There can be no doubt that the Zionist regime has no intention other than to make Palestine into a totalitarian racist state; and the pressure must be on now that its backer, the USA, may not be able to afford to maintain its proxy empire much longer.
Saed Bannoura of IMEMC reports that Israeli army bulldozers uprooted farmlands close to Tiqoua’ “settlement”, built on land stolen from residents of the Tiqoua’ Palestinian village, south east of Bethlehem, in order to build new, exclusively Jewish homes.**
Dozens of “settlers” also placed caravans in Palestinian-owned lands, in and around Al Mas’ha, east of Bethlehem.
Droves of so-called West Bank “settlers” celebrated the end of the temporary “settlements” phoney-freeze on September 30, while the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu declared that 2000 homes for Jewish “settlers” will be built soon in the West Bank.
Rather than pack up and go home as he may well have done, on the 1st October U.S. envoy George Mitchell held yet another futile round of discussions with Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Mitchell’s boss, Barack Obama, has been at pains to appear as one pushing the Zionists to compromise - but there is always the possibility that this is merely a front for laisse-faire, as the US requests are continually undermined by its regular, unequivocal injections of money and armaments to the rogue state.
The gloves are coming off elsewhere on the West Bank: for instance, the infrastructure for four illegal outposts is being constructed around the West Bank city of Hebron.
In an interview with Ma'an Radio on 30th September, Abed Al-Hadi Hantash said the outposts would be integrated to form a new “settlement”, which would be linked with Kiryat Arba, the largest “settlement” in the district.
Combined, the “settlements” would constitute a third of the ancient city of Hebron, which is already surrounded by illegal “settlements”, and where many of the non-Jewish residents must beg for special permits to use their own front doors.
And a half-hour drive east (if you're Jewish/Israeli) or anything from, say, one day to a few weeks away, if you're in the wrong tribe: the Jordan valley has the same mix of dread and destruction. Although it has a third of the West Bank’s water resources, Palestinians have not been allowed to drill wells since 1967, as Michael Jansen writes in the Irish Times*.
“Settlement” crop fields cover the flat land while the incursion homes and military zones are taking over the hills, shrinking yet more valuable Palestinian space.
A broad band of land stretches north to south for 120km behind barbed wire; security roads and minefields line the Jordan river border with the Kingdom of Jordan.
Since occupying East Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967, Israel has regarded the valley as its eastern border. Israel says it would never withdraw because the valley, 30 per cent of the West Bank (and as such, the agreed part of Palestine alloted to the Palestinians before the ’67 war and also an element of the Two-State Solution which so many UK politicians fool themselves into believing in), functions as a strategic buffer zone.
Since 1967 Israel has built 36 “settlements” and half a dozen military camps here.
Israel has complete control of the valuable resources of the valley which Palestinians insist must belong to their future state. What is left of the larger areas of the ‘free’ West Bank will soon be effectively like Gaza: their function as ‘soft” death camps.
Picture by Palestinian News: Friday - Israeli invaders from the Itamar group in south Nablus burned over ten dunums of olive tree land northeast of Awarta village.
*http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2010/1001/1224280078941.html
**http://www.imemc.org/article/59522
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