by Karys Rhea
Khan al Ahmar is representative of a pattern of tactics that the PA regularly employs when wresting land rights from the State of Israel.
Israel's complete jurisdiction over Area C, which legally includes building permits, zoning, construction, law enforcement and planning, was recognized and agreed to by the Palestinian leadership and the world at large for almost three decades. As stipulated in the agreement, only when direct negotiations determine the permanent fate of the territories that had illegally been occupied by Jordan until 1967, can the Oslo Accords be replaced. Until then, it is the law.
First, they fabricated a name for this illegal encampment to make it appear "historic": "Khan al Ahmar." From there, they complained to the media that this destitute group of Arabs were being threatened with supposed "crimes against humanity": forced population transfer and ethnic cleansing. They accompanied their manufactured narrative with images of barefoot Bedouin children, and began pumping money into the settlement, and building these "dispossessed" children a school.
Khan al Ahmar is representative of a pattern of tactics that the PA regularly employs when wresting land rights from the State of Israel. First, it identifies a strategic point located far from an existing population center. Second, it illegally seizes the land, invents a name for this "historic" village that never existed, and insists the squatters have been there since the dawn of time, despite historic aerial photographs showing otherwise. Third, it broadcasts any pushback from Israel as "cruel" and "oppressive," and "ethnic cleansing".... Then, it finds another location to invade.
As of today, the PA has built over 90,000 illegal structures and aggressively seized more than 23,000 acres of land.
[T]he UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has been known to partner with the PA, and it actually plowed over the royal city of Shomron (Sebastia), the seat of the ancient Israelite Kingdom and one of the largest, most important archaeological sites in the area. UNESCO has also literally "reinvented" the Tomb of the Patriarchs -- where Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca and Leah are buried -- as the purported tomb of a Muslim sheikh.
Attempted legal action against the EU, on the basis of its undermining the Oslo Accords, is met with the claim that its funding for the PA merely amounts to "humanitarian aid" and that the EU has full "diplomatic immunity." Carver, however, argues that this defense is invalid because the Vienna Convention stipulates that diplomats may only be granted immunity if they do not interfere in the internal affairs of a state, which the EU is actively doing by seizing land that is recognized legally as being under Israel's jurisdiction. In claiming immunity by falsely declaring that it is not interfering in Israel's internal affairs, the EU is also disregarding a foundational element of the UN charter: the principle of non-intervention.
The Europeans appear to want it both ways, on the one hand paying lip service to the Oslo Accords in order to criticize Israel, while on the other hand actively helping the PA to ignore the terms of the Accords. The chasm between proclaimed intention and actual behavior renders any commitment to peace laughable. The irony of the Europeans condemning Israel for expropriating questionable Palestinian land when the Europeans themselves are helping Palestinians to expropriate Israeli land is lost on the public at large.
Yesterday, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced their commitment to "foil what they said was the Palestinian Authority's scheme to seize land across Judea and Samaria." Most of this vast, lawless land-grab, it turns out, has been energized and financed by the European Union (EU).
For decades, members of the media, activist groups, academics, international organizations, NGOs, and countless politicians have insisted that Jewish settlements in the West Bank are the primary obstacle to peace between Israelis and Palestinians. These settlements, the assumption goes, represent an illegal and inhumane "occupation," and until they are dismantled and the territory handed over to a Palestinian state, there can be no resolution to the conflict.
Beyond these power-broker narratives exists another dimension to the story that is deliberately neglected worldwide. It is a far more labyrinthine and sinister tale -- one of stunning hypocrisy, moral bankruptcy, quasi-legal bureaucracy and colossal abuse of international law -- that exposes the questionable motivations of quite a few bad-faith actors at the core of an Israeli-European alliance supposedly based on "shared democratic values."
The deception begins with a 2009 document, "The Fayyad Plan," and ends with the unlawful Palestinian takeover of hundreds of thousands of dunams of land, with direct subsidies and encouragement from the EU. This land, under the internationally recognized and mutually agreed to Oslo Accords, rightfully belongs to Israel.
In 1993, in Washington, DC, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, a Palestinian terrorist who had been evicted from Jordan and Lebanon, signed the first and only agreement achieved between Israel and Palestine Liberation Organization, which was brokered by the United States government under President Bill Clinton, and witnessed by the EU.
In 1995, the parties signed a follow-on agreement called the Oslo II Accord, also known as the Taba Agreement or the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. A critical component of Oslo II separated the West Bank into three jurisdictions -- Areas A, B and C -- and outlined specific responsibilities and obligations of its administrators.
Area A would be exclusively controlled, both for civil and security matters, by the newly-created Palestinian Authority (PA). Area B would be administered for all civil matters by the PA while the Israeli government would maintain security of its periphery, and Area C would be solely administered by Israel until all final borders would theoretically be negotiated face-to-face with the Palestinians. In other words, Israel's complete jurisdiction over Area C, which legally includes building permits, zoning, construction, law enforcement and planning, was recognized and agreed to by the Palestinian leadership and the world at large for almost three decades.
As stipulated in the agreement, only when direct negotiations determine the permanent fate of the territories that had illegally been occupied by Jordan until 1967, can the Oslo Accords be replaced. Until then, it is the law.
Unlike United Nations General Assembly resolutions, which are non-binding, the Oslo Accords are legally obligatory. Yet on August 23, 2009, 14 years after the signing of Oslo II, Salam Fayyad, then the prime minister of the PA, published a blueprint titled, "Palestine: Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State," known today as the Fayyad Plan, in which he took it upon himself to unilaterally abandon the Oslo framework and reject direct negotiations with Israel. Instead, Fayyad explicitly called for the creation of a de-facto Palestinian state in Area C.
Fayyad's usurpation of an international legal framework consisted of a plan to disregard the territorial divisions in the West Bank established by the Oslo Accords and de facto annex the land by building "facts on the ground" throughout Area C, presumably creating irreversible possession, establishing an extra-judicial foothold in an off-limits area, and eventually reshaping the demographic and sovereign facts on the ground.
Fayyad recognized that the brutal wave of Palestinian terror attacks that began in 2000, initiated by the Palestinian Authority, had distracted the world from the fact that they once again had rejected, without even a counter-proposal, yet another offer by Israel for a supposedly wished-for Palestinian state. The wave of terror attacks, in which more than 1,000 Israelis were murdered in what came to be known as the Second Intifada, had a transformative effect on Israeli public opinion. The argument of the Israeli peace-camp that, by ceding tangible land for intangible promises, Israel could buy peace, was finally discredited.
Terrorism had failed to break the Israeli spirit, and Fayyad needed a new plan. That plan was to build. Despite valid fears that Israeli authorities would immediately destroy any illegally-erected structures in Area C, the Palestinians went ahead. When the European Union saw that the Israeli leadership was ignoring the illegal construction and saw what their protected Palestinian wards could get away with, they became massively involved, encouraging the Palestinians to build as if there was no Oslo, financing the land-grab with structures labeled "European Union," and, in the event that Israel enforced the law, guaranteeing legal assistance.
First, in Ramallah, the Palestinians' de facto capitol in Area A, the EU established "consultancy offices of permanent representation" -- a de facto embassy, but for a state that does not exist -- and together with the PA developed multiple master plans to build infrastructure, roads, schools and other puzzle-pieces that, when completed, would connect to form an uninterrupted band of Arab territory, north-to-south – effectively covering all of Israel's Area C.
The EU also trained Palestinians in the use of advanced technology and helped to modernize their bureaucracy -- essential tasks to overcome the conservative, tribal nature of Arab societies. This sociological model, traditionally adhered to by the Palestinians, is one factor why they have failed to create a modern state, despite receiving more humanitarian aid than any group in history.
Dr. Yishai Spivak, an investigative researcher with Ad Kan, an Israeli non-profit organization, noted:
"It wasn't just about the Europeans throwing money at the Palestinians or teaching them to build single structures. It was about teaching them how to think about the other families so they could cooperate and share land. Fayyad had the vision. The EU led him by the hand and gave the vision a soul."
Since 2009, the Europeans have invested anywhere from hundreds of millions to more than one billion euros in Area C Palestinian development in the form of direct subsidies for construction, legal assistance, and aid to administration and planning. Once money is allocated, it is transferred to the Municipal Development and Landing Fund (MDLF), an executive arm of the PA Ministry of Local Government. A contract is drawn-up between a local municipality and UN-Habitat or other UN branches. Finally, the UN contracts directly with builders and field workers. These contracts actually acknowledge that the construction projects they are carrying out are, in fact, illegal, and that the Israeli government is within its rights to demolish them. In fact, legal costs for the defense and appeals process in Israeli courts are built right into the contracts, and budgets are set aside to cover the occasional impounding of construction machinery by Israel. Yet at no point in this process is Israeli permission sought.
This is not some secret conspiracy. In 2015, John Gatt-Rutter, the EU Representative to the West Bank and Gaza Strip at the time, dismissed the legally binding Oslo Accords by declaring that "Area C remains an integral part of the occupied Palestinian territory and compromises crucial natural resources and land for a viable Palestinian state." That same year, the EU spent 3.5 million euros on Palestinian Area C development. Its spatial plans for Area C construction are publicly available on the website of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and reveal exactly where the EU is funding infrastructure projects. Or simply take a drive through Area C and see dozens of Palestinian squatter camps with an EU flag or logo displayed on their structures.
In December 2022, an unpublished policy plan was leaked to the media and sparked outrage among politicians and Jewish groups. Drafted by the EU and dated June 2022, the document provided an "overview of the EU's approach in its Area C programme." The six-page policy plan, addressed to European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen, European Council President Charles Michel, and European Parliament President Roberta Metsola, bafflingly claimed to be "in line with the Oslo Accords," while, in the same sentence, declaring its aim to "preserv[e] Area C as part of a future Palestinian State." The plan discussed re-mapping the territory, thwarting Israeli archaeological activity, building infrastructure for Palestinians, and providing them with legal aid.
Since 2009, the PA has paved over 1,200 miles of new roads, put up thousands of electricity poles, and used agricultural projects to take over Israeli state land that had been untouched for decades. Some 3,500 illegal structures are erected every year in Area C, with an average of seven new illegal structures per day. By 2009, 29,784 structures had been built. By 2020, there were close to 70,000 structures. As of today, the PA has built over 90,000 illegal structures and aggressively seized more than 23,000 acres of land. Israel's Civil Administration tears down a mere 200 to 250 of these illegal structures each year, and generally chooses insignificant enforcement targets, such as animal pens or garages that do not bear intentional sponsorship signs.
Over the last decade or so, the PA has also illegally built more than 100 schools in Area C.
One school, built in 2021 in Gush Etzion, was constructed with funds from the supposedly "neutral" Switzerland, which is not even an EU member. That school is still standing today. The PA also routinely takes advantage of Jewish holidays to implement lightning-speed large-scale construction, including in Area C sites already under court-issued work-stop orders. Palestinians have more than enough room to build in Areas A and B, with 63% of that land empty and suitable for construction, but they apparently have the strategic goal of suffocating Israeli towns and villages. Brigadier General Amir Avivi (res.), founder of the Israel Defense and Security Forum, explains:
"If the Palestinians manage to create an impossible life for Jews, at the end of the day, Jews won't be able to live there. It's a disaster beyond anyone's imagination. Everybody living in Judea and Samaria will eventually have to leave because they will be surrounded by people shooting at them on the roads from all sides."
The particular case of Khan al Ahmar demonstrates how far the PA and EU will go in its quest to delegitimize Israel and draw international sympathy. By the 1970s, many Bedouin Arabs had abandoned their nomadic, shepherding traditions, taking advantage of the livelihood the newly established state of Israel afforded them. During this time, after a blood feud occurred within the large Jahalin Bedouin tribe, some families were forced out and migrated from southern Israel, and eventually settled on land adjacent to Maaleh Adumim, an Israeli town 4 miles east of Jerusalem. Ignoring its hazardous location next to a major highway, they set up a cluster of tents, and began illegally tapping into the municipality's water and electricity lines. Knowing full-well that their presence was illegal, many of the Bedouins cooperated with Israeli orders to evacuate. Some relocated, while others signed relocation agreements. Following the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, instead of allowing this routine zoning case to be settled like any other real estate dispute involving squatters, the Palestinians and their European backers decided to act as the Jahalin's representatives and turn this streetcorner into an international spectacle.
First, they fabricated a name for this illegal encampment to make it appear "historic": "Khan al Ahmar." From there, they complained to the media that this destitute group of Arabs were being threatened with supposed "crimes against humanity": forced population transfer and ethnic cleansing. They accompanied their manufactured narrative with images of barefoot Bedouin children, and began pumping money into the settlement, and building these "dispossessed" children a school.
Eventually, the Bedouins were convinced that they should stay put, while, starting in 2009, the PA and EU launched four separate lawsuits with the Israeli Supreme Court, an activist body consisting of self-selected and largely left-wing judges, who have crafted a supra-democratic system in which anyone, with no legal standing, is invited to file unlimited petitions against the State. Israel's Supreme Court is notoriously lenient towards Palestinians, often at the expense of the safety and security of Israelis, yet even it ruled, in every one of the six Khan al Ahmar petitions, that the squatters must evacuate. The French courts called the verdicts a "violation of international law," a rich claim given that country's own sordid history of forced transfer of its Roma population to eastern European countries.
The Israeli government offered the Jahalin a generous relocation package to the Arab community of Abu Dis, located roughly 4 miles away. This initiative would provide every wife of the polygamous Jahalin households with nearly $140,000, as well as each a plot of land zoned for residential construction in a new community named "Jahalin West," equipped with water and electricity, proper sanitation, education and welfare services. If they had accepted, these Bedouins would be living today in functional homes as part of a community designed specifically for them. Instead, they have been kept in limbo and cynically used as pawns in a perverse and corrupt European battle against the Jewish state. For 10 years, the evacuation, relocation and demolition orders were suspended, while Jahalin West remained uninhabited. Recently, squatters have begun to creep in and erect homes on the plots that had been standing empty, a rather ironic predicament given that critics had once complained that the Jahalin could not possibly be relocated to this site because it was "unfit for human settlement."
Khan al Ahmar is representative of a pattern of tactics that the PA regularly employs when wresting land rights from the State of Israel. First, it identifies a strategic point located far from an existing population center. Second, it illegally seizes the land, invents a name for this "historic" village that never existed, and insists the squatters have been there since the dawn of time, despite historic aerial photographs showing otherwise. Third, it broadcasts any pushback from Israel as "cruel" and "oppressive," and "ethnic cleansing."
Often, the next step is to create a land bridge between the new "village" and an existing Arab settlement, often through agricultural projects, again often funded by Europe. Then, it finds another location to invade. Rather than using its resources legally to build homes, schools, businesses, public buildings or parks on the vast open spaces under its control, the PA invests in politically motivated land seizures in Area C with the conscious aim of denying the right of Jews to live and thrive in their own sovereign country, amidst a sea of 50 Muslim-majority countries. Such behavior would appear to indicate that neither the Palestinians nor the Europeans have any interest in a lasting peace with Israel, which presumes an atmosphere of cooperation and direct negotiations.
Avivi openly considers this illegal takeover of land by the PA as big a national security threat to Israel as are Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and even Iran, adding:
"Unfortunately, many other high-ranking officers from the Israeli defense establishment don't understand. We are not treating this situation as a state of emergency, even though it's crystal clear that the Palestinian Authority is an enemy, and a dangerous one at that, even apart from its funding of terror and inciting hatred in education."
James Carver, a former Member of the European Parliament and its Committee on Foreign Affairs, is one of the few European parliamentarians who agrees. In 2016, he called out the EU for its obsessive meddling in Israeli affairs in a Times of Israel article:
"The EU professes to support a lasting Middle East peace settlement, yet I've highlighted both EU funding of the PLO, which pays salaries to murderers, as well as how EU funding of illegal Palestinian buildings in Area C, is in breach of the Oslo accords, thus acting as an obstacle to peace and expunging any pretense of the EU being an honest broker."
In diluting Israeli sovereignty, argued Carver, the EU is only creating further conflict, because those who genuinely support a two-state solution would never actively work to undermine either of those states.
Especially troubled by the fact that Europeans are building in nature reserves, he stated:
"It's very hypocritical that the European Union claimed to be environmental champions but seemed to be quite happy to illegally put-up buildings with their logo and develop settlements in nature reserves. Can you imagine the audacity of the European Union to believe they can violate legal facts? They've got skin as thick as a rhinoceros. They genuinely believe they can carry on with this, carte blanche."
These ongoing European-supported construction project are in nature reserves that were, in fact, internationally mandated as no-construction zones in the Wye River Memorandum, an agreement that concluded the Oslo Accords' division of the territory. Regavim, an Israeli non-governmental organization dedicated to protecting Israel's national lands and resources, has been mapping Palestinian illegal construction and land seizures for more than a decade. Regavim uses archival material, land deeds, official documents, historic photographs, historic and up-to-date aerial photographs, and geographic information system (GIS) maps. Its legal department often petitions the courts to compel Israeli authorities to act against instances of environmental abuse. Illegal construction, for instance, often produces illegal junkyards, which ignore regulations and requirements, and seriously pollute major water supplies used by both Arabs and Jews.
In many instances, Regavim has also petitioned against illegal construction on archaeological sites, a method by which the Palestinian Authority achieves two goals simultaneously: taking over territory and erasing the physical remains that attest to the Jewish historical connection to the land, dating back more than 3,000 years, to 1400 BCE. Israel previously carved out nature reserves around some archaeological sites in order to protect them. As far as the PA is concerned, these are the most sought-after construction sites, and the Europeans are full-fledged partners in this destruction of history, the environment and international law. In fact, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has been known to partner with the PA, and it actually plowed over the royal city of Shomron (Sebastia), the seat of the ancient Israelite Kingdom and one of the largest, most important archaeological sites in the area. UNESCO has also literally "reinvented" the Tomb of the Patriarchs -- where Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca and Leah are buried -- as the purported tomb of a Muslim sheikh.
While the European Parliament is generally considered a great seat of power, Carver, as an MEP, did not have the ability to initiate legislation, and his objections were never addressed. He explained that it is actually the purview of the European Commission to initiate laws, which only then go before parliament, where they are chewed over by the different political groups until a "consensus" is reached. Unlike the parliamentarians, who are elected by the voters of individual EU member states, the commissioners are appointed. As such, their loyalty lies with the EU over its member states. An ideologically-driven entity that seems to sanctimoniously revel in the belief that it has the moral right to usurp power from democracies and bestow it upon themselves, passing legislation that overrides national laws, the European Commission has – not surprisingly, considering its history -- swallowed the Palestinian's Jew-hating narrative whole. According to Carver, the Palestinian lobby is noisy and well-organized, and its members are vociferous in their actions compared to the far calmer, legalistic and reflective Israeli advocates.
Attempted legal action against the EU, on the basis of its undermining the Oslo Accords, is met with the claim that its funding for the PA merely amounts to "humanitarian aid" and that the EU has full "diplomatic immunity." Carver, however, argues that this defense is invalid because the Vienna Convention stipulates that diplomats may only be granted immunity if they do not interfere in the internal affairs of a state, which the EU is actively doing by seizing land that is recognized legally as being under Israel's jurisdiction. In claiming immunity by falsely declaring that it is not interfering in Israel's internal affairs, the EU is also disregarding a foundational element of the UN charter: the principle of non-intervention.
The Europeans appear to want it both ways, on the one hand paying lip service to the Oslo Accords in order to criticize Israel, while on the other hand actively helping the PA to ignore the terms of the Accords. The chasm between proclaimed intention and actual behavior renders any commitment to peace laughable. The irony of the Europeans condemning Israel for expropriating questionable Palestinian land when the Europeans themselves are helping Palestinians to expropriate Israeli land is lost on the public at large. Germany, in particular, leads the charge in this systematic assault on Israel's autonomy. According to Itamar Marcus, director of Palestinian Media Watch:
"It is outrageous that Germany, who, in the 20th century, led Europe in trying to exterminate the Jews, is the country leading 21st century Europe in policy that threatens Israel's survival."
It is unlikely that the Europeans -- insisting they are an "honest broker" in the Israel-Palestinian arena, and masking their antisemitic agenda of negating Jewish national and individual rights -- will ever be held to account. Many Israelis, however, believe it is their own leaders who have been too compliant to European demands that weaken them, and giving away the future of the country.
Karys Rhea is a producer at The Epoch Times and works
with the Middle East Forum, Jewish Leadership Project and Baste Records.
Her articles have appeared in Commentary, NY Daily News, Newsweek, The
Federalist, Washington Examiner and Townhall, among others. You can find
her on X.com under @rheakarys.
Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21490/europe-palestinians-land-grab
