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”.
That the Jewish people have historic ties to Judea is not only in the name, there’s plenty of archeology as well.
Yeah and so does Germany over vast areas of western Poland, yet you don’t see normal people claiming that Germany should invade, settle, and occupy those parts. Secondly, I’m part jewish and have no connection to Israel, and never will. The Zionist mission to look for Lebensraum in the West Bank will never have my support. Zionism doesn’t represent Judaism. If you think so, then you’re just another philosemitic antisemite, or someone delusional enough to think that supporting the mass slaughter of children will wash his family’s past crimes.
Yes, you don’t see German terrorists shelling Western Poland or Polish terrorists blowing up buses in Lviv. That’s because we accepted that the borders moved. Palestinians don’t accept that the borders change and still want all of Israel.
West Bank settlements should stop, agreed.
Do think Israel has a right to exist?
And where Palestinians should go. Shall they magically disappear to leave more Lebensraum for Israel? Or what’s your solution?
“Palestinians” here is a useless generalization, because it lacks a quantifier. Certainly some do, and just as certainly not all do.