Access to housing and the right to build  new homes in Israel and the Occupied Territories has been in the news lately as the Obama and Netanyahu administrations wrangle over settlement policy.

Both Clinton and Obama have made unequivocal statements regarding the need for a stop to settlement construction (including so-called "natural growth" construction) as a prerequisite to the beginning of peace talks.

The Netanyahu administration has agreed to remove some "illegal outposts" but has not accepted the call to freeze natural growth construction (natural growth is defined as expanding current structures and building new ones in established settlements). Israeli official Mark Regev recently said that "Normal life in those communities must be allowed to continue." Netanyahu himself stated that it "wouldn't be fair to ban construction to meet the needs of natural growth." Giving a "real life" example, he said that as children grow they will need new homes in the settlements to start their own families.

Netanyahu's unremarkable defense of adequate housing for growing families becomes quite remarkable when considering his administration's attitudes toward housing for Palestinians (both in Israel and the Occupied Territories) and tolerance of settler attacks on Palestinian land and homes. So on Monday, in retaliation for the removal of several small illegal outposts, "settlers torched a wooded hilltop near Nablus and set trees and Palestinian agricultural land on fire near the village of Hawara, residents said." Palestinians did not remove the outposts - the IDF did - but Palestinians were nevertheless the targets of settler "retaliation."

Today The Washington Post reports that "Israeli settlers are waging court battles to evict dozens of Palestinians from homes in an East Jerusalem neighborhood...They have already won property rights to six Arab homes, whose residents were subsequently evicted. Palestinians and an Israeli rights group say settlers are trying to evict a further 27 Arab families from 28 buildings...Settlers have moved into six Arab buildings in Sheikh Jarrah, home to consulates and trendy restaurants. Armed men guard the buildings where settlers have hoisted Israeli flags to assert Jewish dominance...[The Israeli Ir Amim rights group] said that Israeli courts do not accept similar Arab claims to land and property in Jewish West Jerusalem. The high-end neighborhood of Talbieh is abundant with old white-stone houses whose Palestinian owners fled or were forced to leave during the 1948 war over Israel's creation."

In addition to court-based takeovers of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem, the outright destruction of Palestinian homes in Jerusalem continues unabated. As The Times reported in early May, "Scores of Palestinian-owned structures are demolished every year by the Israeli authorities on the grounds that they were built without the required permits. But many Palestinians say Israel limits construction to push them out of East Jerusalem, which they claim as the capital of a future Palestinian state. The report states that only 13 percent of East Jerusalem land is currently zoned by the Israeli authorities for Palestinian construction, and much of that is already built up, severely restricting the possibility of obtaining a permit. More than a third of East Jerusalem, meanwhile, has been expropriated for Israeli construction since 1967, according to the report, while 22 percent is zoned for green areas and public infrastructure and 30 percent remains “unplanned.”

So when it comes to land and homes for Israelis in occupied Palestinian territory, life must continue normally and any limits to construction are considered totally unreasonable. Yet when it comes to the land and property of Israeli Palestinians in Israel, legal takeovers and outright demolitions are standard operating procedure.

And this doesn't even begin to cover Israel's position toward Palestinian-owned land and homes in the West Bank and Gaza.  IDF strategies toward private property in the Occupied Territories range from turning individual houses into temporary "bases" to outright demolition. When I was in the West Bank in 2005, we encountered a peace-time situation where a group of IDF soldiers had turned a multi-floor home for an extended family into a temporary base. The multigenerational family of 20 people had spent the last several days in one large room of the house as soldiers turned the rest of the house into their quarters. This was not an unusual occurance and the practice continues to this day. You can see the policy in action in a January report from 60 Minutes here and here.

It's somewhat encouraging to see the Obama administration making useful noises regarding the settlement issue, but how serious is his commitment and how much progress is actually being made? Although some illegal outposts have been dismantled (we'll leave aside what an illegal outpost could possibly mean since all building on occupied territory for the benefit of the occupier's population is illegal under international law), housing advocates argue that the removal of this handful of outposts (some of which were already abandoned and some of which had been evacuated before) is just PR.

And despite the fact that the public disagreement between Obama and Netanyahu is getting wide coverage, it's easy to see that this rift is only getting so much ink because the last eight years found the Israeli and American leadership in agreement on almost every issue. For some perspective on how mild Obama's criticism has been so far, he is apparently not going "so far" as to recommend that loan guarantees to Israel come with conditions regarding settlement construction - a move so radical that George H.W. Bush proposed it almost 20 years ago.