Yaron London
צילום: יהונתן דייויס
A matter of resolve
Yaron London questions authorities’ desire to enforce settlement freeze
Our Filipino maid left us last week and traveled for a month-long vacation in Manila. Ahead of her trip I sat down at the computer with her and surfed to the Google Earth website. If you’re unfamiliar with this site, it will be worth your while to become familiar with it. It offers an interactive tour across earth as it looks from a satellite. Using the mouse, you can locate any site and zoom in on it.
So that’s what I did: I turned east and spotted the Philippines, and the Manila metro area. Ninette guided me to her neighborhood and street. We hovered above the street and spotted a house with a green roof and Ninette said: That’s my house. At the time of writing this, as I type this column up in the morning, it’s night in Manila and she is there under her green roof.
The software version I have is free and offers relatively low quality images. Yet for a fee one can get much better photos with higher resolution, from companies such as the Israeli ImageSat, which operates satellites for various aims. The consumers include spy agencies.
The optical spies that operate on behalf of states are very sharp-eyed. Had I been able to dispatch them to hover above Ninette’s backyard, I would have been able to see her waving to me, even in a moonless night.
Hence, I was amused by the attorney general’s warning that the State would find it difficult to implement the decision to freeze settlement construction. The decision stems from the need to maintain our good ties with the superpower that protects us, and hence, in the view of government ministers, it’s an important decision.
According to the speed with which the difficulty to implement it was presented, it appears that failure has been determined in advance. The attorney general counted the number of building inspectors at his disposal for the mission and discovered that it’s only 14. Had he added that all of them are lame and partially blind and that none of them know how to interpret aerial photographs, it would have made for an even funnier excuse.
Playing a game
After all, Judea and Samaria’s territory is tiny. It would be enough to have one person examining up-to-date satellite photos daily in order to spot any change. This is indeed what the Defense Ministry did, and with puzzling speed sent a plane that documented the topographic reality. It won’t be difficult for one person, equipped with a vehicle, to visit a dozen of sites a day or more and hand out official notices to those engaging in banned construction.
The problem does not have to do with the difficulty to identify them, but rather, with the level of resolve to enforce the law. This resolve is weak. The newspapers reflect that. They report the expected deeds of the underground builders with full confidence that they will be disobeying the State’s orders.
Israeli governments made us accustomed to feeling that the rebellion of residents in the occupied territories is a natural law, or perhaps a child’s game where the police are not really police officers and the thieves are merely good kids dressed up as thieves. And for youthful folly there is no need to punish, perhaps only reprimand softly.
So the soldiers and police officers will gently quarrel with them, some structures will be razed and then rebuilt, and so on and so forth, until the weakling known as the “State” will be exhausted, and the buildings will remain standing.
