida) excavations. He expresses astonishment at the magnitude of the area that the Civil Administration delimited as the “Zanuta archaeology site” – 120 dunams (30 acres), whereas the real site, in his opinion, is half or less the size. Ofer wrote that this is “an exaggeration that is characteristic of the authorities in Judea and Samaria.”
Ofer also disputes the opinion of the Civil Administration regarding the possible existence of a settlement on the archaeology site.
“To the best of my knowledge and experience,” he writes, “the customary position in the State of Israel in instances in which residential housing exists in the area of an archaeology site is to permit continued residence, but to stipulate that any expansion or change will require archaeological examination.”
Zanuta possesses “a certain” archaeological importance, he said, but there is not “any similarity, even in the slightest, between the immense (archaeological) significance of ancient Jerusalem and biblical Hebron” and Zanuta, Ofer wrote.
Nevertheless, he notes, in both of the latter sites the authorities authorized construction and settlement within the site, while investing a great deal of money to combine excavations and residential housing.
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