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November 30, 2003
chomping away at Palestine
Israeli illegal settlement outposts (previously) built on confiscated Palestinian lands. Later, they become legal and protected settlements (Khalil Abu Arafeh, 11/28/03).
This process of chopping away at Palestine until it disappears is what is not discussed in Australia, whenever the Israeli-Palestinian conflict surfaces in public life.
This piece gives a good description of the "chomping away":
"Since Israel signed the Oslo Accords, the settler population has doubled to 390,000, strewn over a thick web of at least 145 settlements and their interconnecting Jewish-only roads, blanketing the Palestinian West Bank. Since the beginning of the Second Intifada three years ago, the Israeli army has been systematically wrecking Palestinian infrastructure throughout the West Bank and Gaza. Water mains, wells, and pumping stations, sewage systems, telephone and Internet hubs, markets, airports, police stations, roads, civic buildings, mosques and churches, all have felt the special attentions of Israel's bulldozers, bomb teams, helicopter gunships, and F-16s. It is a slow-motion version of what Gulf War I did to Iraq."
The strategy of the Isreali right is not just to starve the Palestinians into submission. The strategy is a part of part of a larger accelerating project of land theft and dispossession that Israelis call "Judaization." The "security fence" will extend 450 miles, nearly five times longer than the Berlin Wall. And that's not including the 'eastern fence' beginning to amputate the Jordan Valley into Israel. As the article says:
"When it is all done, perhaps by the end of next year, there will be three walled Palestinian islands controlled by the Israeli army; one north, one south, and a tiny enclave around Jericho, marooned inside the Zionists' dream; a Greater Israel reaching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River..."
The strategy is leave the Palestinians with little land or resources to build a future state and society.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at November 30, 2003 11:10 AM
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Comments
A similiar process has occured in Cyprus with the illegaly occupied northern section having had an influx of non-Cypriot people from Turkey over the last 30 years to the point where they perhaps outnumber the Turkish Cypriot's.
The difference in tactics as compared to Israel is that the Turks concentrate on using the settlers, rather than the land itself, as a bargaining or even blocking tool to an eventual deal with the Greeks.
And it may finally be bearing fruit with pronouncements from the newly elected Cypriot leader stating that he is not happy with the Annan plan. The issue of the illegal settlers has been the major issue as a far as he is concerned.
Posted by: Savvas Jonis at December 1, 2003 08:53 AM