Several top members of the ruling Likud Party are openly calling on Israel to annex Area C, the bulk of the West Bank, seeing it as a way to get a handle on international criticism of the expansion of settlements.
Public Diplomacy Minister Yuli Edelstein insisted that the lack of full annexation “strengthens the international community’s demand for a withdrawal to the pre-1967 line.”
This doesn’t appear to have been thought out too deeply, as Israel has already annexed occupied East Jerusalem, and since the international community doesn’t recognize this claim the expansions there are still criticized.
Rather the bulk of the argument seems to be the political hay to be made of doing so as a chance to court the ever-rightward Israeli voting mass. Pro-settler hawk Moshe Feiglin sought to take at even a step further in this direction, seeing it as a move to expel all Arabs from the West Bank.
“We can give every family in Judea and Samaria $500,000 to encourage them to emigrate. This is the perfect solution,” Feiglin noted. Exactly how broad a “family” is defined is unclear, but with 2.6 million Arabs to buy out, this would be a significant investment.
Tzipi Livni, whose new party is showing gains in recent polls, slammed the idea, saying Likud had “removed their masks” and shown that they are extreme right wing.
I have a idea: How about ALL the Israeli-American duo-citizens, and ALL of the American Jewish and Christian Zionists in the U.S. who advocate for and support the Dispossession of and Israeli State Terror Against the Indigenous Palestinians, OFFER TO SIGN OVER their homes and ALL of their possessions, properties, businesses etc. (i.e. everything they own/possess) to the Occupied, Blockaded, Dispossessed, and Forcefully Exiled Palestinians. and replace the Indigenous Arab population in the Cantonized West Bank and Blockaded and devastatingly bombed GAZA Strip IF
the Palestinians agree.
'We can give every family in Judea and Samaria $500,000 to encourage them…' That's $500,000 courtesy of American taxpayers mind you. $500,000 is a bit more than I have made working for more than 40 years. $500,000 to stir up animosity all over the Middle East and ignite a war that may cost millions of lives (actually has already cost over a million lives in Iraq alone – all the estimates are way too low). All this misery and turmoil just so a few thousand 'settlers' can steal property and work to destroy the people of Palestine who are the true natives of that region. And we, Americans, are blindly and cheerfully paying for this thanks to the fact that Israel has 100 senators and over 500 representatives doing their bidding in Washington. 51st state ? More like 1st state!
The Israeli government is a criminal cabal with no moral compass anywhere in site. How sickening are these fiends??? One must pray for a blowback on the magnitude of the Afrikaners demise in South Africa. Israel only understands force, and by god this is way over due.
Have fun guys. After you annex all that, I hope you enjoy living in a majority Palestinians country.
………….and our revered political leaders claim there is "no daylight between the US and Israel" and we "have Israel's back", and similar nonsensical, putrid garbage. If we allow this to happen, we will have blood on our hands.
When will our government signal to the Natanyahu gang that there is a line in the sand and we will not let them cross it? This is a crime in progress and the international community as well as our government stand by and watch………. It's unconscienable and tragic.