The Truth About Demolition of Arab Houses in Israel

The article in the fishwrap HaAretz today analyses why the Arab sector building is almost universally illegal according to the country's law and why the enormous budgets appropriated for the Arab sector are not used and at the end of each fiscal year, return to the State. On the graph we see that only 9 Arab municipalities used more than 40% of the State budgets,and and on the left end, 3 used up less than 10%. 

This validates my personal experience, when I was working in the Water Administration. My Dept. had a budget of about 250 million dollars to be "lent" for public water and sewage projects in the Arab sector. Half of each loan was a grant, not to be paid back, and the rest … too. I mean they never paid back and the loan was recycled annually and then erased. Yet we never succeeded in spending more than half of the budget, due to lack of suitable, bankable projects. The Arab sector had no working municipalities and city engineers able or interested in talking to us, and the sewage flew on their streets as in the Middle Ages.

Regarding the illegal construction going on, the issue is that according to the law, each building has to have a municipal permit, and almost none has. The Arab municipalities are a chaos, there is no one to submit a plan and if even if submitted, since there is no city planning at all, cannot be approved legally. The law say that illegal buildings have to be destroyed, and in the Jewish sector, they are. In the Arab cities and villages the Law is silent, not applied, but the people is worried from a strong rightist government may be willing to confront the issue. 

The article comments that Representative Achmed Tibi (right), trying to neutralize the menace, had formed a political alliance with Moshe Gafni (left pic), from the ultra orthodox sector, and both camps  - Arab and Haredi - are de facto political allies. 

Anyway, Ariel University is graduating hundreds of Arab civil engineers and in a few years the Arab municipalities will catch up and regularize their planning situation. In general, the Arabs have advanced much in the last decade in Israel. They have entered the universities are working in the general economy and making money.