Days After Generals Call Settlement Campaign Ethnic Cleansing, Netanyahu Orders Only the Unauthorized Outposts Removed

…(cont) Twenty hectares is two hundred thousand square meters. My yard, the one with the bank's name still on it, runs a little over four hundred. So if you wanted to lay July's confiscated land end to end using my yard as the measuring stick, you'd need about five hundred of them, side by side. I'm sorry, I keep doing this math instead of just telling you the number. Five hundred yards like mine. Fifteen signatures got you there.

I'm sorry, I bring the fifteen up again, but on the thirty-first of August, retired Israeli generals — their own words, this is in the Times' report on the tour they were making through the West Bank that week — called the settler campaign ethnic cleansing. The Times reported that they were touring; the phrase belongs to the generals, not the paper, and I want to be careful about that, because I got it backwards the first time I wrote this down and had to cross it out.

Two days before that, on the twenty-ninth, masked settlers attacked a Palestinian woman and an NBC News crew that was there to report on exactly this. I don't have a dollar figure for that one. Some of what's in my notebook doesn't convert.

And on the twenty-first, a man named Loui Ridi flew in from Ohio to a house in Qusra that had already been surrounded for more than a week by the time he landed — his own family's house, water and electricity cut in parts of the village, settlers outside the whole time he was inside. I'm sorry, I keep going back to the fifteen orders, and I know Qusra isn't one of them, the record doesn't say that, and I won't pretend it does. I bring it up because it's the same stretch of ground and the same stretch of days.

Now the order everybody's reading about arrived on a Sunday, this Sunday, September seventh. Netanyahu told his government to dismantle unauthorized settler outposts — the ones built without a permit from Israel itself. I wrote "unauthorized" three times and underlined it twice, because it's doing a lot of work in that sentence.

I keep going back to the fifteen orders one more time, and this is the last time, I promise. Those weren't unauthorized. Those were signed. The government's own hand, in July, on the government's own paper, taking two hundred dunams the ordinary way — through an office, not around one.

So here's my question, and then I'll let you go: does the order that came down on Sunday touch any of that? Does dismantling the outposts nobody signed off on put back an inch of the land that somebody did?

Excuse me — before you go — one more thing. If a government can sign fifteen confiscations in a single July without anyone calling them unauthorized, what exactly was the September order authorized to fix?

Fifteen orders, twenty hectares, in July.