UPDATES
9:00 am Israel time, Tuesday, July 28 2015
**Everyone in southern Israel is wondering what happened last night.
At 10:15 pm, three very large explosions rocked the area–one of them shook our house here in Ashdod. They emanated from further south, and were reminiscent of last summer’s explosions during the war.
But there were no warning sirens, and there has been absolutely no discussion of what happened in the Israel media. However, hundreds of comments were registered on social media from people as far away as Jerusalem–all of whom felt and heard the explosive impacts.
As you may not know, your humble servant’s house is directly in the take-off path of a nearby air force base which shall remain unnamed. At exactly 10:32, 4 Israeli bombers nearly tore the roof of our house as they passed overhead with no lights on. Who knows what their destination was?
TODAY’S BLOG:
It’s 55 km (34 miles) from Jerusalem to Beit El.
The night and the day of reckoning has apparently, absurdly, arrived in Beit El for the Dreinoff Homes.
The Dreinoff homes (actually a small apartment complex). Note the Israeli flag atop the building and the sign that reads: We will not give up on Judea and Samaria–there will be a war (photo Aryeh Minkoff).
What are the Dreinoff homes? “They” are an “apartment complex” built by contractor Meir Dreinoff near the Beit El security perimeter just west of the main community. The homes, like all the homes in Beit El, were built on land appropriated in Area C of Samaria by the government for security purposes.
In 2010, pro-Palestinian NGO Yesh Din filed a petition claiming that the land on which Dreinoff was building the apartments was “private Palestinian land”. In response, the Israel Supreme Court issued an interim order freezing further construction on the complex.
However, the Court did not rule that the land was Palestinian land but rather that the contractor had not received the necessary building permit to build the apartments. At that point, the government sought to issue the necessary permit retroactively, but then the Court ordered the complex demolished.
And so the case has dragged on for five years.
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It has become a symbol of the effort to construct Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.
Now, we actually have a ridiculous situation in which the Court is continuing to order the complex destroyed by the end of July because of no building permit despite the fact that the Civil Administration has legally issued a building permit.
The whole situation is absurd.
It is in this context that hundreds of police and Border Guards arrived in Beit El in the middle of the night last night to take control of the “Dreinoff Homes” in advance of the end of July deadline. What they found was that Jewish community members had entered the structure and refused to leave.
An absurd display of force to evacuate an apartment building (picture: Observation Agency–on photo).
Intense clashes ensued with police firing tear gas into the buildings, and more than 50 Jewish community members were arrested. Eventually the buildings were cleared and the Border Guards set up a command post inside.
Judea and Samaria are consumed by Palestinian terrorism and the police and Border guards are attacking Jewish community members?
What is amazing about the action of the police and their cohorts–aside from the sad scene of Israeli police battling Jewish community members– is that Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked visited Beit El just hours before the police showed up and assured residents that the government was making every effort to legalize the homes. Apparently there is no communication between Shaked and Defense Minister Yaalon–who ordered last night’s action.
We’ll see what happens as the day progresses.
Addendum: One thing that has happened already is that within the last hour 250 Jewish community members–including dozens of families who formerly lived there– have moved into the ruins of Sa-Nur in northern Samaria–a community that was forcibly evacuated back in 2005 at the same time as the communities of northern Gaza. They are refusing to budge.
A student from Malawi, who had worked with an Israeli health volunteer in his country battling AIDS, came up to us as we walked down the street in the UC-Davis Picnic Day Parade and wanted to carry the Israeli flag.