THE COLONIALIST SETTLEMENTS IN PALESTINE
By Ibrahim Ebeid Al-Farr
My roots are deeper in Palestine than the Zionist colonialist settlers,
I was born in Palestine on June 1, 1935.
My ancestors the Kannanites, Phoenicians, and Jebusites were living there for thousands of years before the fairytale biblical Abraham came to Palestine.
I will never forget the grand betrayal of the Western powers to our cause of unity and liberation. Without Arab help and support, the West wouldn’t have achieved victory over the Ottoman Turks. Sharif Hussein Bin Ali, the ruler of Hijaz and Najd launched the Great Arab Revolt in June 1916 against the Ottoman army during the First World War and sided with the Allies with the hope of unifying the Arabs in one independent state as promised.
As soon as the First World War ended a secret agreement between Britain and France, known as Sykes-Picot, to divide the Arab homeland into mini-states under their Imperialist domination was revealed by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.
This notorious Sykes-Picot Agreement (15 May 1916) was struck as a prelude to facilitating the creation of the Zionist state in Palestine at Arab expense. The Balfour Declaration, granting a national home in Palestine to the Zionist movement, followed a year and a half later, on November 2, 1917. For this reason, Palestine was carved out of Syria and put under the British Mandate.
The Balfour Declaration treated Palestine as real estate owned by Britain and granted it to the Zionist Jews. It referred to the Arabs of Palestine, who comprised 92% of the population, as “non-Jewish communities of Palestine.” This gave a false impression that the Arabs of Palestine were an insignificant minority occupying a position subordinate to the Zionists. The Arabs were able to diagnose the malicious intention of the British government and understood the real danger behind such a declaration, robbing them of their land and securing it for the Zionists.
Since the inception of {Israel} in Palestine illegally by the United Nations in 1947 and with the support of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the Western powers mass cleansing of the Palestinians started. Jews started living in Palestinian cities, towns, and villages, an operation that continues till the present time, especially in the West Bank and the Golan Heights in Syria.
Since the occupation of the remaining part of Palestine in 1967 all of Palestine succumbed to zionist control and the status quo has deteriorated immensely, the policy of constructing and expanding illegal settlements continued, and tens of thousands of Palestinian properties were demolished or confiscated in order to build settlements for the illegal Jewish immigrants, (Israel) has also diverted Palestinian natural resources such as water and agricultural land for settlement use and the Palestinians were deprived of their rights. Water became rationalized on certain days only while the settlers enjoyed green yards and swimming pools, and the Palestinians suffered from thrust.
There is no doubt that settlements in Occupied Palestine violate international law and are categorized as a war crime.
Despite multiple UN resolutions, Israel has continued to appropriate Palestinian land and support at least 600,000 settlers living in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Until 2005, more than 9,000 Israeli settlers were illegally residing in Gaza.
In recent months, Israel has accelerated settlement expansion. The government has announced plans for thousands of new homes in existing settlements, as well as the establishment of two new settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Amnesty International reported that the hundreds of Israeli military closures across the West Bank such as checkpoints, roadblocks, and settler-only roads, make simple daily tasks for Palestinians who are trying to get to work, school, or hospital a constant struggle. Israel claims the winding 700-km fence/wall is there to prevent armed attacks on Israel by Palestinians. But that does not explain why 85% of it is built on Palestinian land, including land deep inside the West Bank. What the fence/wall does is cut off Palestinian communities from each other and rip families apart. It also deprives Palestinians from accessing essential services and separates farmers from their land and other resources, crippling the Palestinian economy. Inherently discriminatory and unjust laws also prevent many people from being able to marry or travel within the occupied territories or into Israel to visit or live with their loved ones. These arbitrary restrictions are discriminatory and unlawful.
Recently Aljazeera reported that the Benjamin Netanyahu Defence Ministry planning committee that oversees settlement construction approved more than 5,000 new settlement homes. The international community, along with the Palestinians, considers settlement construction illegal and an obstacle to peace. More than 700,000 Israelis live in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem – territories captured by Israel in 1967 and sought by the Palestinian Authority for a future state.
“The Netanyahu government is moving forward with its aggression and open war against the Palestinian people,” said Wasel Abu Yousef, a Palestinian official in the occupied West Bank. “We affirm that all settler colonialism in all the occupied Palestinian territories is illegitimate and illegal.”
Israel’s government, which took office in late December, is dominated by religious and ultranationalist politicians with close ties to the settlement movement. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a firebrand settler leader, has been granted cabinet-level authority over settlement policies and has vowed to double the settler population in the occupied West Bank.
In addition to confiscating the West Bank lands to become fully part of the Zionist entity, restrictions on the movement of Palestinians are imposed. Each village and City became surrounded by armed settlements and road barricades with armed settlers and army units.
Daily life under occupation is miserable, people are trapped and oppressed, This act is a racist one and reminds me of Hitler’s abominable act against humanity.
Earlier settlements had previously been built within the Egyptian territory of the Sinai Peninsula, and within the Palestinian territory of the Gaza Strip; however, Israel evacuated and dismantled the 18 Sinai settlements following the 1979 Egypt–Israel peace agreement, and all of the 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip, along with four in the West Bank, in 2005 as part of its unilateral disengagement from Gaza.
Israel has established Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem and in the Israeli-occupied portion of the Golan Heights, both of which Israel has effectively annexed, and as such Israel does not consider the developments there to be settlements. The international community regards both territories as held under Israeli occupation and the localities established there to be illegal settlements. The International Court of Justice found the settlements to be illegal in its 2004 advisory opinion on the West Bank barrier. In the West Bank, Israel continues to expand its remaining settlements as well as settle in new areas, despite pressure from the international community to desist.
This is a brief report that I have collected from various organizations to display to those who are concerned about Palestine and the Palestinians who are resisting injustice imposed upon them by tyrannical Zionism. ” Israel ” is an illegitimate entity established by force by Western Powers. Palestine is Arab, it belongs to the Palestinians, some are dead, some are living but most of them are not born yet.
Judaism is not a nationality, it is a religion, like Islam or Christianity are not a nationality. Zionism is a racist movement that is detrimental to Judaism and to humanity.
There is an awakening among Jews around the World who have
realized the illegality or the unnecessity of a Jewish state, among them writers, philosophers, and scientists. A sample of well-prominent Jewish figures opposing the Israeli state:
David Wilson
UK Jews marching on 9 August 2014 to say Israel’s assault on Gaza is Not in My Name
ON 9 AUGUST 2014, 150,000 protesters marched in London in solidarity with the people of Gaza who were suffering a barbaric assault by Israel which had killed over 2000 people, most of them civilians, and over 400 of them children.
Numerous Jewish groups joined the march. They marched as Jews to show their opposition to the state of Israel, which for 66 years has endlessly stolen Palestinian land and imposed the most brutal occupation and siege on Palestinians. Jewish marchers saying “not in my name” included, the Jewish Bloc, The International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, Jews for Justice for Palestinians, and Jews Against the War on Gaza.
These Jewish marchers were part of a long and honorable tradition. Many prominent Jewish figures over the past century — from Albert Einstein to holocaust survivor Primo Levi — have opposed the idea of an ethnically exclusive Israeli state.
Sigmund Freud:
“I concede with sorrow that the baseless fanaticism of our people is in part to be blamed for the awakening of Arab distrust. I can raise no sympathy at all for the misdirected piety which transforms a piece of a Herodian wall into a national relic, thereby offending the feelings of the natives.”
Albert Einstein:
“The (Israeli) state idea is not according to my heart. I cannot understand why it is needed. It is connected with many difficulties and narrow-mindedness. I believe it is bad.”
Erich Fromm, social psychologist:
“The claim of the Jews to the Land of Israel cannot be a realistic political claim. If all nations would suddenly claim territories in which their forefathers lived two thousand years ago, this world would be a madhouse.”
Primo Levi, writer and Auschwitz survivor:
“Everyone has their Jews. For the Israelis, they are the Palestinians.”
Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the 1943 Warsaw uprising:
Edelman wrote a letter in support of the Palestine resistance, comparing them to ZOB, the Jewish fighters in Warsaw. He opened with, “Commanders of the Palestine military, paramilitary and partisan operations – to all the soldiers of the Palestine fighting organizations.”
Isaac Asimov, novelist:
“I find myself in the odd position of not being a Zionist … I think it is wrong for anyone to feel that there is anything special about any one heritage of whatever kind. It is delightful to have the human heritage exist in a thousand varieties, for it makes for greater interest, but as soon as one variety is thought to be more important than another, the groundwork is laid for destroying them all.”
Hannah Arendt, political scientist:
“The trouble is that Zionism has often thought and said that the evil of antisemitism was necessary for the good of the Jewish people. In the words of a well-known Zionist in a letter to me discussing the original Zionist argumentation: ‘The antisemites want to get rid of the Jews, the Jewish State wants to receive them, a perfect match.’ “
I.F. Stone, US journalist:
“Israel is creating a kind of moral schizophrenia in world Jewry. In the outside world, the welfare of Jewry depends on the maintenance of secular, non-racial, pluralistic societies. In Israel, Jewry finds itself defending a society in which mixed marriages cannot be legalized, in which the ideal is racial and exclusionist.”
Noam Chomsky:
“In the Occupied Territories, what Israel is doing is much worse than apartheid. To call it apartheid is a gift to Israel, at least if by “apartheid” you mean South African-style apartheid. What’s happening in the Occupied Territories is much worse.”
Gabriel Kolko, one of the leading historians of modern warfare:
“The large majority of Israelis are not in the least Jewish in the cultural sense, are scarcely socialist in any sense, and daily life and the way people live is no different in Israel than it is in Chicago or Amsterdam. There is simply no rational reason that justifies the state’s creation.”
Miriam Margolyes
Miriam Margolyes, actor:
“The black South Africans asked for our support and now it’s the Palestinians who are asking for our support. I hate what Israel is doing over there to the Palestinians. I think that boycotting is a very active and non-violent way of protesting.”
Uri Avnery, ex-Israeli army officer:
Avnery wrote that after an Israeli military victory, “What will be seared into the consciousness of the world will be the image of Israel as a blood-stained monster, ready at any moment to commit war crimes and not prepared to abide by any moral restraints.”
Henry Siegman
Henry Siegman, Rabbi and director of the U.S./Middle East Project:
“Israel has crossed the threshold from ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ to the only apartheid regime in the Western world.”
Richard Cohen, US columnist:
“The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake … the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.”
Roseanne Barr
Roseanne Barr, US comedian, writer, director, presidential candidate:
“I am sick of Israel and I am sick of Zionists. They are propped up by evangelical Christians who cannot wait for the Arabs to kill them so that their genocidal war god whom they misname Jesus can come back.”
Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun Magazine:
“If a Jew today goes into any synagogue in the U.S. or around the world and says, ‘I don’t believe in God or Torah and I don’t follow the commandments,’ most will still welcome you in and urge you to become involved. But say, ‘I don’t support the State of Israel,’ and you are likely to be labeled a ‘self-hating Jew’ or anti-Semite, scorned and dismissed.”
Richard Falk, the former UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories:
Falk has called Israeli policies in the Occupied Territories “a crime against humanity.” Falk also compared Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to the Nazi treatment of the Jews. Falk has said, “I think the Palestinians stand out as the most victimized people in the world.”
