The decision to give Zvi Strock, a Zionist Orthodox settler from the illegal Esh Kodesh settlement outpost, such an abnormally long amount of time to leave was made by Israel’s State Prosecutor’s Office and the High Court of Justice after Strock issued a veiled threat and said the delay was necessary in order for his evacuation of the Ibrahim’s land to happen “in a peaceful manner."
Threat Of Settler Violence Prompts High Court To Allow Settler Who Stole Palestinian Farmer's Land Inordinately Long Time To Evacuate It
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com
A West Bank Jewish settler with a history of violence against Palestinians has been given a full year to evacuate land he stole from a Palestinian farmer, Fauzi Ibrahim.
The decision to give Zvi Strock, a Zionist Orthodox settler from the illegal Esh Kodesh settlement outpost, such an abnormally long amount of time to leave was made by Israel’s State Prosecutor’s Office and the High Court of Justice after Strock issued a veiled threat and said the delay was necessary in order for his evacuation of the Ibrahim’s land to happen “in a peaceful manner,” Ha’aretz reported.
Strock was previously convicted of beating a Palestinian child and killing a baby goat owned by Palestinians, and was sentenced to 2-1/2 years in prison.
Strock stole Ibrahim’s land in 2010. An order for Strock to evacuate that land was issued by the IDF’s West Bank Civil Administration more than two years later in December 2012. Strock refused to comply and appealed the order. That appeal was rejected in December 2014, two years after the order to evacuate was issued.
But Strock still refused to evacuate Ibrahim’s land, and the IDF did nothing to force him to do so. It also did not put him in jail.
Strock told the High Court he needed at least a full year to move the trees he had planted on Ibrahim’s land and to prepare new land elsewhere to plant them in.
Despite opposition from the attorneys representing Ibrahim and Rabbis for Human Rights (which helped Ibrahim file his High Court petition), the High Court gave Strock the inordinately long time period to evacuate the land, and it did so despite the fact that State Prosecutors who negotiated Strock’s agreement to evacuate (akin to a plea deal) said their decision to agree to the one-year evacuation period had nothing to do with trees or fruit.
The state agrees to the one-year timeframe “for the sake of peace. Our main emphasis is to reach it in agreement,” Roi Avichai Shweiki of the State Prosecutor’s office told the court.
In his legal filings and through his attorney Strock still claims the land does not belong to Ibrahim and that Ibrahim’s High Court petition was “undertaken by political bodies to advance the agenda of defaming the [Jewish] settlers in Judea and Samaria [i.e., the West Bank].”
Six unauthorized Jewish settler outposts have been illegally built in the area of the West Bank near Ibrahim’s land since the end of the 1990s.
In a typical Israeli response to wrongdoing by Israelis against Palestinians, in order to reduce settler harassment of and violence against Palestinian farmers coming from these illegal Jewish settler outposts, the IDF restricted Palestinian farmers access to their own land. That in turn lead to large-scale expropriation of Palestinian land by Jewish settlers – expropriation Israel almost always refuses to punish.