Jewish community in Jordan Valley warns: ‘Bedouin are carrying out a mass-scale takeover of state land’

The Bedouin residents of the illegal outpost, which has grown significantly in recent years thanks to the support it receives from the Palestinian Authority and a consortium of European organizations, have begun to cultivate a huge tract of land, using heavy equipment, in an attempt to establish facts on the ground that will be very difficult to reverse.

(January 2, 2019 / JNS)

Residents of an illegal Bedouin outpost adjacent to Maskiyot were served with demolition orders. But instead of pulling up stakes, they are carrying out a takeover through agricultural projects on state land – land that is registered to the state, straddling the area’s major traffic artery, in an area under military closure orders.

The agricultural takeover at Maskiyot is only one of many such cases. “The Roots of Evil” report, released by Regavim in December, contains a detailed survey of the full extent of the methodical program of agricultural land-seizure being carried out by the Palestinian Authority and its foreign supporters.

This program, the PA’s “Roots Project,” aims to disrupt the territorial contiguity of Israeli control in Area C, and to enable the PA to claim ownership of the land under the current system of law. Each individual tract of state land that is overtaken by PA-sponsored agricultural work is part of the larger Arab vision of mass-scale seizure of Israeli-controlled territory. Every olive tree that is planted, every terrace that is built, strengthens the Arab hold on the territory and establishes facts that may become immutable down the line.