Settlers who went too far - even for Netanyahu
Itai Harel gazed across at the rocky wilderness of the Judaean Mountains and urged us to "look at all this wonderful, empty land all the way from Jerusalem, waiting for its sons to come to build and live in it". It was one of the few moments that Mr Harel, a 38-year-old social worker, turned lyrical in helping to explain why he, his wife and six children are living with 50 other families in a fenced outpost on a remote hilltop east of the West Bank city of Ramallah.
Standing by the stables Mr Harel uses for the successful therapeutic riding centre he runs, you would hardly guess that Israel's Supreme Court has ordered that every structure here should be evacuated and demolished in little more than eight weeks. Or that the outpost has become the crucible for a political and judicial trial of strength; one which may decide whether Israel's government is prepared to put any limits at all on illegal Jewish West Bank settlement.
This peaceful winter morning, children are clambering over the slides in the playground of one the community's two kindergartens. The water tower and electricity pylons, like the road that winds up the hillside to the summit, testify to the generous $4m-worth of help the community has had from governmental agencies since its establishment a decade ago. So too do the Israel Defence Force soldiers on protective duty here.
Yet this is part of the Migron paradox – there is absolutely nothing legal about it. Forget about international law, which most democratic governments believe is violated by all Jewish settlement in occupied territory. Like another 100 such unauthorised outposts, which started to spring up in the 1990s to get round Israel's promise to build no new actual settlements, it has no basis in Israeli law. Moreover, government departments have regularly confirmed, and the Supreme Court accepted, that Migron was built on land privately owned by individual Palestinians and their families in the nearby villages of Burqa and Deir Dibwan, which makes it doubly illegal.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/settlers-who-went-too-far--even-for-netanyahu-6295350.html
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