In an article about controversial Israeli architect Eyal Weizman, The Guardian let loose a real whopper of an accusation against Israel.
According to the story, the tiled roofs so common to Jewish homes in the West Bank are actually “mandatory red roofs so that on flyovers the Israeli army know not to target them.”
Mandatory? Flyovers? Army targets?
We decided to do some fact-checking to see if there was any merit to this claim. We contacted the legal counsel to one of the West Bank Jewish communities to find out if there were, in fact, laws mandating red roofs.
The answer we received from attorney Akiva Sylvetzky was that the claim is nonsense and the information completely wrong.
Many zone plans regarding Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria do not have provisions forcing building red tile roofs. If fact, there are many zone plans which do not demand building tiles at all, and there are even zone plans which forbid tiles on the roof!! I am not familiar with one zone plan that demands them to be red.
Image: CC BY-NC-ND flickr/Nebojsa Mladjenovic
