Peace Now petitions court to halt Efrat housing project
The left-wing group Peace Now has petitioned the High Court of Justice to halt the pending 7,000 unit project in the West Bank settlement of Efrat over the issue of land discrimination.
The project, one of the largest in the last decades, will be located on Efrat’s Givat HaEitam and would transform the Jewish community of over 11,000 people located on Jerusalem’s outskirts into a city.
Palestinians and the Israeli Left have objected to the project, which they fear will prevent the expansion of the neighboring Palestinian city of Bethlehem. They have dubbed it E2, because much like the Ma’aleh Adumim’s E1 project they argue that it threatens Palestinian contiguity and the viability of a future state.
In petitioning the court, however, Peace Now has argued that the property spread over 120 hectares (296.5 acres) of land, which was classified as state land in 2004, should be allocated for Palestinian housing, even though technically it falls within the municipal boundaries of the Efrat community.
Palestinians hold that the portions of the land are private Palestinian property and should never have been allocated as state land.
But the petition itself, doesn’t contest the classification, rather the allocation of the property for settlement use. Peace Now argued in its petition that the issue here is a discriminatory land practice by which state land in the West Bank is almost always designated – 99.76% of the time – for Jewish settlement development and is not made available to Palestinians to develop Area C of the West Bank.
“For over fifty years of occupation, the State of Israel has done everything it can to ensure the establishment and expansion of the Israeli settlement in the West Bank, at the expense and serious harm to the Palestinians, who are protected residents [of the area],” the petition stated.
The main tool by which Israel has executed its national goal of settlement development in the last decades is through land classification and allocation, the petition stated.
“The time has come and the time has come for the Israeli government to recognize its duty to ensure the welfare of the protected occupied population and to abolish its criminal allocation policy,” the petition stated.