In a definite setback for their ethos, the violent Palestinian riots over the past week were mis-founded: Israeli Health Officials from the Abu-Kabir Forensic Institute announced today that Arafat Jaradat’s death last week was not the result of poisoning or physical violence against him.

Palestinian administrative detainee Arafat Jaradat’s autopsy found no evidence of poisoning or physical violence, stated a report released by the Health Ministry on Thursday.

Jaradat died on Saturday in the Megiddo Prison. The Abu Kabir Institute of Forensic Medicine continues to run tests to determine the cause of death. (Dr. Itay Gal) YNET So who can we blame for Palestinian violence? Settler violence [TM] and Price Taggers [TM]? Ooops. Seems like the Palestinians fabricated that too.

The Shai District Police found that the alleged “price tag” incident which took place at the West Bank village of Kusra was fabricated.

The police findings show that the claim, stating that six vehicles were set on fire, is untrue and that the Israeli identification card presented by one of the village residents was lost in the area a few days prior. (Itamar Fleishman, YNET). Fair readers, do not be alarmed.  There many do-gooders over at Haaretz concocting new slanderous stories as you read these very lines.

But here’s a photo of Palestinian violence below….just in case you want to remind yourself what’s really going on.

Photo: Tazpit News Agency

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Following the recent deterioration of the security situation in Judea and Samaria, local residents have decided to take their security into their hands, reinitiating a civilian based recon unit which was operative during the second Intifada. In recent months there has been a sharp upsurge in terrorist attacks against the residents of Judea and Samaria. The number of stone and fire-bomb attacks on the roads has increased dramatically. To contend with this reality the local security councils have decided to reestablish the civilian security patrols on the roads.

The IDF has lately decreased the size of its forces in Judea and Samaria. As a direct result, Arab terrorists are freer to operate.  Furthermore, the IDF has reopened some roads to Arab traffic which have been closed up until now for security reasons. This further endangers the Jewish motorists.

The security councils of Neve Tsuf and Ateret, in Benyamin, dispatched a letter to Minister of Defense Ehud Barak protesting their current precarious condition. “The situation is ablaze and there is no response provided, and it seems that the peak is still ahead of us,” they stated in the letter, “… The residents have come to one conclusion – the authorities have left us with no proper response and we must care for our own security. In a joint decision, we have decided to reestablish the civilian patrols which will scout the roads during the dangerous hours and will provide security to the residents against terrorism.”

They further stated that, “As citizens of the State of Israel, we regret that the trust we had in the security system no longer exists and we can no longer rely on the military to provide the necessary security to our communities and the roads leading to them.” The residents’ representatives concluded the letter with a demand that the IDF restore a presence in the region, thus providing the required security which will enable them to conduct their lives in a proper fashion. Copies of the letter were sent to top IDF officers in the region and to members of Knesset

The civilian patrols are deployed at crucial points, serving as spotters and deterrents. They are equipped with first aid kits and communication tools. They were directed to travel slowly to detect any looming danger. If attacked, they are to block the roads and warn other drivers of the upcoming perils.

On Feb. 18^th, several cars were significantly damaged after being attacked with stones on the Trans-Benyamin highway. It took the army a long time to arrive on the scene, and a significant numbers of cars were hit until the IDF finally arrived and stopped the attacks. Last Friday, several Israelis were ambushed with stones at several points on the roads. Earlier that day a driver spotted two youth who were about to attack him. He drew his weapon and waved it at them and they ran away. In a different incident, a driver was attacked and fired in the air, and the terrorists fled the scene.

Yitzchak Shadmy, Chairman of the Benyamin Residents Council and a lieutenant colonel in the IDF reserves told Tazpit News Agency: “The IDF has lately left various areas in Judea and Samaria. Now, every time something happens it takes the IDF a long time to respond, up to the point where they are not relevant. It is upsetting that the IDF has not yet comprehended that a new Intifada is on the rise, and that it can be stopped early on. We call on all the residents to join and create a standing by force that will protect the women and children, before someone pays a heavy price.”

Neve Tsuf’s secretariat told Tazpit that: “Following the IDF’s decrease of its forces in the region they are unable to fulfill their mission. With the knowledge of the security forces, a civilian patrol has been established. Its mission is to warn the IDF of security related incidents in real time. We regret that as citizens we are forced to replace the security forces guarding our lives. We demand that the political echelons get involved to restore a sense of security and peace to our area.”

An IDF official told Tazpit News Agency that they are doing their utmost, overtly and covertly, to contend with these attacks. The IDF categorizes stone attacks as terror and relates to them accordingly. He further added that the IDF has not decreased its presence in the region, but rather has redeployed its forces. He reaffirmed the IDF’s commitment to the residents of Judea and Samaria.

Rock-throwing Arabs hit a soldier in his eye Monday and then rioted when solders fired back, aiming at the lower parts to minimize injuries in what is the latest of dozens of weekly Arab attacks that have been so routine that they are rarely reported.

The only exception is if someone is serious injured or murdered, which was the unfortunate case last week. In what was a real-life cowboys and Indians scene, Israeli police chased after an Arab vehicle carrying Arab workers without permits to work outside of Judea and Samaria.

The Arab driver tried to escape by reckless driving, and he crossed the white line, crashing into a car driven by a 29-year-old resident of Susiya, located between Be’er Sheva and Hevron.

The young man, Yenon Levanon, was killed instantly, and the Arabs were wounded lightly.

Murderous driving, usually by Arabs, is routine on the roads in the Negev, heavily populated by Bedouin, and throughout highways in Judea and Samaria.

The dangers are two-fold. If a driver is lucky enough to travel in his car without begin hit by an Arab driver who passes another passing car on a curve uphill, he still has to deal with dozens of firebomb and rock-throwing attacks.

This is not the “Third Intifada” that the IDF has been warning about; it is the continuation of the First Intifada from the late 1980s, which took a break during the euphoria of the eve of what was supposed to be the culmination of the Peace Process in the last 1990s, when the so-called “Second Intifada” or Oslo War began.

The State Dept. is careful to relate to President Obama every shack Jews erect in Judea and Samaria.

It is doubtful how much information he gets on Arab terrorist attacks, if the Associated Press is any guide.

Reporting Monday on Arab riots in support of Palestinian Authority prisoners on a hunger strike in Israeli jails, the news agency referred to “demonstrations,” such as one in Bethlehem where  Israeli forces dispersed several dozen activists who blocked a road on Monday.  AP added, “There were no reports of injuries.”

After telling readers that one hunger striker reportedly is in critical condition, AP reported, “Israel is holding some 4,500 Palestinians for charges ranging from throwing stones to undertaking deadly militant attacks. Their incarceration is a sensitive issue for Palestinians, who see them as heroes of the Palestinian liberation struggle.”

That is the end of the report , but it is not the end of the story. AP did not report that in the past week alone, Arabs carried out 29 Molotov firebomb attacks against Israeli soldiers and civilians, including one on a public bus, another on a Jewish women driving near Kedumim, east of Karnei and Ginot Shomron in Samaria, and two on Rachel’s Tomb (Kever Rachel).

The Palestinian Authority claims Kever Rachel actually is a Muslim holy site, even though Islam was founded more than 2,000 years after Rachel died. The site is not holy enough to dissuade PA Arabs from attacking Jewish worshipers there. Besides firebombs, PA terrorists also hurled two grenades last week.

If Obama were to keep a diary of security incidents in Israel in just one week, he would discover:

– Hevron Arabs threw rocks on children in a playground in the Avraham Aveinu neighborhood of Hevron;

– PA Arabs fired at Kibbutz Migdal Oz on erev Shabbat, apparently careful to wait until the Muslim day of rest was over on Friday;

–  Arab Knesset Members, as part of their public service to the country, joined Palestinian Authority Arabs for Prayers at the Ofer jail, near Jerusalem, to show solidarity for hunger strikers. After prayers, hundreds of Arabs threw rocks at soldiers, two of whom were lightly inured;

– PA Arabs rioted at Efrat, a “settlement” of several thousand families five miles south of Jerusalem, at Beit Haggai, which borders Hevron to the southwest, and at Beit El, another “settlement” of more than 1,500 families in Samaria;

– Rock-throwing Arabs, trying to cause fatal accidents, managed to wound an eight-year-old in the face at Beit El and a driver whose windshield was smashed at one of the terrorists’ favorite locations, the village of Azoon on the road between Kfar Saba, at the northern edge of metropolitan Tel Aviv, and the Jewish communities of Maaleh, Ginot and Karnei Shomron;

Some 3,000 vines, situated near Shiloh in Samaria, were destroyed over the past few days, it was discovered this morning.

The vineyards are visited every few days during this season, so the precise time of the destruction is unclear.

The damage is estimated at 200,000 NIS.

Footprints leading to the Arab village of Kutzrah were discovered by IDF trackers during their initial investigation. About a year ago, a 1/4 of an acre was destroyed in the same vineyard.

“This morning we discovered the difficult scene of some 3,000 destroyed vines,” Itamar Weiss, a worker at the vineyards, told Tazpit News Agency. “This is the fourth time this vineyard has been targeted in the past years.”

Israeli Police said an investigation has been launched to discover the culprits.

Weiss said that residents “expect these crimes to be treated with the same force that crimes throughput the rest of Israel are treated and investigated.”

This incident is one of many attacks apparently executed by Arabs against Jewish agriculture and farming in Judea and Samaria.

In the beginning of November 2012, Tazpit News Agency reported that a herd of some 400 goats was stolen from Avraham Hertzlich, a farmer from the Benyamin area.

An olive grove near Shiloh, owned by Erez Ben Sa’adon, was vandalized at around the same time. Many of the trees were uprooted or cut down, and the irrigation system was damaged.

About a month ago, 70 heads of sheep were stolen from a pen in Sussia.

Israel is abuzz with talk of President Obama’s upcoming visit – his first trip to the Jewish state as president. Speculation is rife that he would not put his prestige on the line in this manner unless he was confident his pressure on Prime Minister Netanyahu would bear fruit.

What precisely will Obama be pressuring Netanyahu to do? For starters, he will want to see a resumption of negotiations with the Palestinian Authority. One might ask why Netanyahu would have to be pressured to talk with the PA, when he has been calling for exactly that ever since he assumed office in 2009.

Here is where current events are actually shaped by their perception and bias. Though the P.A. is the party that refuses to come to the table, the popular understanding is that this is Israel’s fault. The P.A. repeatedly declares that talks cannot begin unless Israel freezes all construction throughout all of Judea and Samaria (Yesha) – and even the areas of Jerusalem liberated in the Six-Day War.

Chief P.A. negotiator Saeb Erekat even went so far as to say a construction freeze is not a “condition” for a resumption of negotiations, but rather “obligations that Israel is required to fulfill” even without talks.

Thus, those who are predisposed to the Arab narrative are quick to conclude that if Israel is not meeting the P.A.’s demands – it must be Israel’s fault.

Left unmentioned in the popular discourse is the “been there, done that” aspect: In late 2009, Israel declared a ten-month construction freeze, exactly for the purpose of jump-starting talks with the P.A. “We hope this decision will help launch meaningful peace negotiations,” Netanyahu declared at the time. American officials hailed the decision as “substantial” and “unprecedented.”

But it wasn’t enough for the P.A. For nine months it refused to come to the table, even as Israel suffered economically and Netanyahu suffered politically from the freeze. The ten-month moratorium was not acceptable, the PLO said; it must be “infinite.”

Only in the last month of the freeze did the P.A. deign to resume negotiations. Its nearly exclusive demand was that the freeze must continue indefinitely – or else the fledgling talks would end even before they started.

Israel did not fall for the trap, ended the freeze as scheduled, and negotiations have been stuck right there ever since.

Yet when Obama comes to Israel next month and demands that the talks begin once again, to whom will the demand be addressed? To Israel, of course: Stop building those schools and houses immediately, and let the P.A. come to the table. And yes, that includes Ramat Eshkol, Gilo and other Jerusalem suburbs, as well as the settlement blocs – Abbas won’t have it any other way.

Hints that this is the unfolding scenario are evident from many quarters. The New York Times reported over the weekend that the Israeli government is considering a new settlement freeze, and prominent public figures have been quoted of late supporting exactly that, at least partially. Among them is outgoing Cabinet minister Dan Meridor (Likud), who said that Israel should restrict building beyond the Green Line to Jerusalem and major settlement blocs.

Similarly, National Security Advisor Yaakov Amidror, more on the hawkish end of Israel’s political spectrum, warned that continued Israeli construction in Judea and Samaria would lead to a deterioration in Israel’s international standing.

From Netanyahu’s office – not from Netanyahu himself – have come statements that a new settlement freeze is not on the table. During the election campaign, Netanyahu said as much many times, and even the #2 party in the soon-expected government coalition, Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid, said it objects to a building freeze during negotiations.

Nonetheless, Yesha leaders are far from relaxed, and with good reason. They know the very fact that a freeze is again being discussed so widely does not bode well.

Incidentally, the PLO Executive Committee has also announced that resumed talks are conditional on not only a “complete halt to settlement activities, including in East Jerusalem,” but also the release of all terrorist prisoners. And there’s more: Israel must also accept the recent U.N. resolution recognizing the P.A. as a non-member observer state.

The P.A. sees Obama’s visit as a great opportunity, “although we need deeds and real U.S. pressure on Israel rather than meetings,” said Abbas spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh. “We wish the U.S. administration will exert pressure on Israel to stop settlement expansion, in order to lay the ground for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the Palestinian territory within the borders before June 4, 1967.”

There are Israeli voters making some surprising and rather unexpected choices for political candidates on Tuesday, January 22.

Yair Hizni, who grew up in a settler family in Hebron, is casting his vote for Shelly Yachimovich, the leader of Israel’s Labor Party. Hizni, a teacher who lived in the settlement community of Nokdim in Judea before recently moving to Jerusalem, spoke with Tazpit News Agency about his decision to support Yachimovich.

“It’s less about the political parties and more about who Shelley is for me,” said Hizni.

“I believe that Shelly speaks a language that people can respect – she is a very ethical and honest person,” Hizni told Tazpit News Agency.

“Shelly doesn’t take the typical left-wing stance on certain issues and has the ability to bridge between the different sectors of Israeli society and solve the problems of this country,” he said.

“Take for example, the settlers,” said Hizni. “Shelly is probably one of the few politicians on the left who doesn’t speak with hate against the settlers – as well as the ultra-Orthodox community in Israel – she is someone who wants to talk with these groups. She doesn’t speak with the hatred that has characterized many leftist politicians over the years against the settlers.”

In an interview with Ha’aretz last year, Yachimovich stated that seeing the settlers join Israel’s summer social justice protests made her “unequivocally” happy. “There is a new language, a unifying language, a uniting language,” she stated in the interview.

“But for me,” said Hizni, “Shelly’s stances on economic and domestic issues are just as important. The economy, the weaker sectors of our society – for example, the elderly, Holocaust survivors – also need to be addressed.”

In a country where politics is taken very seriously, Hizni says that his parents, who live in Hebron, found it difficult in the beginning to accept his more liberal perspective.

“In the beginning, they were shocked,” he said laughing. “Politics is very important to them. But now we talk freely about politics and I love the dialogue – even with their right-wing neighbors.”

Another Israeli citizen, Khaled Mazared of Beit Zarzir, in northern Israel, is also looking for an “honest” politician. Mazared is casting his vote for the religious Zionist party, Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home.

A Bedouin who served as Captain in the IDF’s Givati brigade, Mazared believes that Bennett’s “stand on Israel’s security and his commitment to the spirit of the IDF and values of the army and soldiers’ moral is critical.”

For Mazared, who is Muslim, the fact that Bennett is religious and wears a kippa makes him trustworthy. “In the army, I served with men like Bennett, who were religious and had values. I know their word is good, and, based on my army experience, I trust Bennett,” Marazed told Tazpit.

“Bennett speaks in a simple and real way. He says that whoever is loyal to the country deserves to be acknowledged for their service and to be addressed. As a Bedouin, politicians have always made us promises and in the end, they didn’t do anything,” Mazared said.

Bedouin citizens are a minority within the Arab minority in Israel, and make up three percent of Israel’s population. Considered to be semi-nomadic tribes, most Bedouins originally came from Hejaz, a region in the northern Arabian peninsula, and immigrated to Israel between the 14th and 18th century. Some also arrived in Israel from the Syrian desert. Today Israel’s Bedouin tribes are found in the southern, central and northern regions of the country, with a significant number, especially those from northern Israel, serving in the IDF and identifying with the Jewish state.

“Most of my community want to give Bennett a chance – he is new and it seems that he will be able to appreciate the Bedouin people and help us, especially with education, government employment and public transportation. My Bedouin community has always supported politicians like General Raful Eitan and Rehavam Ze’evi in the past, and Bennett seems to follow their path.”

“I hope that Bennett does well on Tuesday,” concluded Marazed. “ I’ve done everything I can to encourage other Bedouins to vote for him.”

A Channel 10 report on Thursday ranked the various Israeli Prime Ministers, since 1991, based on the amount of actual housing construction that began during their respective terms, inside the Israel’s Settlements.

*Also destroyed thousands of buildings and homes.
** This chart doesn’t include infrastructure construction, only homes.

Based on information collected by Peace Now, below are the number of government tenders for new settlement housing that were issued, by year for the past decase. We then correlated that information according to who was Prime Minister at the time.

Again, the information above is for new homes only. It does not include the infrastructure development in the settlements, which Netanyahu, for instance, did a lot of (exact data unavailable at the moment) during this last term as Prime Minister.

Updated:

According to Peace Now, the Netanyahu government also approved dozens of “outposts”, though what Peace Now calls “outposts” are actually neighborhoods of existing Settlements.

Some 250 Palestinians rioted Saturday afternoon just outside the village of Esh Kodesh in the Benjamin region of Judea and Samaria. The rioters broke down the fences around the village’s vineyards causing heavy damage.

Following the disturbances, about 30 residents arrived from the entire Shilo area to Esh Kodesh, and at first had to push out the Arab rioters with hurdled stones. Shortly thereafter, the regional emergency squad was activated by the security forces, and its members fired in the air until the arrival of the IDF and the transfer of management of the incident to the military.

A representative of the Esh Kodesh settlement told Tazpit News Agency that 11 Jewish residents, including the chief security officer who was hit in the leg by a rock, were injured lightly during the Arabs’ violent riots and were treated on the spot. One settler who had sustained a head wound was evacuated by MDA to the hospital. The man was initially taken to Sharei Tzedek, but due to the severity of his head injury he was move to Haddasah Ein Karen,

Serious damage was caused to several vineyards, after rioters tore down the fences and struck the vines. A security vehicle windshield was smashed by a rock.

The Esh Kodesh fence and fields.. Photo: Tazpit.