Sasson’s report took special note of Avi Maoz, who headed the Ministry of Construction and Housing for most of this period. Maoz, a political activist who early in his career spoke openly of expelling all Arabs from the West Bank, helped found a settlement south of Jerusalem during the 1990s and began building a professional alliance with Benjamin Netanyahu, then ambassador to Israel. Israel in the United States. United Nations and would soon assume his first term as Prime Minister. Years later, Maoz would play a decisive role in ensuring Netanyahu’s political survival.
“The image that emerges before the viewer’s eyes is severe,” Sasson wrote in his report. “Instead of the Israeli government deciding on the establishment of settlements in the territories of Judea and Samaria, its place has been taken, from the mid-1990s onwards, by others.” The settlers, he wrote, were “the driving force” but could not have achieved it without the help of “various building and housing ministers at the relevant periods, some of them with a blind eye and others with encouragement and support.” cheer up.”
This clandestine network operated, Sasson wrote, “with massive financing from the State of Israel, without adequate public transparency, without mandatory criteria. The construction of unauthorized outposts is carried out in violation of proper procedures and general administrative rules and, in particular, in flagrant and continuous violation of the law.” These violations, Sasson warned, came from the government: “It was the state and public organizations that violated the law, the rules and the procedures that the State itself had determined.” It was a conflict, he argued, that effectively neutralized Israel’s internal checks and balances and posed a grave threat to the nation’s integrity. “Law enforcement agencies cannot take action against government departments that break the law.”
But, echoing Judith Karp’s secret report decades earlier, the Sasson Report, made public in March 2005, had almost no impact. As he had a direct mandate from the prime minister, Sasson might have believed that his investigation could lead to the dismantling of the illegal outposts that had spread throughout the Palestinian territories. But even Sharon, with his senior position, found himself powerless in the face of the machinery now in place to protect and expand settlements in the West Bank, the same machinery he had helped to build.
All this occurred in the context of the withdrawal from Gaza. Sharon, who began overseeing the withdrawal of Gaza settlements in August 2005, was the third Israeli prime minister to threaten the settlers’ dream of a Greater Israel, and the effort sparked bitter opposition not only from settlers but also of an increasingly larger part of the population. political establishment. Netanyahu, who had served his first term as prime minister from 1996 to 1999, and who previously voted to withdraw, resigned from his position as finance minister in Sharon’s cabinet in protest and in anticipation of another run for the top job. high.