The State Comptroller backs the Sovereignty Movement’s claim that the Civil Administration should be abolished and that the settlement enterprise in Judea and Samaria should be subordinate to the government of Israel. Sovereignty is the answer to these serious distortions and failures.
The State Comptroller’s report confirms today (Monday, August 3rd, 2020) what the Sovereignty Movement has been claiming for some time, along with the call to abolish the Civil Administration, which makes the hundreds of thousands of residents of Judea and Samaria to be subordinate to military rule and causes severe violations to human rights.
The audit found that “In light of the non-settlement of disputes between the Civil Administration and the Ministry of Justice, registration of lands has not progressed, which has caused harm to the Israeli residents of Judea and Samaria in everything regarding their ability to register ownership and rights to land in the Judea and Samaria Lands Registry books.
The State Comptroller states that due to failures of the Civil Administration’s conduct in the matter of real estate, the old, manual procedure of registration allows the PA to falsify data and take over territory under Israeli control, and this is how the PA establishes facts on the ground.
On this matter, the State Comptroller writes: “On the matter of real estate, there are two key failures that we have been warning against for years. Besides the basic fact that the lands registrar in Judea and Samaria is opaque to Israeli citizens, in a way that causes severe infringement to property rights and freedom of information, there is also the outdated, slow procedure of registering lands by hand, which provides fertile ground for forgery and violation of the property rights of and the ability to acquire land. The lack of progress in regulating lands has enabled the Palestinian Authority to lead a planned, timed and well-funded process in recent years, seizing hundreds of thousands of dunams in Judea and Samaria through illegal building and agricultural takeover, even maintaining a land registry for itself in areas located under full Israeli control, thus presenting the State of Israel with established facts”.
The Sovereignty Movement views this report as additional evidence of the neglect that has allowed the bodies of the PA to implement their plans to take over Area C, for years, with a wink or closed eyes. The movement states that the application of sovereignty and Israeli law in Judea and Samaria will restore civil rights to the almost half million settlers in this area and will constitute the completion of the Zionist vision and a civil necessity of the first order.
The Sovereignty Movement also states that “the IDF’s job is to win the military battle for the security and fortification of the State of Israel and not to waste resources on civil necessities such as establishing kindergartens, paving roads, laying water pipes and power lines and so on. The application of sovereignty will allow the IDF to mobilize for carrying out its all- important role on behalf of the security of Israel”.
The movement's leaders, Yehudit Katsover and Nadia Matar, note and emphasize that "the demand to close the Civil Administration is not in order to slam the administration's employees, but rather it is a call for the transfer of its powers and employees to regulated activities under relevant government ministries."