Israel’s Peace Now movement today issued the following press release, after scoring a major victory in its fight against Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank.

High Court Orders Evacuation of 17 Structures in The Illegal Outpost of Derech Ha'Avot

Earlier today the High Court of Justice ruled on a petition submitted by Peace Now and by Palestinian landowners on the illegal outpost of Derech Ha'Avot. In its verdict, the High Court demanded that the State will evacuate 17 structures in the illegal outpost, located near Bethlehem. The court strongly criticized the State, which tried to retract its previous commitments, and over and over again postponed the enforcement of the law with regards to illegal construction in the outpost while raising a variety of contradicting excuses. The High Court ordered that the evacuation of the structures and fulfilment of the demolition order will be executed within 18 months (by March 2018), and ordered the State to pay high legal expenses.

Unauthorized settlements dot hilltops in the West Bank, and anti-settlement groups and Palestinians say retroactively legalizing them is a methodical effort to change the region’s map.

ISABEL KERSHNER

MITZPE DANNY, West Bank — One night in the fall of 1998, a self-professed “outpost entrepreneur” brought three trailers to a rugged hilltop in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and established his first pirate settlement.

Dozens of youthful supporters came to cheer on the entrepreneur, Shimon Riklin, whose wife, newborn and toddler joined him a few days later. A second family also moved in. To their initial surprise, nobody from the military or government came to remove them. “After six months,” Mr. Riklin said in a recent interview, “I understood it was a done deal.”

They named their outpost Mitzpe Danny, after a British immigrant stabbed to death by a Palestinian at the settlement across the highway, and went on over the next few months to help establish Mitzpe Hagit and then Neve Erez a short drive away. “I jumped from hill to hill,” Mr. Riklin said.

Today, more than 40 Orthodox Jewish families live in Mitzpe Danny, one of a string of outposts on a strategic ridge with breathtaking views southwest to Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives and east all the way to Jordan. They are part of an expansive network of about 100 outposts established mostly over the past two decades without government authorization.

At least one-third of these have either been retroactively legalized or — like Mitzpe Danny — are on their way, in what anti-settlement groups that track the process see as a quiet but methodical effort by the government to change the map of the West Bank, now in its 50th year under Israeli occupation, by entrenching the outposts that spread like fingers across it.

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News from the Peace Now's (Israel) Settlement Watch:

 By William Booth,  August 28, 2016

For a quick reality check on the current stalemate in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there’s no better place to visit than this little village of miserable huts and sheep pens in the middle of nowhere.

The hamlet in the hills south of Hebron has become an improbable proxy in a cold war waged among Jewish settlers, the Israeli government, Western diplomats, peace activists and the 340 or so Arab herders who once inhabited caves on the site and now live in squalid tents.

Israel’s military authority in the West Bank wants to demolish the Palestinian community, contending that the ramshackle structures, made of old tires and weathered tarpaulins, were built without permits and must come down.

The Palestinian residents insist they are not squatters but heirs to the land they have farmed and grazed since the Ottoman era.

They say Israel wants to depopulate the area of Arabs and replace them with Jews.

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Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent APN's views and policy positions.

This week, Alpher discusses what the choice of Diaspora partners for the Israel Ministry of Diaspora Affairs' new program for outreach among Jewish university students tells us; how significant is it that Director General Dore Gold of the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs has paid a brief secret visit to a Muslim country in Africa with which Israel has no diplomatic relations; and any redeeming qualities to Defense Minister Lieberman’s new “carrot and stick” policy toward the Palestinians.

In 2009, Israel arrested the head of the northern branch of Israel’s Islamic Movement for incitement, for saying that Israel “seeks to build a synagogue on Al-Aqsa Mosque.” Since then – and especially over the past two years, as unrest has rocked Jerusalem – Netanyahu has regularly argued that Palestinian Authority incitement over the Temple Mount is a chief cause of violence, and has called Palestinian officials’ statements about Israel’s intentions on the Temple Mount “gross lies.”

Earlier this month, on August 14-15, Jews observed the fast day of Tisha B’Av, commemorating various catastrophes that have befallen the Jewish people, including the destruction of the first and second temples. Israel’s Deputy Defense Minister, Eli Ben-Dahan, marked this solemn occasion by telling a crowd gathered for a march around the Old City: “We aren’t embarrassed to say it: We want to rebuild the Temple on the Temple Mount.”

The Washington Jewish Week and the Baltimore Jewish Times  runs this week's message from Ezer Weizman (1924 - 2005), seventh President of Israel, former commander of the Israeli Air Force, and former Minister of Defense.

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Jerusalem expert Daniel Seidemann and settlement expert Hagit Ofran of Israel’s Peace Now movement were APN’s guest on an August 25^th 2016 briefing call on the latest settlements-related developments in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

News from Peace Now's (Israel) Settlement Watch:

Following our exposure regarding the possible establishment of a settlement in Hebron's "Plugat Hamitkanim" military base, below is new information uncovered in the past 24 hours.  

1. It appears that former Defense Minister, Moshe Ya'alon, approved the allocation of a portion of the land where the military base is located to the Ministry of Housing. The Housing Ministry is now preparing a plan to build 28 housing units in the area. If implemented, the plan would increase the number of settlers in Hebron by approximately 100 (an increase of over 10% to the settler population in the city). The planning process at the Civil Administration's High Planning Committee has not yet begun.