semitism.net

Reporter Steven Erlanger had articles on Jayyous yesterday in the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune. It looks like he went there to survey residents on the upcoming election and instead got an earful about the land grab, which is their overriding concern at the moment.

Briefly, Jayyous is a Palestinian farming village outside the Green Line. Last year the Israeli security wall was built through the middle of the town, separating farmers from their fields. The gates are open for one hour, twice per day, and the permits that are required to pass through are issued selectively. Many farmers have been unable to tend their fields. The town’s livelihood is in serious jeopardy. Now, it would appear that an Israeli settlement inside the wall, Zufim, is seizing fields belonging to Jayyous’ farmers for its own expansion project. See my earlier post for details.

The Times reports:

Tawfiq Salim, 57, owns prime land with his brother, Jamil, that is the center of a dispute roiling the village and beyond. On Dec. 10, bulldozers acting for an Israeli company uprooted nearly 650 of their olive trees, some of them 600 years old, he said. The men at the controls said the land, which lies on the Israeli side of the barrier, belonged to the company…

Talya Somech, the Israeli spokeswoman for the Civil Administration Office for the West Bank, said that the District Coordination and Liaison Office, to which the Salims complained, immediately ordered the work to stop pending investigation.

The head of civil administration talked to both sides and found that a Jayyous resident sold the land to the Israeli company in a deal approved in June 2003. The company had a permit to uproot the trees.

“The relocation of the trees was carried out in keeping with the permit, which was legally issued to the owner of the plot, as registered in the Land Registry,” Ms. Somech said.

The residents of Jayyous assert that they never sold their land to any developer. Salim says the Israeli company that is plowing up his land is using an inaccurate map. He is planning to file suit in the Israeli courts.

What company are we talking about? The New York Times doesn’t say. But David Bloom, who has followed the story closely for an independent magazine called World War III Report, reports:

In a Dec. 15 Ha`aretz article by Akiva Eldar, he mentions that Ge`ulat Haaretz is the “yazam,” or developer, and the contractor, “kablan” in Hebrew, is LIDAR. For some reason, Ge`ulat`s relationship to LIDAR is mentioned in the Hebrew-language edition of Ha`aretz, but any mention of LIDAR has been censored from the English-language edition.

Bloom also says that Lidar is owned by Lev Leviev, a Russian Jew active in the Lubavitcher sect (I was not able to find other sources to confirm the involvement of Lidar, or that Leviev owns Lidar). If Bloom’s report is true, it would cast the situation in an interesting light. In January Ha’aretz listed Leviev as one of Israel’s five wealthiest people, with a net worth of one and a half to two billion dollars.

Leviev made his fortune in the diamond business. Specifically, according to Professional Jeweler magazine, when de Beers started to limit its dealings in Angola because of concerns over “conflict diamonds”, Leviev stepped in and signed an exclusive partnership with the Angolan govenment for diamond mining and distribution.

The Angolan government…began rethinking its relationship with De Beers and other diamond buyers. This occurred after De Beers stopped buying open-market diamonds in Angola in October 1999, concerned that illicit diamond trading that funded civil war could be tainting legal production. In early 2000, Angola created a single channel of distribution to control production. A new company, Angola Selling Corp. (or Ascorp), was formed to market rough diamonds bought from small- to large-scale mining operations and independent miners. Ascorp is a joint venture of Angola which owns half and Leviev and Omega Diamonds of Antwerp, Belgium, who each control about a quarter. Leviev, who reportedly sold the concept of Ascorp to Angola, came away with the job of marketing Angolan diamonds.

A Forbes Magazine profile makes him out to be quite well-connected.

Leviev, who now lives in Bnei Brak, an ultra-Orthodox enclave in Israel, is a close associate of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the presidents of Kazakhstan and his native Uzbekistan. Among his pals in Africa are presidents José Eduardo Dos Santos of Angola and Sam Nujoma of Namibia.

Leviev does have an interest in real estate - he is an owner of Africa Israel, the construction company that was awarded the government contract to build the Cross-Israel Highway. Africa Israel also made headlines recently by purchasing the Chase Manhatten Building in New York for $170 million.

So - is an Israeli billionaire pulling strings to displace Palestinian farmers for a profitable development project?

The Israeli govenment has taken steps in Jayyous whose end result is to devalue the land for its owners: making it difficult for them to access their fields, uprooting their orchards, threatening their water supply, blocking their access to urban markets both in Israel and in the West Bank, and flooding existing markets with underpriced Israeli-grown produce. One effect of these actions could be to impoverish the farmers to the extent that they are willing to sell their land at a loss. The beneficiaries would be developers who can buy the land cheaply and re-sell it to Israelis for housing.

Whether Lev Leviev is involved or not, the situation serves as a reminder that running underneath the issues of politics and security are economic interests. With no state of their own, and no electoral voice in the Jewish state, the Palestinians are a disempowered people. They are sitting on some valuable West Bank resources. If well-connected Israelis decided they could make a profit off their land, would it come as a suprise that the Palestinians find themselves with the short end of the stick?