Israel driving Palestinians out of West Bank

Israel is driving a large number of Palestinian people out of the West Bank in order to grab land and other resources.
The comments come as Israeli forces have fired tear gas and rubber bullets at Palestinian demonstrators protesting against settler violence in the West Bank city of Ramallah. The attack ignited as about 500 Palestinian villagers tried to march from the West Bank village of Deir Jarir toward a nearby Jewish settlement outpost on Friday. Violence by extremist settlers has been on the rise over the years. Over 400 attacks were reported in 2011 compared to about 300 in the year before.

An interview with Ralph Schoenman, a political commentator and the author of Hidden History of Zionism from Berkeley, California to further discuss the issue.

Q: Mr. Schoenman why is it despite years of negotiations we still don’t see any breakthrough in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict?

Schoenman: Because the Zionist state intends to expel the population and to settle every piece of Palestinian land and that’s been the consistent policy. We have been having these discussions since 1967, there are over a half million settlers there. This is not a new process, it is a continuing process and we should point out to you and to our listeners that, as Reuters emphasized, the village has been under consistent attack from the settlers.

The settlers on a regular basis terrorize the Palestinian’s population in villages throughout the West Bank to compel their removal, to drive them out.

Let’s put this in its context. On March 11, Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a very important front page article by Aluf Benn (the editor-in-chief for Haaretz Newspaper): Israel going for one million Jews in the West Bank. And the subheading is ‘Netanyahu has successfully leveraged his position to create a rightwing government outwardly aggressive and inwardly nationalistic’.

What is the actual project that Netanyahu with American’s support, all rhetoric not withstanding, precedes?

This is how the count of how Haaretz reports the situation; the game has ended and real life will begin, the third Netanyahu government has one clear goal; enlarging the settlements and achieving division; a one million Jewish settlers in Judean Somalia.

This magic number will thwart the division of land, prevents once and for all the establishment of even a rump Palestinian state.

The defense, housing and construction ministries that are relevant to these issues have been given to [Israeli Minister of Defense] Moshe Yaalon and to former [Israeli Prime Minister] Ariel [Sharon]. They won’t be forming these positions in order to freeze settlement construction, but rather to implement a levy report, which is going to expand it up to one million people.

Netanyahu has used the term ‘math’ to explain the political agenda that he has in mind.

This article continues, the key task is to buy quiet on the Palestinian issue to allow the expansions at the small price of international condemnation.

There’s no amendment and Obama is completely complicit in this, so let’s be very clear.

It is a relentless process of driving the Palestinian people out of the West Bank and their land, the inexorable logic of the Zionist state and its approach to the Palestinian population.

Q: How much does the Israeli public believe in what the Israeli officials say about the Palestinians and how the Israeli administration deals with them?

Schoenman: Well I think as you have seen from demonstrations in support of Palestinian hunger strikers and sympathy with Palestinian prisoners who are all over the West Bank, there is considerable response on the part of the Israeli public, who for many years now have been fed up with the nonstop conflict and being basically instruments of a regime that pits the Israeli settler population against the fundamental aspirations of millions of people in the region.

There is no other outcome, but permanent war, permanent conflict and propertization of the mass Israeli settler population itself, in order to sustain this military and imperial agenda of which the United States is the primary funder, armor and supporter.