by Randy Maugans

israel-settlements-all-en-2009.pdf

  “Knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners, for unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers…”-1Timothy 1:9 

It is a great irony that many pro-Zionist Christians, who defend the nation-state of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinian people, cite Romans 13 (the”higher powers”) as the admonition to obey civil authorities. Yet these same Zionist zealots willingly overlook the defiance of international laws and treaties which govern the administration of land rights within the Palestinian region.

Now, through the exposure of the existence of an Israeli settlements database, its subsequent translation by the CIA’s Open Source Center, and the leak of the document by Stephen Aftergood, editor of the US based Federation of American Scientist’s Secrecy News, the extent of Israel’s lawlessnes in statistically documented.

From WikiLeaks:

CIA OSC: Secret Israeli database shows full extent of illegal settlements, Apr 2009 

One of the main reasons for this effort was the need to have credible and accessible information at the ready to contend with legal actions brought by Palestinian residents, human rights organizations and leftist movements challenging the legality of construction in the settlements and the use of private lands to establish or expand them. The painstakingly amassed data was labeled political dynamite.

The defense establishment, led by Defense Minister Ehud Barak, steadfastly refused to publicize the figures, arguing, for one thing, that publication could endanger state security or harm Israel’s foreign relations. Someone who is liable to be particularly interested in the data collected by Spiegel is George Mitchell, President Barack Obama’s special envoy to the Middle East, who came to Israel this week for his first visit since his appointment. It was Mitchell who authored the 2001 report that led to the formulation of the road map, which established a parallel between halting terror and halting construction in the settlements.

The official database, the most comprehensive one of its kind ever compiled in Israel about the territories, was recently obtained by Haaretz. Here, for the first time, information the state has been hiding for years is revealed. An analysis of the data reveals that, in the vast majority of the settlements – about 75 percent – construction, sometimes on a large scale, has been carried out without the appropriate permits or contrary to the permits that were issued. -Summary by Uri Blau, writing for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on 1 Feb 2009

Source: CIA OSC: Secret Israeli database shows full extent of illegal settlements, Apr 2009