The Israeli State Attorney’s Office announced on November 22 that within 15 days it would demolish some 20 buildings, representing approximately one-fifth of the total number of buildings in the village. The Israeli state’s claim – denied by the petitioners of the Palestinian community of Susiya – is that these buildings were constructed in violation of a judicial order, despite the potential to regulate the village and find a solution. In accordance with international law, Israel has no right to change the local legislation, including local practices relating to property and settlement, unless there is a clear security need to do so.

We are asking you to reach out to your representatives to ask them to contact Israel’s Ambassador and request them to cancel pending demolition orders in Susiya.

Attorney Quamar Mishriqi-Assad, co director of Haqel: In Defense of Human Rights and who is representing the residents of the village, explains: “The demolition of one-fifth of the village is an extreme step that will damage the most basic humanitarian needs and the very humanity of those involved, without it even having been proved that they have violated the law. As winter arrives, the imminent demolition will leave 100 people, half of them children, without shelter… This is contrary to Israel’s obligations under international law. Israel is guided neither by law nor justice, but by the desire to evacuate the area.”

The State’s announcement implies the immediate destruction of residential buildings, a clinic, and livestock pens, causing mortal and irreversible damage to the basic rights of some 100 residents of the village (half of whom are children) who have nowhere else to live. Adv. Quamar submitted a request to respond to the state’s response.

The residents of Susiya have never been given a chance to regulate their homes and village. Over the years, residents have attempted to regulate their residence of their land, however, all their requests for permits, appeals, and a plan have been rejected - not even a single building has received a permit.

The day residents are expelled from their land will seal their fate as a farming community with a unique tradition. It will also seal the fate of their farmland, as settlers from the adjacent settlement will gradually invade their land without the law enforcement authorities taking any action to prevent them. This is precisely what has already happened to 400 dunams (~ 100 acres) of land that belonged to neighboring communities.

Background: The Palestinian Village of Susiya

By William Booth, Washington Post, August 28, 2016

SUSIYA, West Bank--For a quick reality check on the current stalemate in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there’s no better place to visit than this little village of miserable huts and sheep pens in the middle of nowhere.

The hamlet in the hills south of Hebron has become an improbable proxy in a cold war waged among Jewish settlers, the Israeli government, Western diplomats, peace activists and the 340 or so Arab herders who once inhabited caves on the site and now live in squalid tents.

Israel’s military authority in the West Bank wants to demolish the Palestinian community, contending that the ramshackle structures made of old tires and weathered tarpaulins were built without permits and must come down.

The Palestinian residents insist they are not squatters but heirs to the land they have farmed and grazed since the Ottoman era.

They say Israel wants to depopulate the area of Arabs and replace them with Jews.

“It’s ethnic cleansing,” said Nasser Nawaja, a resident of the village, who also is employed by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, which opposes the demolition.

That is nonsense, said Josh Hasten, international director for the pro-settler group Regavim, which has been pushing the Israeli government “to stop kicking the proverbial can down the road” and shove these “illegal squatters” off the land.

Hasten described Susiya as a phony village and part of a plot funded by the European Union and supported by the Palestinian Authority to assert rights that do not exist and create a “de facto Palestinian state” on land that should belong to Israel.

The Nawaja clan are stubborn, tough, poor shepherds who have spent the past three decades subsisting with brackish cistern water and a trickle of power from a generator. They’re not likely to leave unless forced at gunpoint.

“If we can stop the Israelis here, we can stop them from demolishing other villages,” said Jihad Nawaja, one of the village elders.

A final order to bulldoze the hamlet was delayed in mid-August when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office asked the courts to stay a ruling on the dispute for two months--until after the U.S. presidential election--according to lawyers involved in the case on both sides.

The Obama administration this month warned Israel that it finds the proposed eviction “very troubling.”

In July, State Department spokesman John Kirby said that demolishing Susiya “would set a damaging standard for displacement and land confiscation, particularly given settlement-related activity in the area.”

Far beyond the United States, Susiya stands at the center of fraying relations between Israel and Europe, which is providing life support to the village.

The solar panels in Susiya were donated by Germany, the school by Spain, the water pumps by Ireland. Belgium, Italy, Norway and others have contributed a playground, a shipping container to use as an office, and a new bullhorn.

Even so, it is a pitiful place, without running water or electricity from the grid, though it lies just a few hundred yards from Israeli power and water lines that serve a nearby Jewish settlement with the same name.

Right-wing ministers in Netanyahu’s coalition government have become much more vocal in their calls to Europe to stay out of Israel’s domestic affairs.

Apparently, that is not going to happen.

This month, two top British diplomats visited Susiya to hear from the locals.

Tony Kay, the deputy chief of mission at the British Embassy in Tel Aviv, made Susiya a first stop just weeks after arriving in the country.

“The Israelis criticize the Palestinians for building without permits, but the number of permits the Palestinians are issued for Area C is practically nil,” he said.

Area C is the 60 percent of the West Bank completely controlled by the Israeli military, which oversees both security and civilian affairs here.

B’Tselem, citing government figures, reports that in 2014, out of 242 permit applications submitted by Palestinians for building in Area C, only one was granted. Between 2009 and 2012, a total of 1,640 applications were submitted. Only 37--about 2.3 percent--were approved, according to the human rights group, which said that most Palestinians do not submit the paperwork unless they face “stop-work” orders.

The Palestinians want to create a state in the Gaza Strip and here on the West Bank, which Israel occupied after winning the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. The Israeli government right now wants to formally annex Area C in the West Bank, where 200 Jewish settlements are located, saying that a two-state solution is unworkable. Most of the world considers the Jewish settlements on the West Bank to be illegal, a conclusion that the Israeli government rejects.

James Downer, the British deputy consul general in Jerusalem, sipped coffee with the Nawaja clan.

“I am very fond of Susiya,” he said.

Downer joked that he had visited enough times to be made an honorary citizen.

He promised the locals, “We will do what we can to oppose demolitions here and elsewhere.”

Whatever it was in the past, these days Susiya has more the feeling of a protest camp than a functioning Palestinian village.

There are no streets, shops or mosques, and no permanent homes. There do not seem to be many people, either--giving some support to Regavim’s claim that most of the residents live in the nearby Palestinian town of Yatta.

Residents say that since the construction of a Jewish settlement nearby in 1983, their village has been leveled twice and partly demolished seven other times by Israeli bulldozers. Each time, the Palestinians returned to the hilltop and rebuilt their huts.

Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked visited the area this month and said it was hypocritical for Europe to fight against new building in Jewish settlements in the West Bank while underwriting illegal construction in Palestinian villages.

The Europeans also see Israeli hypocrisy.

As the Jewish settlements in the West Bank continue to grow, the Israeli military has ramped up demolitions of Palestinian homes, barns and sheds.

According to the United Nations, Israel has demolished 614 unauthorized Palestinian structures in the West Bank this year.

Israeli settlers in the West Bank see an insidious Palestinian encroachment onto lands the Jewish homesteaders believe were given to them by God.

Regavim, the group pushing to have the Palestinians evicted, says the herders of Susiya are squatting on land adjacent to an important archaeological site with ruins of a Jewish community and a synagogue dating to the 8th century.

By Diaa Hadid, NY Times, July 23, 2015

SUSIYA, West Bank--Yousef Nawajaa strode between the tents bedecked with Palestinian flags, scattered through parched orchards and rocky hills, shouting delightedly to a man nearby: “Hey, did you hear? John Kerry spoke about Susiya!”

“Kerry!” the man exclaimed, with a look that said, “No way.”

Mr. Nawajaa, 38, was mistaken, but not by much, in his observation about how outsized the cause of his tiny village has grown. It was not Secretary of State John Kerry but John Kirby, the State Department spokesman, who had recently urged Israel not to raze Susiya.

How did a hamlet of 340 Palestinians in a dusty corner of the southern West Bank find its way onto the global stage? Residents point to a chain of events that began two decades ago with visits from sympathetic foreign visitors and that have now made Susiya a symbol for pro-Palestinian activists of how Israel has sought to maintain control over large parts of the occupied West Bank.

“We could not have imagined all this,” Mr. Nawajaa said as two of his 12 children argued over a toy helicopter.

“The Israelis used to destroy our village, and we slept in the wild, in the rain, and nobody knew anything about us,” he said.

The village has been displaced three times in the last 30 years, and residents are faced with ejection once again. Unless the Israeli Supreme Court orders defense officials to reverse themselves and accept a master plan for the village, Susiya will soon be demolished.

The court’s ruling is due on Aug. 3, but residents fear that the bulldozers will not wait that long. They say officials have visited them to warn that parts of the village may be demolished sooner. The villagers’ lawyer, Qamar Mashriki-Assad of Rabbis for Human Rights, said she was shown a map and a list of buildings slated to go.

Susiya’s residents now live on a stretch of land between an Israeli archaeological site and a Jewish settlement with a very similar name, Susya.

They were pushed out of their homes in 1986 to make way for the archaeological dig, which uncovered a fourth-century synagogue with a mosaic floor inscribed in Hebrew.

They were uprooted again, in 1990, for unclear reasons, and then again in 2001 as a collective punishment tied to the shooting death of a Jewish settler. With nowhere else to go, they landed in their orchards and pastureland, improvising homes out of tarpaulin tents and concrete.

Their land lies in what is known as Area C, a part of the West Bank directly overseen by Israeli agencies rather than by the Palestinian Authority. It is very difficult for Palestinians to get permission to build in much of Area C, so much so that Israel has attracted international criticism.

Palestinians say one proposal is to move them to an area on the outskirts of Yatta, a town about a mile away. But Susiya’s residents worry that if they leave their orchards and pastures, their land will be seized by neighboring Jewish settlers. The United Nations has said that Susiya’s residents already lack access to some two-thirds of their farmland--about 500 acres--because it lies in or near the Jewish settlement.

The Susiya residents say they are being pressed to leave precisely because the settlers want to extend their community to reach the archaeological site, with its tangible evidence that Jews were here 1,700 years ago.

“We are like a fish bone in their throats,” Sarah Nawajaa, 70, said about the settlers. (Many of the village’s residents are members of the Nawajaa tribe and share that surname.) “We won’t leave, because if we do, they will come and build homes.”

Residents were left in fear by the first displacement in 1986, and they sought a foreign presence in the area in the 1990s in the hope that it would help protect them from settler violence and further displacement The first group came from an organization called the Christian Peacemaker Teams; other foreigners arrived after the Palestinian intifada began in 2000, including a German volunteer who helped Susiya obtain solar power. European aid groups helped build a school and clinic, residents said.

The hamlet first made international news in 2008 when a resident used a donated video camera to record masked men beating her husband, Ismail Nawajaa. Sympathetic Israelis have made short films about Susiya. A blog and a Facebook page have been set up.

Residents have “managed to place Susiya on the international agenda, in ways that other villages have not managed to do,” said Sarit Michaeli, a spokeswoman for B’Tselem, the Israeli rights group that donated the video camera.

Years of advocacy appeared to pay off when Susiya’s residents began warning early this month that their village was under threat. Israeli activists flocked to the area, a European Union delegation visited the village, and so did American consular officials. Then Mr. Kirby, the State Department spokesman, raised the issue of Susiya on July 16.

Susiya’s demolition “would set a damaging standard for displacement and land confiscation, particularly given settlement-related activity in the area,” Mr. Kirby said. “We urge Israeli authorities to work with the residents of the village to finalize a plan for the village that addresses the residents’ humanitarian needs.”

On Monday, the European Union called on Israel to allow Palestinians to build in Area C and to “halt plans for forced transfer of population and demolition of Palestinian housing and infrastructure” in Susiya.

Activists have taken up residence in and around Susiya in solidarity with the villagers. Two Canadian women, Lenora Yarkie and Patricia Mercer, sat on a recent day in the shade of a tent draped with Palestinian and European Union flags, and said that they were there to act as outside witnesses to whatever happens.

“If Susiya goes, then there’ll be no protection for the other villages,” Ms. Mercer said. “It has come to symbolize all that is wrong here.”

An Israeli activist kissed the cheeks of a 5-year-old, Jenan Nawajaa, who was playing outside her family’s tent. The girl’s mother, Islam Nawajaa, who is pregnant, said she had not slept well for days, worrying about being uprooted. But she has a plan, she said: If the Israeli authorities come to raze her home, she will send her children to a neighbor and then build another tent under the cover of night.

Preparing for my visit here

please please please

DO NOT FORGET THAT

Forced Displacement on Both Sides of the Green Line Adalah captures the stories of two Palestinian villages, Al-Araqib and Susiya -- one in Israel, one in th...

Amazing and short video from Palestinians in Al-Araqib (inside Israel) and Susiya (inside the West Bank), documenting Israel's ongoing efforts to remove them from their land and their homes.

Al-Araqib has been demolished FOURTY-EIGHT TIMES.

70% of houses in Susiya have a demolition order out against them. Settlers have set fire to Palestinian's homes whilst they're still in them, and then not let the emergency services through. They regularly beat farmers attending to their land, which the Israeli army ignores.

Whether inside the Green Line or outside, Israel wants to ethnically cleanse the land of any Palestinians.

Deuteronomy 20:19 "If you besiege a city for a long time while attempting to capture it, you must not chop down its trees, for you may eat fruit from them and should not cut them down." Nonetheless, for the last six weeks, damage to and destruction of olive trees has been a regular part of my reporting about the situation here in the West Bank, particularly in Area C, where the Israeli Defence Force has complete security and civil control, often seeming to structure its training plans around the desires of Israelis in illegal Settlements. 

  This tree, in a grove belonging to the village of At Tuwani near the notorious Ma'on Settlement, was damaged 15/09. It was subject of an earlier post, "The Worst Kind of Enemy".

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Nasser shakes me awake. "We pick olive now" he says in his heavily accented English. So I roll over, take three deep breaths and sit up to face the day. It is 7.40am. On the walk to the field, Yahya confides in me that his heart is pumping for fear of the Settlers. To date, I've not been exposed to any, so I remained unmoved. Also, I am possessed of white skin and an Australian passport. In combination with my EAPPI vest, this creates a virtually impervious barrier around me. At worst, I will be arrested. 

I am surprised when we arrive. There are maybe twelve trees, short and hardly groaning under their own fruitfulness. There are perhaps eight Palestinians and at least ten activists: a mixture of Ta'ayush, Operation Dove and then Tor Aage and myself. I get straight into picking, some men start pruning, a boy brews tea and the women collect the offcuts for firewood.  Everything goes smoothly for some time. Under the watchful eye of two, then four military vehicles, Israel's greatest security threat- the Palestinian Olive Farmer- plucks fruit from his trees, drinks hot, sweet tea and gathers firewood by hand. At one stage, the soldiers gather around a Palestinian cistern on the far side of the road- for lack of anything better to do, we document this. 

In fact, at 10am, we were squatting in the shade waiting for the donkey to come back for the last load of firewood so we could all go home for more hot, sweet tea. Then it happened. Five young men dressed all in white come over the hill. (Saturday is a big day for religious Settlers: forbidden from work, there is plenty of free time to harass Palestinians.)

The army notice before we do, and the movement which catches our attention is their rush to meet the Settlers before they have reached the olive grove. Quickly Nasser pulls out his B'Tselem "Shooting Back" camcorder, and I note that the army, too, is recording events. Initially, just a small group of soldiers go over, but over the next few minutes, more and more Settlers come- matched each time by an additional solider until there is quite a crowd.

Of course the whole thing happened in Hebrew and Arabic, neither of which I can understand to this level (or any level, if I'm honest). There is shouting, poking at maps, and two Settlers leave the group and cross a field below the grove towards the road. They are followed- and filmed- by Nasser, and the army follows- and films- him, shouting. The two Settlers are brought back, obviously unwillingly but without force, to the main group.  In the meantime, the donkey returns and is loaded up. Nasser is involved in some last-minute negotiations with the head soldier, and we start heading back to Susiya. We pause at the top of the hill for another half hour, just to make sure the soldiers and Settlers actually leave.

We're still watching when the women phone us: "Lunch is ready, get here!"