Back to Bethlehem

And so this is what we found in Bethlehem :

Rachel's Tomb is a bit harder to get to than before



Our land now has a house on it



(that's the illegal settlement of Har Homa in the background left. Of course things change quickly here - this is Har Homa 5 years ago)


But the house wasn't finished yet ....



so I amused myself in wrecking all the brand new tiles that the settler had left there.

Noone was living there but there was clearly alot of recent work going on.


And just to make this a rich multimedia experience, here is

"Visiting Bethlehem - THE VIDEO"

The Settlement Machine

Before we left, I decided to do some research on the Israeli settlement "system".

The process is well documented. Akiva Eldar wrote in Ha'aretz, 2005 :

Right under the noses, in the best case, of prime ministers, chiefs of staff and
GOCs of the Central Command, who are responsible for "Judea and Samaria"
(the West Bank), among them Barak himself, the State of Israel has imposed
the law of the jungle on those territories.

This is what happens in the jungle :

Building companies owned and managed by settler leaders and land dealers acquire
lands from Palestinian crooks and transfer them to the Custodian of
Government Property in the Israel Lands Administration. The custodian
"converts" the lands to "state lands," leases them back to settler
associations that then sell them to building companies.

and furthermore :

The Justice Ministry has responded that "property will be considered government
property as long as the opposite has not been proven. Hence, it is possible to
declare that privately owned land is government property, only if the owners of
the land have asked the Custodian of Government Property to manage the
property."

Here's the entire land theft article.

So there we have the crux of the issue. Under the Occupation there is a reverse onus of proof. The fact that land has been owned by your family for generations means nothing if a rogue settler decides he likes the look of it. The onus is then on the owner to prove title. In the court of a foreign, occupying country.

A Phonecall from Palestine

Hello to everyone in cyberspace

This Blog is my take on the Israel - Palestine conflict. There will be political debate, live information and hopefully some insight. I welcome comments from all and sundry.

But first I am going to be indulgent and start on a personal note.

In May 2005 I received an anxious phonecall from Bethlehem, Palestine - about a piece of land at a place called "Jrun el Hummus".

Jrun el Hummus is at the northern entrance to Bethlehem - quite close to Rachel's Tomb - here is a map :



I will publish my full bio soon - but put simply the land in question was purchased by my great grandfather Jadullah Siman in the early 1920's. The land is well located - between Bethlehem and Jerusalem and immediately to the West of the "Security fence" / Apartheid Wall. To this day it is registered in my great grandfather's name in the Jerusalem "Tabu" (land registry). There are four heirs to Jadullah's property - my mother in Australia, my cousins Carlos Muvdi and George Siman in Colombia, and our cousin Henry in Los Angeles.

Early last year (2005) an Israeli gentleman entered this land without permission. He was armed and claimed to have purchased our land from an "unamed foreign owner". Now this is clearly ludicrous - the property is held by my famly, we are all in contact with each other and noone has sold anything.

The intruder threatened the neighbours with violence if they tried to resist his incursion and moreover refused to show any proof of purchase. And he started to build - in a hurry. When challenged, his response was simple :

"If you don't like it then take me to court. It will take 2 years and 10,000
dollars, and by the time the case is heard there will be a fact on the ground.
And by the way, it is probably not in your interest to make trouble for me"

I didn't realise it at the time, but I was about become part of a live case study into Israel's settlement "machine" : a loose network of colonists who operate on the fringes of the law, IDF personnel who look the other way, a local population too terrified to protest, and in the background opportunistic property development companies and a semi official government master plan.

But this was all in the future - first I had to travel to Israel / Palestine to get the facts...