Washington & Tel Aviv use talks to cover land grab

By Gene Clancy

Oct 24, 2010

The message was as grim and clear as a KKK cross burning. “Mosques, we burn,” said a warning scribbled at the door of the smoke-smudged mosque of Beit Fajjar, south of Bethlehem in Palestine’s West Bank.

The green-carpeted floor of the mosque was burned to a black crust in a dozen places where it had been doused with kerosene and set alight in the middle of the night on Oct. 4. The fire scorched a dozen copies of the Quran.

A Zionist “Star of David” symbol and the words “Price Tag” were found scrawled over the mosque’s doorway. Militant Israeli settlers have coined the term to warn of the “cost” of any attempt to halt their building of new settlements on Palestinian land. (Reuters, Oct. 2)

Beit Fajjar is a dusty village of stone-cutting mills on a dead-end road outside the sprawling Jewish settlement of Gush Etzion, which is closed to Palestinians.

Palestinians said that Israeli settlers were behind the attack, and the Israeli government did not deny it. The Israeli government maintains the roadblocks, an apartheid wall and separate roads to allegedly protect Jews throughout the West Bank, and in general it backs the settlers in every way.

“The settlers’ message is: Terrorize the Palestinian people,” said Mohammad Hussein, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who came to inspect the damage and talk to the locals. “Crimes like these do not terrorize the Palestinian people. On the contrary, such attacks will only embolden the Palestinian people and increase our determination to achieve all of our rights,” he told Reuters.

On Sept. 26, the Israeli government ended its temporary moratorium on new settlements on Palestine’s West Bank. On Oct. 12, despite U.S. pressure, the Palestinian Authority said that it could not continue peace talks with Israel unless the Israelis stopped their illegal policy of building new settlements.

Both the U.S. and Israel have attempted to downplay if not dismiss entirely the impact of settlement construction and the 43-year occupation of the Palestinian territories, but a brief glance at a map of the West Bank, interlaced with settlements, reveals the opposite..

Today, Israel has more than 130 settlements and 100 “outposts” in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem with a population of more than a half million — in total violation of international law. These heavily fortified settlements are supported by a Jewish-only road network, checkpoints, military bases and a massive 480-mile-long barrier that segments and isolates the West Bank’s major Palestinian population centers from each other and from Palestinian East Jerusalem.

According to an Israel B’Tselem Human Rights Organization report this year, the Israeli settlers control 42 percent of the West Bank; other estimates are as high as 59 percent. Under the terms of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, negotiations to decide the fate of the settlers were to conclude after five years. Today, 17 years after the Oslo process began, the endless negotiations and settlement construction continue.

The Israeli organization Peace Now has determined that more than 39 percent of the settlements are built on private Palestinian property, which is even a violation of Israeli law. It is obvious that the so-called “peace process” is being used as a cover while the Israeli regime encourages the systematic theft of Palestinian land.

Underlying these figures is the human toll of the settlements and the settlers on Palestinians. The Zionist settlers have frequently damaged and uprooted Palestinian olive groves and have harassed and attacked Palestinian farmers, shepherds and schoolchildren.

In September, an Israeli settler shot and killed an unarmed Palestinian man in the Jerusalem suburb of Issawiya. In the ensuing protests, Israeli police fired tear gas, which suffocated an 18-month-old Palestinian child.

Although these incidents are shocking, they are not isolated. As B’Tselem has documented, settler attacks against Palestinians are not only routine, but are escalating. These acts usually go unpunished by the Israeli authorities, which further emboldens the settlers and encourages further acts of violence.

This was shown by settlers’ celebrations marking the end of the settlement-building “freeze” and by their increasingly brazen attacks on Palestinian property to prevent any Israeli concessions in the “peace” talks or state attempts to curtail their activities. The Zionist settlers act as if they are above all laws, and neither the U.S. nor Israel has given them reason to believe otherwise. In fact, the Israeli government does not just “allow” the settlers to take Palestinian land; it actively finances them with government-backed mortgages.

Six years ago, the International Court of Justice in The Hague reaffirmed that Israel’s wall in the West Bank and supporting infrastructure, including the settlements, were in violation of international law. In spite of its best efforts to gloss over this reality, Israel’s settlement policy is a reminder that the Zionists’ true goal is not peace, but expansionism and conquest.

Some establishment media analysts have concluded that the latest round of peace talks is bound to fail, and that this is because “the United States [has] lost any leverage with Israel and any chance of brokering a peace accord.” (Huffington Post, Oct. 15)

In reality, the U.S. has plenty of “leverage.” The U.S. government gives Israel billions of dollars in military and economic aid each year. Washington is often the sole defender of horrific Israeli actions and policies and threatens military intervention against any country or organization that resists Israeli expansion.

If the U.S. government were truly serious about stopping Israeli expansionism and attacks on Palestinians and recognition of their rights, administration officials would withhold the massive allocations of financial and military support. The real question is not why the U.S. can’t control Israel, but rather why both countries continue to pursue the causes of imperialism and expansionism in the Middle East in open defiance of world opinion.