Outpost advocates pursue price tag demolitions in court

A tiny village of Palestinian families in the southern West Bank has had an unwelcome visitor in recent months. “He comes with small weapons and his camera, sometimes with armed forces, sometimes with settlers,” Susiya resident Nasser Nawajeh says. The armed visitor is Ovad Arad, the Judea and Samaria Director of Regavim, an Israeli non-governmental organization. Arad’s job is to roam the West Bank photographing Palestinian buildings for the group’s legal petitions, which demand the Israeli government expedite their demolitions. Susiya, a hamlet of 350 people, including 120 children, is now at immediate risk of forced displacement as a result of Regavim’s petition, the United Nations humanitarian affairs office says. Arad is not a lone-ranger. The group he works for is run by residents of Israeli settlements and illegal outposts, with political connections to local government and the Likud and National Union parties. According to Israeli experts who reviewed the group’s official reports, the NGO is financed by publicly funded local councils of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. It received more than 2 million shekels ($550,000) of funding in 2010, the latest year for which figures are available. Regavim referred Ma’an to a representative named Yoni who, after several weeks of unreturned calls and emails, refused to confirm or deny its funding or clarify details of its work. “We don’t want to cooperate with Ma’an,” he said Tuesday, before hanging up. Legal ‘price tag’ Founded in 2006, Regavim insists it is an independent group interested in equal application of the law for both settlers and Palestinian communities. With a 2010 budget that increased more than six-fold since 2008, it has stepped up a legal campaign calling on the Israeli state to act on frozen or drawn-out challenges to demolitions of Palestinian buildings. In recent months, a Regavim petition secured a commitment from the Israeli state to tie up all pending Palestinian demolition orders before August 2012. But research by Ma’an shows the group is staffed by politically connected settlers, and it champions demolitions as retribution for Israeli government moves against settlements, echoing the ‘price tag’ slogan of settler outlaws. Regavim director-general Yehuda Eliyahu lives in one such outpost, Haresha, near Ramallah, and according to the outpost’s website, helped found the plot in 1999. While the Israeli government has supported settlement building in the West Bank for decades, outposts set up by settlers are illegal even under Israeli law. After Israel's Supreme Court ordered the evacuation of the outpost in 2009, Haresha says it "joined hands with Regavim ... to file petition after petition" against Palestinian homes. Then when the court ruled last August against the high-profile outpost Migron, Regavim began working with the outpost to flood Israeli courts with cases against Palestinian Bedouins inside Israel, the Haaretz daily reported at the time. The petition that now threatens Susiya was filed in response to a 2010 case against the neighboring settlement, to enable villagers access their lands safely, lawyer Quamar Mishirqi says. Regavim has also directly petitioned against government removal of settler outposts. In April 2010 it won a case to halt the demolition of six homes in Har Bracha outpost near Nablus, according to the settler news site Arutz Sheva. And Regavim joined the Binyamin settler council in filing for an injunction against demolition of Migron homes in 2011, Arutz Sheva said.