Read part of why this is true, in the view of Zionists:
AND MUCH MORE...http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2010/12/1 ... -unequal-0SummaryThis report consists of a series of case studies that compare Israel’s different treatment of
Jewish settlements to nearby Palestinian communities throughout the West Bank, including
East Jerusalem. It describes the two-tier system of laws, rules, and services that Israel
operates for the two populations in areas in the West Bank under its exclusive control, which
provide preferential services, development, and benefits for Jewish settlers while imposing
harsh conditions on Palestinians. The report highlights Israeli practices the only discernable
purposes of which appear to be promoting life in the settlements while in many instances
stifling growth in Palestinian communities and even forcibly displacing Palestinian residents.
Such different treatment, on the basis of race, ethnicity, and national origin and not narrowly
tailored to meet security or other justifiable goals, violates the fundamental prohibition
against discrimination under human rights law.
It is widely acknowledged that Israel’s settlements in the West Bank, including East
Jerusalem, violate international humanitarian law, which prohibits the occupying power from
transferring its civilian population into the territories it occupies; Israel appears to be the
only country to contest that its settlements are illegal. Human Rights Watch continues to
agree with the nearly universal position [BIAS?]that Israel should cease its violation of international
humanitarian law by removing its citizens from the West Bank.[/b] This report focuses on the
less-discussed discriminatory aspect of Israeli settlement policies, and analyzes serious and
ongoing violations of other rights in that context.
The case studies in this report show that discriminatory Israeli policies control many aspects
of the day-to-day life of Palestinians who live in areas under exclusive Israeli control and that
those policies often have no conceivable security justification. For example, Jubbet al-Dhib is
a 160-person Palestinian village to the southeast of Bethlehem that is often accessible only
by foot because its only connection to a paved road is a rough, 1.5 kilometer-long dirt track.
Children from Jubbet al-Dhib must walk to schools in other villages several kilometers away
because their own village has no school. Jubbet al-Dhib lacks electricity despite numerous
requests to be connected to the Israeli electric grid, which Israeli authorities have rejected;
Israeli authorities also rejected an internationally donor-funded project that would have
provided the village with solar-powered streetlights. Any meat or milk in the village must be
eaten the same day due to lack of refrigeration; residents often resort to eating preserved
foods instead. Villagers depend for light on candles, kerosene lanterns, and, when they can
afford to fill it with gasoline, a small generator.
Separate and Unequal 2
Approximately 350 meters away is the Jewish community of Sde Bar. It has a paved access
road for its population of around 50 people and is connected to Jerusalem by a new, multimillion
dollar highway—the “Lieberman Road�—which bypasses Palestinian cities, towns,
and villages like Jubbet al-Dhib. Sde Bar operates a high school, but Jubbet al-Dhib students
are ineligible to attend; for Palestinians, settlements are closed military areas that may be
entered only with special military permits. Residents of Sde Bar have the amenities common
to any Israeli town, such as refrigerators and electric lights, which Jubbet al-Dhib villagers
can see from their homes at night.
Both Jubbet al-Dhib and Sde Bar fall within “Area C� – land that was designated under the
1995 Oslo interim peace agreement to fall under Israeli civil and military control. But while
Israel grants Sde Bar residents access to roads, electricity, and funds for housing
development, it deprives residents of Jubbet al-Dhib of similar amenities. Since Sde Bar’s
founding in 1997, Israel has invested millions of dollars in nearby Jewish settlements like
Tekoa and Nokdim to build homes, schools, community centers, health clinics, and
swimming pools. The same is not true for Jubbet al-Dhib, which dates to 1929. Development
and infrastructure there are at a standstill, strictly prohibited by Israeli authorities who
prevent villagers from building new houses or expanding those they already have.1
Israel has human rights obligations towards all persons under its control, including those in
territory it occupies, as has been stated by the International Court of Justice and other
international bodies. Israel denies that its human rights obligations apply to Palestinians in
the West Bank, except for East Jerusalem, which it considers part of Israel. It argues against
the applicability of human rights law based on an interpretation that restricts its applicability
to the territory of a state and not to occupied territories, and on the argument that the law of
occupation applies to the West Bank to the exclusion of human rights law. The
International
Court of JusticeALSO BIASED?]as well as several UN human rights committees have rejected this
interpretation, on the basis of the text of the relevant human rights treaties, which define
their applicability based on the degree of a government’s control over a person rather than
on a state’s borders, and on the principle that human rights law and the law of occupation,
as written and interpreted, are not mutually exclusive but complementary obligations that
may both apply to populations under a government’s effective control. International law
does not require Israel to treat Palestinian residents of the West Bank as though they were
Israeli citizens; for example, non-citizens do not have the right to vote. However, the rights of
1 With the exception of settlements in East Jerusalem, where Israel has applied its civil law, Palestinians are virtually excluded
from living in settlements by the requirement that they obtain renewable permits from the Israeli military to enter settlements;
Human Rights Watch is not aware of cases of Palestinians applying for or the military granting permits allowing them to
purchase homes in settlements.
3 Human Rights Watch | December 2010
Israeli citizens—including settlers—do not include the right to benefit from discriminatory
treatment that violates the rights of Palestinians in Israeli-occupied territory.
Israel’s differential treatment in law, regulations, and administrative practice directly affect
the roughly 490,000 Jewish settlers and 420,000 Palestinians in areas under its exclusive
control in the West Bank (including in Area C and East Jerusalem). In addition, the
implications of Israel’s discriminatory policies are far broader, affecting many of the roughly
2.4 million Palestinians living in the cities and towns in the occupied West Bank (known as
Areas A and B) where Israel has ceded most civil responsibilities to the Palestinian Authority.
That is because Area C contains substantial amounts of water resources, grazing and
agricultural land, and the land reserves required for developing cities, towns, and
infrastructure. It is also the only contiguous area in the West Bank, effectively isolating the
cities and towns (which fall outside Area C) into disconnected enclaves.2 As a result, Israel
effectively controls movement and access between Palestinian population centers.3
Palestinians must cross checkpoints to travel through Area C and need permits to build
infrastructure that would connect to cities, towns, and villages (including roads, water and
sewage pipes, and electricity towers). It is often impossible for Palestinian cities, towns, and
villages that have outgrown municipal lands to expand into Area C, where Israel strictly
controls Palestinian construction.
To the extent that Israel, which remains ultimately responsible for persons in the territories it
occupies, has conferred powers on the Palestinian Authority (PA) in certain areas, the PA
also has human rights responsibilities.
Since 1967, when it seized the West Bank from Jordan during hostilities—and under a variety
of governments, since the right-wing Likud party first came to power in 1977—Israel has
expropriated land from Palestinians for Jewish-Israeli settlements and their supporting
infrastructure, denied Palestinians building permits and demolished “illegal� Palestinian
construction (i.e., Palestinian construction that the Israeli government chose not to
authorize), prevented Palestinian villages from upgrading or building homes, schools, health
clinics, wells, and water cisterns, blocked Palestinians from accessing roads and agricultural
lands, failed to provide electricity, sewage, water, and other utilities to Palestinian
communities, and rejected their applications for such services. Such measures have not only
limited the expansion of Palestinian villages, but imposed severe hardships for residents,
2 World Bank, The Economic Effects of Restricted Access to Land in the West Bank, October 21, 2008, p. 4.
3 See OCHA, The Humanitarian Impact of Israeli Infrastructure in the West Bank, 2007, Chapter 2; B’Tselem, Land Grab: Israel’s
Settlement Policy in the West Bank, May 2002, p. 50.
Separate and Unequal 4
including forcing children to walk long distances for school, and leaving residents with
limited access to medical care, which can often be accessed only by crossing multiple
checkpoints, because there are no Palestinian general hospitals in Area C. Road blocks,
checkpoints, and substandard roads delay ambulances and people seeking medical care, in
addition to the costs they impose on the Palestinian economy. Since Palestinians need
special military permits to enter settlements, usually as laborers, medical services there are
effectively unavailable to them. In some cases, Israel’s discriminatory policies have forcibly
displaced Palestinians from their communities.
Such policies have not been applied to Jewish settlements. Notwithstanding Israel’s
evacuation of settlers from Gaza and four West Bank settlements in 2005, and its evacuation
of a handful of “outposts� (unauthorized settlements), settlements have expanded in size—
growing from approximately 241,500 inhabitants in 1992 to roughly 490,000 inhabitants in
2010 (including East Jerusalem). Settlers enjoy continuing government subsidies, including
funding for housing, education, and infrastructure such as special roads.
In most cases where Israel has acknowledged differential treatment of Palestinians—such as
barring them from accessing “settler-only� roads and subjecting them to 505 roadblocks and
checkpoints within the West Bank (as of June 2010)—it has asserted that the measures are
necessary to protect Jewish settlers and other Israelis who are subject to periodic attacks by
Palestinian armed groups, particularly during the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising,
from 2000 to around 2006.4
But no security or other legitimate rationale can explain many instances of differential
treatment of Palestinians, such as permit denials that effectively prohibit Palestinians from
building or repairing homes, schools, roads, and water tanks; repairing a home does not
under any stretch of the imagination constitute a security threat. In cases where Israel has
justified policies that harm Palestinians on the grounds of security (whether that of residents
of Israel or of settlers), it has often done so based on policies that define all Palestinians as
a security threat by virtue of their race and national origin, rather than on policies that are
narrowly tailored to well-defined security interests. A government’s differential treatment of
different populations can sometimes be justified, but only to the extent that it serves a
legitimate purpose and is narrowly tailored to have the least harmful impact possible.
4 Violent attacks by Palestinian armed groups killed 202 Israeli civilians in the West Bank between 2000 and August 31, 2010.
During the same period, Israeli settlers killed 43 Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and Israeli security forces killed 1823Palestinian civilians there, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.
5 Human Rights Watch | December 2010
In some cases, the harm caused to Palestinians by Israel’s discriminatory policies has been
vastly disproportionate to the stated goal and has been carried out despite less harmful
alternatives. For example, the Israeli military requires many Palestinians to obtain military
“coordination� in order to access their olive groves and other agricultural lands where those
lands are located near settlements. Such a policy purportedly protects settlers from
potential attacks, as well as protecting Palestinians from settler attacks, but in practice, the
Israeli military prohibits (by refusing to “coordinate� access) Palestinian villagers from
accessing their lands for almost the entire year. Residents of Al Janiya, a Palestinian village
near the settlement of Talmon, cannot adequately cultivate their lands during the roughly
two weeks per year that they have "coordinated" access to them, with the result that
agricultural yields have declined sharply and their livelihoods have been harmed. The Israeli
military has not attempted to alleviate this near-permanent exclusion of Palestinians from
their lands by increasing the amount of time they are given access or by imposing
restrictions on the settlers to enhance Palestinian access, effectively forcing Palestinians to
bear the entire burden of ensuring settlers’ security.
Israel’s desire to protect settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and citizens within
Israel from the threat of attack by Palestinian armed groups does not justify policies that
have nothing to do with security or that discriminate against all Palestinians as if they were
all security threats.
Discriminatory practices also often violate Israel’s obligations towards Palestinians under
the law of occupation. As the occupying power in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem,
Israel is obliged to ensure the welfare of the occupied population and to limit its actions
according to the law of occupation as set forth in international humanitarian law. In some
cases, Israeli policies have made Palestinian communities virtually uninhabitable and
effectively forced residents to leave. According to a survey of households in Area C and East
Jerusalem in June 2009, some 31 percent of Palestinian residents had been displaced since
2000.5 The unnecessary and effectively forcible transfer of the occupied population by the
occupying power to other parts of the territory, by unlawfully demolishing homes or by other
measures that make it impossible to remain in a given community, is a serious violation of
Israel’s obligations under the law of occupation. Israel’s confiscation of land and natural
resources for the benefit of settlements exceeds its authority as an occupying power, as
5 Save the Children UK, “Fact Sheet: Jordan Valley,� October 2009,
http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/en/do ... ations.pdf p. 2 (accessed July 21,
2010). The survey found that Palestinian residents in Area C in the West Bank had been temporarily or permanently displaced
primarily as a result of Israeli home demolitions, military orders, and other policies preventing development.
How can HRW, The UN, the World Court, Bet Selem, and so many other international justice groups be so BIASED to the MEs' "only Democracy" that is just using Apartheid to exercise its "legitimate right of self defense" (automatic Israeli response to any reported atrocity by BIASED news reports)?
