The Bedouin community had no permission to build the school on Israel’s state land in Area C.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
The EU protested Friday the demolishment of a small Palestinian school whose construction it had illegally funded and called for Israel to compensate financially.
“Appalled by the demolition of the EU-funded school in Ein Samiya in the Occupied West Bank,” the EU’s Representative Office in Jerusalem tweeted on Friday. Israel, it said, should “respect Palestinian children’s right to education and to compensate [the] EU for the funding lost,” it continued.
The Bedouin herding community of Ein Samiya, with some 200 residents, is located close to the veteran village of Kochav HaShachar in Area C of Judea and Samaria, which is under full Israeli civilian and military control.
The unrecognized community had applied for permission to build a primary school on Israeli state land that had been denied. When the EU paid for modular units to be set up there anyway last year, the government took the matter to court. The judge’s subsequent stop-work orders to halt their construction were ignored, and so the court ordered that the illegal structures be taken down, denying all appeals to allow them to remain standing.
“The State of Israel will not allow illegal construction and Arab takeover of the open spaces,” said Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who ordered the demolition. “I thank the Civil Administration and the security forces who enforced the law today near Ein Samiya and cleared the structures that were erected in violation of the law in a deliberate attempt to take control of the open spaces and establish facts on the ground.”
Smotrich, head of the Religious Zionism party, heads the Civil Administration in the Defense Ministry, which is in charge of bureaucratic matters such as building permits in Judea and Samaria. Hundreds of court-ordered demolitions are issued each year for illegally built structures in the region, both Jewish and Palestinian.
The right-wing has long complained that the Administration zealously obeys the courts in tearing down wildcat Jewish buildings but is slow to follow legal orders when it comes to the Palestinian construction. Smotrich insisted on receiving this position partially in order to flip this status quo.
According to the Regavim Movement, which meticulously researches the phenomenon of illegal Palestinian construction in Area C, such work increased by 80% over the “already alarming rate” of the previous year, with 5535 new illegal structures built compared to 3076 structures in the same period in 2021. By not exerting the control it legally has as per the Oslo Accords, “The Israeli government is creating a de facto Palestinian state,“ the NGO said.
Last December, Regavim also revealed an EU document which proved that it is their official policy to help the Palestinian Authority take over Area C.
The UN also chimed in disapprovingly about the destruction “just a few days before the start of the new school year,” without mentioning that the fact that an Israel court had first issued a legal ruling on the matter.
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