1/ Last week the Trump admin published its plan predicated on the idea that none of the 130 or so Israeli settlements in the West Bank will be dismantled. Israeli settlements are illegal. They are war crimes. Trump's one-sided proposal fails to recognize this.
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2/ Today we offer a case study exploring the reality on the ground hidden within Trump’s “Vision for Peace” map. 
3/ One of these settlements is Ma'ale Shomron - located between the Palestinian cities of Qalqilya and Nablus. Notably, it is home to the Honorable @dandayan, Israel’s Consul in New York.
4/ Next to Ma'ale Shomron there is a small Palestinian village (often referred to in Arabic as a “khirbeh”) that Dayan doesn’t want anyone to know about.
5/ Dayan especially doesn’t want people outside of Israel, to whom he loves to tell his story that “settlements are actually good for the Arabs!” to know about this Khirbeh. So we’ll tell you about it ourselves!
6/ Long before Dayan started to represent the State of (Greater) Israel overseas, he moved to Ma’ale Shomron - located about 10 kms east of the Green Line, just south of the Qalqiliya-Nablus Road (Road 55).
7/ Ma’ale Shomron was established in 1980, on land belonging to the Palestinian village of Kafr Thulth. How was it established? Israel declared more than 5,000 acres in this area as “state land,” of which about 500 acres were given to the settlers of Ma’ale Shomron.
8/ The settlement was in fact built in the heart of a British-era pine tree forest, in which half of the trees were cut down for its construction. Here you can see two images, 1 from 1979 & the other from 1983.
9/ The rest of the newly-declared “state land” was given to other settlements -- Karnei Shomron, Nofim and Yakir -- located along Wadi Qana, a tributary of the Yarkon River that runs through the northern West Bank.
10/ The land Israel took wasn't uninhabited. In the mid-1940s, 2 Palestinian families moved from Al-Shaykh Munis (on which Tel Aviv Univ is built) to what became a Palestinian Khirbeh called Ayoun Kafr Kara, located southeast of where Ma’ale Shomron would be established.
11/ With time & enormous investment by the Israeli government and taxpayers, residents of Ma’ale Shomron built permanent homes. Dani and Einat Dayan, like their neighbors, built a generously sized home in the heart of what became a gentrified settlement.
12/ What about Khirbet Ayoun Kafr Kara? Did Israeli authorities, as they invested heavily in Ma’ale Shomron, also provide for basic necessities – water, electricity, roads – for its Palestinian neighbors, whose residence there pre-dated the arrival of the Dayans by decades?
13/ Stop wasting time with silly, provocative questions. Instead, let’s fast-forward to the end of the 1990s, when illegal outposts – that is, new proto-settlements established by settlers in violation of Israeli law – started popping up all over the West Bank.
14/ Residents of Ma’ale Shomron wanted an outpost of their own. They decided to locate that new outpost to their south, on land that the military had allocated to settlements but for which no construction planning or permissions was granted.
15/ Forging ahead on their own, in 1999 Ma’ale Shomron settlers began (illegally) paving a road, with the intention to establish a new outpost on the southernmost part of the land. Their plan came to fruition in 2002, with the establishment of an outpost they called “El-Matan.”
16/ As with most outposts, El-Matan was populated by a group of people who, even as compared to the general settler population, are political and ideological extremists. What subsequently happened to El-Matan is linked to the fate of all the outposts.
17/ Over the years, the Israeli High Court wrestled with the challenge illegal actions by settlers posed to Israel’s rule of law. The Court, rather than hold settlers accountable, encouraged the govt to find creative ways to retroactively legalize the illegal acts of settlers.
18/ One of the ways the government developed was to categorize outposts, post-facto, as "neighborhoods" of existing, ‘legal’ settlements. This is what happened to El-Matan, which in 2015 was defined as a “neighborhood” of the settlement of Ma’ale Shomron, located a km away.
19/ In Dec 2014 Ayala Shapira, an Israeli child residing in the outpost, was badly injured by a Molotov cocktail thrown by a Palestinian. As a result, Israel’s government allocated tens of millions of shekels to pave a “security road” for the 15 families in El-Matan.
20/ The construction of the “security road,” completed in 2017, severely damaged the historic road connecting the nearby Palestinian Khirbeh, home to around 100 people, to the larger village of Kafr Thulth, where they went for shopping, schools, medical care, etc.
21/ Shortly after the opening of the new road to El-Matan, the Palestinian Authority began, in coordination with the Israeli military, to fix and upgrade that critical route. But guess who didn’t like this road project?
22/ The settlers, who are experienced with these kinds of things, managed with just a little pressure and a couple of protests to get the Israeli military to shut down access for all Palestinian vehicles on the road. But even that wasn’t enough for the Ma’ale Shomron settlers!
23/ Over the past few months the settlers have been demanding that the military block the historic access road even further away from El-Matan in order to prevent Palestinians from coming in with tractors and cars to their own olive groves, located east of Kafr Thulth.
24/ While writing this thread, we remembered that a few years back, Dani Dayan said: “The prime minister & defense minister have to act as if they are facing a virtual sign that reads, What have we done to facilitate a dignified life for the Palestinians today?”
25/ Clearly, Dayan’s ideas for benevolent Israeli control don’t apply to those Palestinians unlucky enough to be his neighbors. Likewise, this same worldview - under which Palestinian rights are non-existent - is the foundation of Trump’s Vision for Peace.
