On the one hand you have acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of the Kadima party flexing his prime ministerial muscle suggesting the law must be upheld at all cost as he justifies sending in the IDF to dismantle illegal outposts. Perhaps it’s an effort to establish what I can only suppose is his “Sharonish” credentials or balls for the Israeli electorate that he chooses his first line the sand to be the eviction of 8 Jewish families living in Hevron - who just happen to be living on a property that last housed a Palestinian run market back in 1994.
Still it seems pretty much a cut and dried issue with Olmert, Kadima and the IDF wearing the white kippahs and those troublesome settlers and their supporters in the black kippahs. And, of course, those black kippahs just up and refuse with all the bad grace they can muster to close up shop and go back to Israeli “proper”. Enter Carolyn Glick’s latest column on the “Cool” Anti-Semitism” to make set that motif on its head.
Case in point is the government's handling of the Jewish "squatters" in the former marketplace in Hebron. The property in dispute is owned by a Jewish trust - the Magen Avot Sephardic Community - which purchased the land 199 years ago. Today, the Magen Avot Sephardic Community is headed by former Sephardic chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu. The Community wants the property to be used to house Jews.
On the face of it, it all seems rather cut and dried. The area is directly adjacent to the Jewish Avraham Avinu neighborhood. It is owned by Jews who want its current Jewish residents to remain in place. Why would the government have a problem with eight Jewish families living in the former shops in full accord with the expressed wishes of the property's owner?
On Tuesday morning I asked Lieutenant Assaf Azoulay, the spokesman for the Judea and Samaria Division, this question during a visit to Hebron. Azoulay responded angrily, "It's an issue of the supremacy of law!" He then proceeded to shout that the Supreme Court ordered that the Jews be expelled from the former shops and the IDF's job is to implement the high court's ruling.
The problem is that the Supreme Court never held a hearing on the issue and certainly never made a decision on the matter. Palestinians did petition the court some five years ago, asking that the Jews who had "squatted" in the stores - that have been empty since 1994 and since replaced by new shops built by the Hebron municipality - be expelled. The issue was argued before the appeals committee of the Civil Administration in Judea and Samaria two years ago.
In their ruling, the military judges tended to accept the recommendation to allow the Jews to rent the property in accordance with the wishes of the property's owners. But the judges' common sense clashed with the state prosecution's world view. Last October, for no apparent reason, Attorney-General Menachem Mazuz decided that the Jewish families must be removed from the shops no later than February 15.
And here we arrive at the main issue. In 1949, after conquering Judea and Samaria, the Jordanian regime seized all Jewish owned lands and placed them under the control of the Jordanian Custodian for Enemy Property. Jews were by law prohibited from entering the areas. In 1967, after Israel took control of Judea and Samaria, the government transferred control over the seized Jewish lands to the Custodian for Absentee Lands in the Civil Administration.
The question arises, why did the government not simply allow the Jewish land owners to reassert their rights over their lands? Israel's refusal to enable Jewish landowners in Judea and Samaria to exercise their rights over their private property constitutes an Israeli adoption of the anti-Semitic Jordanian legal regime which denied all Jewish property rights in Judea and Samaria.
I would suggest that nothing is as black as it seems, not even those kippah’s.
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