A supplementary ruling of the High Court of Justice a few days ago gives the green light to regulate a new neighborhood west of the town of Tapuach in Samaria, and allows for the construction of an alternative road to it, according to a Sunday report by Makor Rishon (עתירת שמאל הביאה להסדרת שכונה בשומרון).
In their majority opinion, Justices Neil Handel and Menachem Mazuz, and against the dissenting opinion of Justice Uzi Vogelman (Fogelman), decided to revoke a temporary order issued in a petition by PA Arabs from the village of Yasuf and the Yesh Din NGO against a special planning order to pave an alternative road to the Tapuach West hill.
This will make it possible to complete the regulation of the settlement, some of which was evacuated a few years ago according to an earlier High Court decision.
In addition, the three-judge panel gave the effect of a ruling to the state’s declaration that four more buildings in the neighborhood would be demolished. These are buildings that have not yet been demolished in accordance with the previous ruling, as their evictions were frozen following the Regulation Act.
The new High Court decision continues a partial ruling by retired Court President Justice Miriam Naor from 2015, on a petition demanding the destruction of the entire Tapuach West neighborhood. President Naor and Justices Vogelman and Mazuz ruled at the time that the buildings on state-owned lands would remain in place and the petition concerning them was dismissed, while the buildings outside the state-owned lands would be demolished, including the access road to the neighborhood.
The decision left lands on the Tapuach West hill whose status was subject to further clarification, and in the meantime, the state declared additional lands in the area as state-owned lands to bring about their regulation.
In the summer of 2018, 17 buildings in Tapuach West were evacuated, following a High Court determination that they had been built on private land. The ruling ordered the removal of the paved road in the lands recognized as private, and the disposal of the electricity infrastructure that had been placed there, following which the state sought to establish an alternative access road, arguing that there could be no legal settlement on state-owned lands without an access road.
This kind of process normally takes many years to complete, but in order to comply with the ruling in full and be able to demolish the old road, the state sought to speed up the construction of the new road. This was finally made possible through a special planning order issued by the Central Command General.
Incidentally, when left-wing groups and other anti-settlement enterprise Israelis complain about the cost of having Jews living in Judea and Samaria, they should know that much of the cost comes from these legal shenanigans which end up destroying expensive investments in infrastructure – forcing the government to double its investment in slightly modified terms.
Much of these shenanigans are the result of a collaboration between then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Talia Sasson, nowadays Chairperson of the New Israel Fund and formerly its president. In 2004, Sharon ordered Sasson, a former attorney in the State’s Attorney’s office, to reassess the scope of “illegal outposts” in the liberated territories. It was the beginning of Sharon’s plot to take down a good chunk of Jewish settlements, and he found just the hangman to carry out the assignment. As a result of Sasson’s report, thousands of petitions from anti-Zionist NGOs representing real and made-up PA Arabs began to flood Israel’s High Court, resulting in a catastrophic increase in demolitions of Jewish homes.
In the Tapuach West case, the PA Arab petitioners and Yesh Din went to the High Court a second time, but their petition was denied.
According to NGO Monitor, Yesh Din received from the Netherlands €170,000 ($203,000) in 2018. Between 2019-2020, it received from Norway NOK 2.3 million ($272,500). Like some 30 other anti-Israel NGOs, Yesh Din is on those countries’ payroll as agent saboteurs dedicated to the destruction of Jewish life in Judea and Samaria.
In conclusion, had it not been for the petitions against Tapuach West, the neighborhood would not have been regulated to this day. So thank you, Holland and Norway, your money was well spent.
Attorney Aryeh Arbus who represented the residents of the Jewish neighborhood in the High Court issued a statement saying: “We welcome and rejoice in the legal breakthrough and for being able to reveal the true face of the petitioners, who couldn’t care less about an infringement of the rights of individuals, but are interested only in the destruction of the settlement enterprise. In light of this, it is difficult for us to understand why the court gave them even partial support by ordering the destruction of a few buildings that do not harm anyone. We hope that the breakthrough will be used and will continue until the approval of the neighborhood is complete, and may the left-wing NGOs’ demands for destruction continue to create new construction.”
Attorney Simcha Rotman, a candidate on the Religious Zionist list for the Knesset who represented the town of Tapuach before the High Court, stated: “I am happy that I and our staff had the merit of being partners in removing the immoral blockade that the left-wing organizations placed on the regulation of the Tapuach West settlement. Immediately after the election, I intend, with God’s help and with the help of my associates on the list of Religious Zionism, to make sure that not only the Tapuach West hill is regulated, but all the young settlements, which we will demand as part of our coalition agreements, as we have pledged.”