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Lev Leviev’s holding company, Africa Israel, is gobbling up property here in the United States as fast as it can finance. In December it bought the Chase Manhatten building in lower Manhatten for $170 million, in partnership with Israeli-born developer Shaya Boymelgreen.

Recently, Africa Israel and Boymelgreen aquired a property on the corner of Broadway and Leonard Streets in Tribeca. which it plans to convert to exclusive rental apartments. According to Haaretz and other sources, a Ground Zero tax break facilitated the purchase.

Africa Israel CEO Pini Cohen explained that the company took advantage of the business terms New York offered after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center, which were designed to encourage developers to build in the area. That tax break meant Africa Israel could raise capital at interest rates of only 1.75 percent a year.

Globes online, the Israeli business daily, adds that “The New York State Housing Financing Agency issued the bonds, with Merrill Lynch as underwriter.”

So what’s wrong with taking advantage of a state-sponsored tax break to build luxury rental units in Tribeca? Nothing. But potential tenants, as well as New York taxpayers, might be interested to know that Africa Israel’s subsidiary Danya Cebus is involved in expanding Israeli settlements in the occupied territories.

Israel agreed to freeze settlement expansion when it accepted the Road Map in May of 2003. But according to Peace Now’s 2004 report on outposts and settlements, as reported in Haaretz, “Large-scale construction is under way at more than 40 different settlements, with the biggest operations taking place in Ma’aleh Adumim, Betar Ilit, Modi’in Ilit, Alfei Menasheh, Adam and Har Gilo.”

Danya Cebus is the contractor for at least one of these developments. In August of last year, Globes online announced:

Danya Cebus will build the $230 million Green Park project in the haredi (ultra-orthodox) town of Upper Modi’in, Danya Cebus CEO Itamar Deutscher announced last week. The company bought 939 dunam (234.75 acres) in the residential East Matityahu lot, zoned for the haredi community.

Danya Cebus’s parent company, Africa-Israel Investments will market the project, which will comprise five-storey buildings with up to 26 apartments per buildings. The buildings will have garden apartments, penthouses, and three, four, and five-room apartments

Leviev-owned companies may also be involved in development at Zufim. There, settlers are appropriating land belonging to the Palestinian farmers of Jayyous, who are walled off from their fields by the separation barrier. David Bloom, who has reported extensively on this situation, tells me:

I was given housing brochures with Lidar’s name on it at the real estate office in Zufim. Lidar also advertises on the Zufin website, and on a poster along the settler highway near Qalqilya. I’m not sure how I first found out about the Leviev connection to Lidar — I think the real estate agent told me - but this was confirmed when an Israeli friend did a Google search in Hebrew and found record of a legal suit brought against Leviev as owner of the Lidar North quarry (in Jayyous). The geologist involved in the quarry had some disagreement with Leviev about how much he was supposed to be paid.

Globes makes mention of a Lidar Water Treatment company registered on the Israeli stock exchange, but I could not independently confirm involvement at Zufim or ownership by Leviev.

Alon Cohen of the Israeli organization Bimkom - Planners for Planning Rights tells me that the company involved is Leader, and that it is owned by Leviev. There is a Leader Holdings and Investments Company based in Israel, but I do not believe Leviev owns it. Haaretz, in an article on the settler elite, does mention “Yitzhak Zaga of Paduel, the legal consultant to the Africa-Israel company and CEO of the Leader real estate and development company.”

I would be interested in any additional information readers can provide on the developers involved in specific projects on the West Bank. International firms that are building Israeli settlements on the West Bank would provide a potential target for boycotts and activism by opponents of the occupation.

Many thanks to Alon Cohen of the Israeli group Bimkom, Planners for Human Rights. He tells me that the contractor building the North Zufim settlement on Jayyous farmland is “Leader Company”, which is owned by Lev Leviev’s firm Africa-Israel. Evidently the settlers themselves have formed a company, Geulat Ha’aretz (Redemption of the Land) which claims ownership of the property, and is contracting with builders to develop 2,100 new housing units there. Jayyous villagers deny having sold the land, and the matter is in the Israeli courts - which has not stopped the settlers from uprooting olive trees and bulldozing villagers’ plantations.

Several hundred protesters - many of them Jewish Israelis - staged a demonstration against the land grab at Jayyous last week. The North Zufim settlement is part of a larger trend. Israeli peace group Gush Shalom reports:

Under the shadow of the disengagement plan, a new wave of settlement construction is taking place in the West Bank. It is especially noticeable along the Green Line, from the area of Elkana and Oranit near Kufr Kassem, via Zufin (east of Kokhav Yair) all the way to Reihan in the north: Companies privately owned by the settlers, alongside state agencies, are renewing the construction of settlements and building thousands of housing units, with the objective of obliterating the Green Line and effectively annexing all the land made inaccessible to its Palestinian owners by the Fence. This operation complements the strategy of annexation and dispossession implemented by the Separation Fences…

Constructing the new settlements…will bring to completion the process of dispossession. A substantial part of the lands which are left in the hands of the people of Jayyous will be west of the settlements, and in order to reach them they will have to cross the settlements. Based on existing tradition, that will turn the people of Jayyous into a security risk, that must be prevented from crossing the road and the settlement on their way to their fields. Raising the Fence becomes part of a well known pattern in the process of colonization: buying land from collaborators, declaring Palestinian lands as “State Lands”, discontinuing local communities and disturbing the social and economical texture of life, drying the agriculture and transforming farmers into a “security risk” in their own fields.

We are offended, when Palestinian Presidential candidate Mahmoud Abbas refers to Israel as the “Zionist enemy”. Unfortunately, that’s exactly how we’re behaving. In fact, Geulat Ha’aretz, the settlers’ company cited above, is named after one of the pioneering Zionist groups that established settlements outside Jerusalem in the late nineteenth century.

If some of Jayyous’ land was sold to the settlers, it would appear that this was done under false pretenses, and with the villagers in a position of distress, blocked from tending their fields and facing impoverishment. These are not unlike the tactics the early Zionist settlers are accused of using to acquire property in Palestine.

When we steal Palestinian land to build exclusive gated communities for our own people - and, ultimately, to expand the borders of the Jewish state - they have every right to consider us the enemy. The farmers of Jayyous have done nothing to us. In additon to the basic injustice being committed, these activities sow mistrust of Israel among the Palestinians and undercut the steps that both sides have taken toward peace.

This is not what Judaism stands for - but it is what the Sharon government stands for. It is our responsibility to pay attention to what the Israeli government is doing in our name, and to speak out.

Make your voice heard. The State Department point person for this issue is David Green, Near East Desk - 202-647-2647. You can call or write to your congressional representatives (click here to find out who they are, and how to reach them - or call 800-839-5276). The number for the American Embassy in Israel is 011 972 2 622 7282. A simple statement that you are concerned about Israeli settlement expansion near Jayyous and other Palestinian towns just outside the Green Line will let them know that you’re watching.

PS - Alon Cohen also sent me some very interesting maps and arial photographs of the expanding settlements, which I plan to post once I’ve made sense of them.

The Palestinian families living in Jayyous in the West Bank have been there, cultivating the land, for at least six centuries. Some of their olive trees are hundreds of years old.

The local charity society has put up a town web site. It offers this description:

The town has three schools (preparatory school, a secondary school for boys, a secondary school for girls), kindergarten, cultural center, charity society and committee, municipality, two mosques, a health club, and other committees like lands defense committee and women committee. The town has the privilege of its educated youths who are holding high education certificates.

Change “mosques” to “churches” and the committees to the Grange and the Extension Service, and it doesn’t look too different from an American farming town - except for the history.

In 1948, after the Israeli War of Independence, about a fifth of Jayyous’ farmland was occupied and turned over to Israeli farmers. The rest of the village lay just outside the Green Line that marks the border of Israel proper. Then in 2003 the separation wall went right through the village, uprooting 2,500 olive trees and leaving the fields on the Israel side and the town outside. Now the farmers need permits to pass through huge concrete and barbed wire gates to get to their fields, which are between the wall and the Green Line. Only about 40% of the farmers have been issued permits, and 15,000 citrus trees have died untended in the past year.

Jayyous has become a center for non-violent protest against the wall. There are regular demonstrations attended by internationals. However, Jayyous residents who attend these protests soon have their permits revoked, which can lead to penury, as farming and herding are the only source of income for many.

Is Jayyous a hotbed of militancy, a threat to Israel? I was able to find two incidents involving Jayyous residents. Abed al-Khaber Khalid was picked up by the Israeli police for working illegally in Israel in 1998, when he was 18 (he was a carpenter). The soldiers reportedly took him to a field, stripped him and beat him brutally, breaking his arm and jaw. Four years later, he strapped on a bomb and tried unsuccessfully to blow it up at a military base in Israel. Another resident, named Qa’adan, was killed in an armed clash with Israeli soldiers in the West Bank city of Tulkarem in 2002.

Adjacent to the farmland of Jayyous is the Jewish-only settlement of Zufim - outside the Green Line but inside the border drawn by the wall. David Bloom, a Jewish activist and reporter, visited Zufim last year dressed as a religious settler and spoke with a real estate agent.

The agent explained that for the price of a two-bedroom apartment in Tel Aviv, we could get a multiple-bedroom house in Zufim, where the air is clean, you have space, and the children can play. Only 45 minutes’ drive to the center of Tel Aviv, he says, and with the light rail expected to be built from the nearby city of Rana’ana in Israel, it will be a ten minutes drive to the train station, and 20 minutes by train into Tel Aviv.

There is an ever-growing demand for attractive, inexpensive housing within commuting distance of major Israeli cities - so Zufim is expanding. In late November, as reported in The Guardian, Israel began bulldozing 200 acres of fields to build Zufim North, which will consist of 1200 new homes. The fields were confiscated from Jayyous farmers without notice or compensation. A couple of weeks later, according to Haaretz, a gang of settlers from Zufim descended on Jayyous and uprooted 1700 more olive trees:

Villagers said dozens of settlers, some of them armed, entered the olive grove owned by village resident Mohammed Salim at 8 A.M. and started destroying it with a bulldozer. The villagers called on the security forces for help, but police and troops only arrived in the afternoon. The settlers had by then destroyed [the] trees.

It’s clear that the security wall and Israeli expansion are strangling Jayyous. Abdul-Latif Khaled, a groundwater hydrologist with the Palestine Hydrology Group, wrote recently in the Christian Science Monitor:

With thousands of trees uprooted for the construction of the wall and countless trees abandoned for lack of access, we find ourselves in the midst of an environmental disaster.

That disaster is exacerbated by restricted access to water. Jayyous has traditionally relied on six groundwater wells, all of which are now behind the wall, forcing us to purchase water from another village. The loss of our water and farmland has meant the deterioration of the village’s ecosystem and our ability to live on our resources. Once the wall is completed, more than 90 percent of the available water in the West Bank will be on the other side or under Israeli control.

There are economic costs to the wall, too. Merchants from surrounding towns used to purchase directly from the farms, but now farmers must sell their produce in small markets where prices are lower. Between March and July, 15-kilogram boxes of tomatoes that should not sell for less than $3.50 had to be sold for 30 cents. This year’s olive harvest has been similarly dismal. Olive oil that should sell for $5 per kilogram is down to $2 - the break-even price is $3 per kilogram. At these prices, reinvestment in the land isn’t feasible.

Development is accelerating in several other West Bank settlements near the Green Line. Again, from The Guardian:

About 400 more houses are being built around Alfe Menashe settlement, at the heart of an enclave created by a loop in the barrier less than two miles south of Zufim. Trapped inside are five smaller Palestinian communities of about 1,000 people and their land.

A short distance away work has begun on about 50 houses at Nof Sharon on land confiscated from a Palestinian town. In recent months the government has invited tenders to build thousands of houses in big settlements, such as Ariel, and those close to Jerusalem, including Ma’ale Adumim.

Last week government lawyers told the court that living next to Alfe Menashe gave the Palestinians the opportunity to find jobs in the settlement, and so they “were not only not harmed by building the fence but even benefited from it”.

It would appear that Israel is trying to push the Palestinians out of the space between the settlements and the Green Line, on the assumption that the larger West Bank settlements will ultimately be annexed to Israel. This, despite Sharon’s committment in the framework of the “Road Map” to freeze settlement construction.

A lot of American Jews will say, “I support Israel. I want security for Israel. I don’t support the settlements.” Well, while we’re supporting Israel and not supporting the settlements, this is what’s happening. The settlements are not an accident or an exception. They are, and always have been, part of a deliberate strategy to displace the Palestinian population and expand Israel’s borders. This is quite obvious to the Palestinians who are being displaced. They have fought it with all means at their disposal - which is the root of Israel’s security crisis.

Mahmoud Abbas, the almost certain winner in the Palestinian presidential election, has called for an end to Palestinian violence.

The settlement project constitutes a different sort of violence - less dramatic than blowing up a bus full of children but, in its own way, just as horrible. We are destroying not only century-old trees, but the people who cultivated them over generations. Where the parents were self-sufficient farmers, the children will be laborers - if they are lucky enough to find work in the homes of the Israelis who live where the olive groves used to stand.

Gaza notwithstanding, settlement expansion continues unabated in the West Bank. Take a look at the map. Israel plans to keep not only the settlements close to the Green Line, but many that are deep within Palestinian territory.

This is an issue on which American Jews should take a strong stand. It is not enough to say, “we don’t support the settlements”, and then look the other way. We should make our giving contingent on dismantling West Bank settlements and negotiating the return of land to the Palestinians. We should contact our representatives in Congress. We need to say, publically, that we don’t agree. This would send a strong message to Israel that it cannot go on committing these injustices in our name.