Masafer Yatta is a poor agricultural area of the West Bank, at its southern edge, in the area known as the Hebron Hills. It has been under occupation since the 1967 “Six Days” war and the Israeli government designated it a military training zone back in 1981, calling it “Firing Zone 918” – arguing that the Palestinian residents have no right to live there.

 It has been in the news recently since Israel’s supreme court on May 4 ruled in favour of the government decision to evacuate around 1,000 people from eight hamlets. It has become a widely-known issue - and unsurprisingly – a controversial one.  It is located in Area C of the West Bank – 60% controlled by Israel. Obviously Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is getting far greater attention.

 The court judged that the land can be repurposed for military use, upholding the Israel Defence Forces’ (IDF) argument that Palestinians living here could not prove they were resident before the firing zone was established. One of the judges involved in the ruling resides in a West Bank settlement. The decision – one of the most significant on expulsions since the occupation began 55 years ago– paved the way for the eviction of everyone living there. The long-feared demolitions, which UN experts have said may amount to war crimes, have already started.

 About 18% of Area C, has been repurposed since the 1970s as “firing zones” for IDF use. According to the minutes of a 1981 ministerial meeting, the then agriculture minister, Ariel Sharon, who later became prime minister, proposed creating Firing Zone 918 with the explicit intention of forcing local Palestinians from their homes. In 1999, 700 residents of Masafer Yatta were evicted, forcibly pushed on to trucks by soldiers, but after a legal appeal the community was allowed to return until a final decision was made.

 These expulsions occurred when the prime minister and defence minister was Ehud Barak, the then Labour Party leader, and at a time when Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization were in negotiations in what the world then called a peace process. “The dissonance between a ‘peace process’ and mass eviction didn’t bother Israeli society,” as one Ha’aretz columnist wrote.

 Since then, the Palestinians living within Zone 918 have been repeatedly threatened with demolition of their homes and the confiscation of agricultural land because they lack building permits, which are issued by the Israeli authorities. According to the Israeli civil administration, just 75 building permits have been granted to Palestinians living in Area C since 2006, while 20,500 have been approved for illegal Israeli settlements, which are viewed by the international community as a major impediment to lasting peace.

 During Donald Trump’s Israel-friendly US administration (when the Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu was prime minister), there was a 150% growth in settlement building. And despite the fact Israel’s current government is a diverse coalition of left and right-wing parties, it appears likely to continue approving planning applications in the West Bank. Since 1967 around 600,000 to 750,000 Jewish settlers have moved to live on land in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank along with 2.8 million Palestinians.

 While discussions of Netanyahu’s annexation scheme in the West Bank and the Jordan Valley have largely subsided, pro-Palestinian activists are arguing that Israel is now preparing for a gradual annexation scheme. Instead of annexing 40% of the West Bank all at once, Israel is now annexing smaller tracts of land and regions, like Masafer Yatta, separately. The government will eventually connect all these annexed areas through Jewish-only bypass roads to larger Jewish settlement infrastructures in the West Bank. 

 On 10 May, the European Union said: "Settlement expansion, demolitions, and evictions are illegal under international law," and that setting up a firing zone is not an “imperative military reason” for transfer of an occupied population. And the United Nations has also directly criticized the Masafer Yatta demolitions, saying they are illegal under international law and urging Israel to not go forward with more.

 It also adding to tensions between the Washington and Tel Aviv weeks before Joe Biden makes his first official visit to Israel since entering the Oval Office. Congress and the State Department have both weighed in on Israel’s actions. The latest demolitions came just one day after dozens of Democratic senators and Congress members published a letter calling on the president to stop the expulsions.

 Palestinians understandably refer to the Masafer Yatta case as part of the Nakba. “This is a Nakba that says the State of Israel, on all levels – military, political and legal – is mobilized, in its entirety, for a single supreme objective: the expulsion of the Arabs from their homeland,” wrote columnist Odeh Bisharat, himself a Palestinian citizen of Israel. “There’s no need for more verbiage, the facts speak for themselves.

 “In the shadow of the huge waves of refugees from Ukraine that are flooding Europe, who pays attention to the 1,000 to 2,000 hardscrabble refugees who live in difficult conditions, and suffer from endless bullying by the occupation government and violent settlers?” It is hard to disagree with that bleak conclusion.
 

BY: IAN BLACK