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Highlights
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From the advent of Zionist colonization of historic Palestine, the movement’s goals have been maximizing the Jewish population, and its control of land, in the region. Following the 1947 United Nations recommendation for partition, Zionist colonists took up arms to expel hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes and came to occupy the majority of historic Palestine. Zionists begrudgingly accepted partition, recognizing it as an inadequate but first step toward achieving their long-term mission. At the time, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, argued that “after the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.” With the 1967 Six-Day War, the Israeli government followed through on this promise and came to occupy Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank as well as the Sinai in Egypt. Now controlling both the Jewish-settled and Arab lands between the river and the sea, fanatic Zionists began to take their mission into their own hands, expanding into the occupied lands with illegal settlements and displacing the Palestinians who lived there. Today, over seven hundred thousand Jewish settlers live in illegal settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. This settler movement has provided the shock troops and the most militant vanguard of the Zionist project. The settlers subscribe to a blood-and-soil ideology that confers on them a racial or biblical entitlement to all land in historic Palestine, and they use militia violence and the power of the Israeli state to displace Palestinians. The Israeli government builds roads and infrastructure connecting the settlements to Israel (barring their use by Palestinians), upholds and carries out evictions of Palestinians to be replaced by Jewish settlers, and bulldozes entire homes. Over the past few years, the settler movement and Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have accelerated their attacks on Palestinian life. The current far-right government, which includes leaders of the settler movement, has repealed laws mandating the demolition of some existing settlements and barring the construction of new ones. And Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has given his far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich full authority to oversee the expansion and consolidation of settlements in the West Bank, and to assert Israeli authority over its occupied Palestinian population. As homes are demolished and Palestinians evicted, the IDF is there with guns. As settlers carry out pogroms, the IDF is often right by their side. And when Palestinians resist their violent occupation, they’re met with military raids that injure and murder civilians. The extreme ethnonationalism at the core of the settler project makes it all the more obscene that US-based organizations fund it — and that the US public is actively subsidizing these groups through their nonprofit status.
✏️ If ever I need a quick overview of the Palestine Israel history, this isn’t too bad. 🔗 View Highlight