The girls, aged 14 to 16, have come for settler training to learn how to occupy Palestinian land — breaking international law. “God promised us this land and told us if you don’t take it, bad people will try and take it and you will have a war,” says Emuna Billa, 19, one of the camp supervisors. “Why do we have a war in Gaza? Because we don’t take Gaza.”
Their guru is Daniella Weiss, a 79-year-old grandmother in a long skirt and patterned headscarf. Founder of the Nachala or Homeland movement, she has been setting up illegal settlements for 49 years and was recently put under international sanctions. “You will be the new emissaries,” she tells the 50 or so girls at the camp. “I call it redeeming, not settling and this is our duty.”
She unfurls a map of Israel and the Palestinian territories dotted with vivid pink house symbols to represent existing and proposed Jewish settlements. Not only are these all across the West Bank, but also in Gaza. Already 674 people have signed up for beachside plots there, she tells me, and “many more want to join”. When someone asks her about settling Lebanon she smiles and says, “Yes, there too”.
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Last time I checked Israel was actively trying to annex parts of the land that was supposed to be part of the future Palestinian state, not to mention that they are building various checkpoints and restricting basic human rights of those people. How would you feel if you were treated like this? Shall we also start talking about the impunity with which those settlers are evicting Palestinians from their land, uprooting trees, etc?
Or the fact that Israel can arrest, kill Palestinians at will without any formal investigation or Palestinians having access to a proper legal defence? You know if you constantly kick a dog, no matter how good this dog is, it will finally bite you. So don’t act surprised when that happens.
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Then can you comment on the settlers’ terrorism? What did the state of Israel did or is doing to prevent this from happening again? How many settlers were convicted and got effective sentences?
Shall I also remind you about the Irgun who were also considered a terrorist organization? Resolution 181 assigned 55–56% of Mandatory Palestine to the Jews. At the time, the Jews were about a third of the population and owned around 6–7% of the land. Arabs constituted the majority and owned about 20% of the land, with the remainder held by the Mandate authorities or foreign landowners. And now ask yourself, if you are on the other side of history, how would you really feel? And then over 700,000 Palestinians were expelled by or fled by Zionist militias and the Israeli military—what would become known in Arabic as the Nakba (‘catastrophe’).[200] The events also led to the destruction of most of Palestine’s predominantly Arab population’s society, culture, identity, political rights, and national aspirations. Some 156,000 remained and became Arab citizens of Israel.
And also to let you know that generalizing the whole Palestinian population is a sure sign of racism. Shall I also remind you that once Germany elected the NS party, how would you feel if I come to you and tell you all the Germans are Nazis because they were once voting for NS? So don’t fall into that trap of bigotry and racial hatred. You know terrorism is fueled by people’s hardships and struggles, with the lack of future and prosperity. And again to make a parallel with Nazi Germany, Germans back then voted for NS, because of their economic hardships after the Treaty of Versailles and the enormous reparations they were forced to pay, including the high unemployment rate. Simply people were desperate back then and looked to the NS as a possible savior of their hardships.
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And again you are cherry picking facts and show very simplistic and one sided version of the historical events, where you blame only Palestine of the collapse of the Oslo accords, but conveniently forget to mention that Yitzhak Rabbin was killed by a far right settler, and that Bibi who was back then in opposition called the Oslo accord mortal threat to Israel.
The same far right leader who is governing Israel, who has been accused of war crimes, who is surrounded by other far right and even more extremist ministers, etc. This is the same like in Germany the kanzler to be from AfD, how happy are you going to be then?
And then I asked you to give me statistics of how many settlers had received effective convictions over unprovoked violence against the Palestinian population? You once again dodged to reply to the question by vaguely claiming that Israel was better before the war, but the reality is that even then, those incidents weren’t uncommon and Israel was doing very little to rein it and prevent it from happening.
Another question for you, how many kids below 14 have been killed on both sides in the last let’s say 20 years? Because with all due respect kids below 14 cannot be persecuted in Germany, correct?
And about Nakba, I really wonder if tomorrow Russia expels 700K Ukrainians, and tell them that they cannot return to their homes you will again shrug it off and say that it is war and that’s what happens in war.
Oh and another challenge for you. I dare you to find a single human rights organisation that’s not affiliated with the state of Israel that is claiming that all the human rights of the Palestinians in Israel are well protected.
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You know you aren’t much better than your predecessors. You still refuse to see those people as human beings. I can only feel sorry for you.
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“Obvious solution”
Says the guy that was literally trying to tell me earlier that Israel has a legitimate claim to the West Bank. Where would that second state be? I say we give a part of Germany so Palestinians can create their state and not stand in the way of the apartheid state with a biblical right to other people’s lands.
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