Haaretz: Secret 1970 Document Confirms First West Bank Settlements Built on a Lie
In
minutes of meeting in then-defense minister Moshe Dayan’s office, top
Israeli officials discussed how to violate international law in building
settlement of Kiryat…
haaretz.com
It has long been an open secret that the
settlement enterprise was launched under false pretenses, involving the
expropriation of Palestinian land for ostensibly military purposes when
the true intent was to build civilian settlements, which is a violation of international law.
Now
a secret document from 1970 has surfaced confirming this long-held
assumption. The document, a copy of which has been obtained by Haaretz,
details a meeting in the office of then-defense minister Moshe Dayan at which government and military leaders spoke explicitly about how to carry out this deception in the building of Kiryat Arba, next to Hebron.
The
document is titled “The method for establishing Kiryat Arba.” It
contains minutes of a meeting held in July 1970 in Dayan’s office, and
describes how the land on which the settlement was to be built would be
confiscated by military order, ostensibly for security purposes, and
that the first buildings on it would be falsely presented as being
strictly for military use.
Aside
from Dayan, the participants include the director general of the
Housing Ministry, the Israel Defense Forces’ commander in the West Bank
and the coordinator of government activities in the territories.
'Construction will be presented as ...'
According
to the minutes, these officials decided to build “250 housing units in
Kiryat Arba within the perimeter of the area specified for the military
unit’s use. All the building will be done by the Defense Ministry and
will be presented as construction for the IDF’s needs.”
A
“few days” after Base 14 had “completed its activities,” the document
continued, “the commander of the Hebron district will summon the mayor
of Hebron, and in the course of raising other issues, will inform him
that we’ve started to build houses on the military base in preparation
for winter.” In other words, the participants agreed to mislead the
mayor into thinking the construction was indeed for military purposes,
when in fact, they planned to let settlers move in – the same settlers
who on Passover 1968 moved into Hebron’s Park Hotel, which was the
embryo of the settler enterprise.
The
system of confiscating land by military order for the purpose of
establishing settlements was an open secret in Israel throughout the
1970s, according to people involved in creating and implementing the
system. Its goal was to present an appearance of complying with
international law, which forbids construction for civilian purposes on
occupied land. In practice, everyone involved, from settlers to defense
officials, knew the assertion that the land was meant for military
rather than civilian use was false.
This
system was used to set up several settlements, until the High Court of
Justice outlawed it in a 1979 ruling on a petition against the
establishment of the settlement of Elon Moreh.
Participant: We all knew the score
Maj.
Gen. (res.) Shlomo Gazit, who was coordinator of government activities
in the territories at the time of the 1970 meeting in Dayan’s office
about Kiryat Arba, told Haaretz it was clear to all the meeting’s
participants that settlers would move into those buildings. He said that
to the best of his recollection, this constituted the first use of the
system of annexing land to a military base for the purpose of civilian
settlement in the West Bank. He also recalled Dayan as the one who
proposed this system, because he didn’t like any of the alternative
locations proposed for Kiryat Arba.
Nevertheless,
and despite what the document advocated, Gazit said, army officers told
the mayor of Hebron explicitly that a civilian settlement would be
established next to his city, rather than telling him the construction
was for military purposes.
Hagit
Ofran, head of Peace Now’s Settlement Watch project, also said this
appears to be the first use of the system of using military orders to
seize land for civilian settlement. And while this system is no longer
in use, she said, “Today, too, the state uses tricks to build and expand
settlements. We don’t need to wait decades for the revelation of
another internal document to realize that the current system for taking
over land – wholesale declarations of it as state land – also violates
the essence of the law.”
Gazit
said that in retrospect, the system was wrong, but that he was just “a
bureaucrat, in quotation marks; I carried out the government’s orders,
in quotation marks.”
“I
think this pretense has continued until today,” he added. “Throughout
my seven years as coordinator of government activities in the
territories, we didn’t establish settlements anywhere by any other
system.”
But
government officials had no idea Kiryat Arba (pop. 8,000) would become
so big, Gazit insisted. They only sought to provide a solution for the
squatters in the Park Hotel, who “weren’t more than 50 families.”
Today,
even Kiryat Arba residents admit that this system was a deception.
Settler ideologue Elyakim Haetzni, one of Kiryat Arba’s original
residents, noted that during a Knesset debate at the time, cabinet
minister Yigal Allon said clearly that this would be a civilian
settlement.
“It’s
clear why this game ended; after all, how long could it go on? This
performance had no connection whatsoever to Herut (the predecessor to
Likud); it was all within Mapai,” Haetzni added, referring to the ruling
party at the time, a precursor of today’s Labor Party.
Haaretz Correspondent
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