By Walt Zlotow
Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza is obvious to all with a moral conscious. Killing 70,000 Palestinians under 50,000 tons of US bombs obliterating Gaza’s 139 square miles is easy to process. Denying food, water, medicine causing degradation and death to the remaining 2,200,000 Palestinians reinforces that genocidal reality.
But many remain unaware of Israel’s relentless policy of ethnically cleansing the 3.3 million Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem annexed by Israel in 1967. Israel is positively gleeful about bringing the West Bank entirely into Greater Israel for Israelis only. In July the Israeli Knesset passed a symbolic motion that the West Bank is “an inseparable part of the Land of Israel, the historical, cultural and spiritual homeland of the Jewish people” and that “Israel has the natural, historical and legal right to all of the territories of the Land of Israel.”
Folding the West Bank and East Jerusalem into Greater Israel, with or without (preferably without) those pesky Palestinians, has been the Israeli dream since that illegal 1967 annexation. A decade later Prime Minister Begin initiated an inexorable settlement policy to implement that dream. Jewish settlement rose from just a few thousand in the late 1970s, to over half a million by the October, 2023 Hamas attack in southern Israel.
The now two year Gaza genocide coincided with accelerated settlements, attacks on Palestinians, their homes, villages, harvests making life horrendous for the West Bank and East Jerusalem’s 3,300,000 Palestinians. Israeli settlement now approaches 750,000. With the world fixated on the horror perpetrated in Gaza, West Bank ethnic cleaning proceeds under the radar.
Israel pretends to oppose Israeli settler violence when in fact they both ignore an encourage it. Case in point is Zvi Sukkot, former head of settler terrorist organisation The Revolt who had been marginalised by the Israeli government. Sukkot was arrested in 2010 for possible involvement in a mosque arson in the West Bank but released. By early 2023 he joined the Israeli Knesset. After the Hamas attack Prime Minister Netanyahu appointed him chair of the Knesset Subcommittee for Judea and Samara (Israel’s name for the West Bank). The leap from heading up a terrorist group to heading up a governmental agency tasked with Palestinian removal tells you everything about Israel’s agenda for the West Bank.
Is Israel determined to drive out West Bank Palestinians to fold that Palestinian land into Greater Israel? With America’s unrelenting support you can bank on it.
Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL
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I thought his name was Begin. Tenses matter.
Thanks, leefe. I have fixed.
So some Israelis (we know who) and Christian Zionists (supported by the IDF) consider Palestinians unworthy of existence. I suggest that in recognition of that attitude we should deny any and all Israeli based enterprises the right to Australian markets. That way we consider them unworthy of existence in our lives.
The coverage has been vile and cowardly.
How did the West allow itself to be dictated too and influenced by a country that has been completely infiltrated and dominated by goose stepping Zionist foot soldiers masqueradingas US patriots?
I just came across a great line.
“Anyone who hasn’t been accused of being an antisemite by a Zionist should be ashamed of themselves.”
Of course, it does not apply here because to my surprise, as far as I know AIMN has not been targeted by the Zionist lobby, so we don’t get the opportunity for a face-to-face. Or a keyboard to keyboard.
But I’m proud to say that I was targeted years ago at The Conversation for a comment so mild it was not even a criticism.
I was attacked by gentlemen with names consistent with a tiny country in The Levant.
When I pointed out the inconsistencies in the attacks, they went harder and I was banned by The Conversation.
I’ve never been back, but to my eternal regret I kept no copy of the email from the Conversation.
But it’s a warning — when they start, they go hard.
Onya Steve!
Bugger that!
Sorry, something else.
Sour old Menachim Begin, the man put in after the Yom Kippur war in the early mid seventies.
Metaphoric ancestor and avator to Netanyahu and his supporters. If you want to hear real racism, have a listen to some tapes of him.