A visit to the jungle

Akiva Eldar, Haaretz, 7/08/07. Last week the prime minister congratulated Ariel College for being elevated by the Judea and Samaria Council of Higher Education to university status. According to all maps, including those of our American friends, the land on which the new university sits is supposed to be an inalienable part of the new Palestinian state. Olmert, like most Israelis, has become accustomed over the past 40 years to living in a world of double meanings. Throughout history, Israeli governments have extended one hand "to peace with the Arabs" while the other hand lays further claim to the occupied territories. In order to maintain the industry of contradictions between what is said and what is done, legal experts constructed a splendid system of overpasses for the politicians. These allow the de facto annexation of Palestinian land, without the need to annex Palestinian residents.

The Council for Higher Education in Judea and Samaria is one of these inventions. It is meant to enable the establishment and development of an Israeli academic institution outside the sovereign territory of the State of Israel. On the one hand the Ministry of Education recognizes the degrees the council grants and the educational programs it approves. On the other hand, the education minister declared recently that the council's decision to upgrade the college is not valid.

The collapse of the Heftsiba construction company sheds light - more precisely, casts a heavy shadow - on the method that enables Israel to talk of peace while continuing to settle the territories. The system of planning and construction regulations was created in line with the requirements of dubious Jewish land salesmen, real estate companies owned by the settlers' leadership, and Palestinian front men who are ready to sell their homeland for a money. The petition to the High Court of Justice filed by the residents of the village of Bil'in and Peace Now stopped the construction in Matityahu East, a new neighborhood in the settlement of Modi'in Illit. The case brought to the fore a terrible phenomenon, in which the State Prosecutor's Office, the local authority and the Civil Administration cooperated - some of them actively and others by turning a blind eye - with a well-oiled system that stole and "laundered" Palestinian properties. Several dozen meters away, inside Israeli territory, no contractor would have gotten away with building hundreds of apartments without the necessary blueprints, building permits, and a basic examination of land ownership documents.

The politicians' mixed signals are complemented by the double standards of law enforcement that enable the settlers, the true rulers of the territories, to make talk of "a political settlement" appear ridiculous.

[All this] reminds us of Ehud Barak's cute metaphor, that Israel is a "villa in a jungle."

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