Hundreds of Israeli police and paramilitary forces swooped into the occupied West Bank today, ousting protesters from the E-1 region and destroying their tents, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to continue with plans to build new settlements in the area.
The E-1 region is small but significant because it was the only area linking the southern third of the West Bank with the rest that didn’t have settlements on it, and was presumably part of a planned contiguous Palestinian state.
The construction effectively bisects the West Bank and ensures that there will be no links between southern and northern West Bank, if the Palestinians ever get a state. Netanyahu insisted they were never going to give E-1 up anyhow.
Though the planned construction has done enormous damage to the prospect of restarting peace talks and has sparked international condemnation, it has proven popular with the Israeli far-right, and at a time when far-right voters are extremely important to Netanyahu’s reelection bid, it seems unlikely he will reconsider.
Israel has every right to build on their own land. The Arabs should have thought twice about attacking Israel in 1967 after which they lost control of this disputed territory. The Arabs have 22 states surrounding tiny Israel with over 800 times the land mass of Israel. As tiny as Israel is, the Arabs that live there have the highest standard of living in the Arab world. Just visit any Ministry of the Interior office on any weekday in Israel and see for yourself it is filled with Arabs trying to acquire Israeli citizenship. Netanyahu is doing the right thing connecting Maale Adumim with Jerusalem.
The same tired lies and fabrications we always get from the paid hasbara trolls. Always changing the facts to agree with the Zionist script. Israel instigated the 1967 war, it was nothing more than a land grab. Arabs in Israel are second-class citizens, with few if any of the same rights afforded to the Jewish population. Israel claims to be a democracy, but in truth it's more of a fascist-apartheid state that would have faded away long ago had it not had Zionist agents infiltrating and buying representation in the US Government.
The world is weary of Israel's endless victim-hood, its hypocrisy, and collective psychopathy. The time to end this colonial experiment is NOW, and return Palestine to actual Semites – the Palestinians. On Israel's current path, this should take only a few years.
Israel is just as entitled to build on land it conquered and confine the Palestinians to small reservations, as we were entitled to confine the tribal natives of North America to reservations 300-150 years ago. The most important thing is to keep US troops out of the Levant area. The thing that worries me most is that we might get sucked into the Syria fighting. Sell Israel weapons, yes, but let Israel fight its own battles in its own backyard.
The US was never entitled to treat Native Americans as they were treated, and Israel has no right to continue murdering Palestinians and stealing land and resources from Palestine.
Sucked into Syrian fighting? We are already there! Only at this point, it's our money that's getting sucked in.
I do agree, let Israel fight it's own battles…but also hold them accountable for their own actions.
Interesting move. If Likud doesn't want a 2-state solution what does it want? Either Israel expels Israelis Moslems once again from their homeland or they will have to live with them in peace. And they will soon be a minority if they live with them in peace. Not quite like the Indians 2 centuries ago who never stood a chance of becoming a majority. More like the whites in America today.