The Guardian published a film review today of a documentary about a disputed area in the southern Hebron hills called Masafer Yatta – eight hamlets, mostly collections of low-slung homes with makeshift roofs, within Israeli controlled Area C of the West Bank/J&S.
The piece, by Peter Bradshaw, (“No Other Land review – an Israeli and Palestinian’s remarkable relationship“, Nov. 7), includes the following background:
No Other Land is about Masafer Yatta, a collection of Palestinian villages in the West Bank whose thousand-plus occupants were, in 2022, ordered to leave because the Israeli military needed the area as a training zone – and so began the long, bitter process of bulldozers being sent in, accompanied by soldiers who were grimly unmoved by residents’ desperate protest
Presumably, the Guardian reviewer is repeating the framing of documentary about Masafer Yatta, which is completely untrue.
As our colleague Tamar Sternthal demonstrated in a post about a correction she prompted at Haaretz on the same issue, the land in question was declared a firing zone forty years ago, not, as Bradshaw suggests, in 2022. What did occur in 2022 is that Israel’s High Court rejected the legal claim that Palestinians had lived there permanently before it was declared a firing zone in the early 1980s. See page 17 of the (Hebrew) ruling.
The court found that Palestinians did not reside there as permanent residents (as opposed to seasonal) when the area was declared a firing zone in the 1980s, so had no legal right to reside there. This is the crux of the case because the law allows the military to designate land for military use if it is not permanently settled.
The residents’ legal wrangling dates back only to 1997.
In other words, the area was a firing zone until then with no legal action on the part of the Palestinians. Moreover, as noted in page 17 of the ruling, the air force used the aerial area for attack drills until 1993, which reinforces the fact that there could not have been permanent Palestinian residents living there at the time.
In addition, page 8 of the ruling notes that some of the appellants have permanent homes elsewhere in the West Bank, a key point which further erodes the appellants’ case given that the law does not protect temporary residents against the firing zone designation.
As usual, the Guardian took Palestinian claims about ‘being kicked off their land’ at face value, while ignoring the historical and legal background.
We’ve complained to editors, requesting a correction.
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