Woodkirk Stone
More than a dozen lawmakers took part in a pair of dueling solidarity visits on Sunday to the northern West Bank, which has become a flashpoint for Israeli-Palestinian violence in recent weeks.
A right-wing delegation composed mostly of Likud MPs visited the illegal Homesh outpost, which was the site of a terrorist attack last month in which a Palestinian gunman opened fire on a group of Israeli yeshiva students returning home after day of study, killing 25-year-old Yehudah Dimantman.
Attendees included MPs Yuli Edelstein, Nir Barkat, Eli Cohen, Yoav Kisch and Ofir Katz from Likud, Michal Waldiger from religious Zionism and Moshe Abutbul from Shas. The lawmakers used the visit to drum up calls from the Israeli right to legalize Homesh, which the state has discovered to have been built on private Palestinian land.
Years ago, the High Court of Justice ruled that Palestinian farmers with land titles should be granted access by the military. In practice, however, this has not happened. Instead, an ultra-nationalist Israeli yeshiva has been allowed to operate almost daily for over 15 years, since Homesh settlement was evacuated as part of the 2005 unilateral disengagement from Gaza and four settlements in northern Gaza. the West Bank.
As security forces razed several structures that settlers erected in Homesh in response to the December shooting, they allowed the makeshift yeshiva building to stand, amid pressure and warnings from right-wing lawmakers , including some members of the coalition, that the demolition of the complex would be a “price for terrorism”.
Homesh is the latest of several outposts to come under scrutiny in the northern West Bank, where the government has blocked the defense establishment from demolishing hamlets of feral cats.
The nearby Evyatar outpost, which was illegally re-established in May as Israeli security forces were busy responding to violence in Gaza and in so-called mixed Judeo-Arab towns across the country, also remains intact. more than six months later. A dozen settler families agreed to leave the area as part of a deal with the government that allowed the outpost to remain and set up a permanent military presence that would watch over empty trailers while the government was determining whether the outpost could be legalized.
Likud, religious Zionism and Shas MPs pay a solidarity visit on January 2, 2022 to the illegal Homesh outpost in the northern West Bank. (Courtesy)
The new outpost has led to weekly protests by Palestinians in the adjacent village of Beita, who see the feral cat hamlet as part of a larger Israeli effort to take control of West Bank land that Palestinians see as part of their future state.
Protests have often been violent, and IDF troops have used live ammunition against protesters, killing at least 10 people in recent months. The protests were extreme in nature, including the burning of Stars of David and swastikas, and they also galvanized support for Palestinians across the West Bank and the Palestinian Authority.
On Sunday, members of the Arab-majority Joint List traveled to Beita and posed for photos with town leaders as well as some of the teenagers who were injured during the weekly protests. MPs condemned the Israeli military’s crackdown on protests and called for the razing of illegal Jewish outposts in the region.