Israeli settlers claim they will not budge, no matter what’s decided in Annapolis

Saturday November 24, 2007 05:30 by Saed Bannoura - IMEMC News

"We know the Arabs say this is their land, but nobody can stop the will of God. We are growing and growing and all the other nations are going out”, roared the Mayor of Beit El settlement, near Ramallah.  And Mayor Moshe Rosenbom, who was one of sixteen families that seized the land to create Beit El on Palestinian land sixteen years ago, is not alone in his fervor.

Beit El outpost being constructed in August 2003

Dani Dayan, head of the Yesha Council, which speaks for the settlers, said he is "optimistic" that the talks will fail.  "The experiment of trying to create a Palestinian state was already tried in the Gaza territory two years ago. It became a de facto Arab state and we all know what happened with that." 

Dayan was referring to the fact that the Islamic movement Hamas now controls the inside of Gaza – but his statement failed to acknowledge that Israeli forces still occupy Gaza, and the territory is not so much a state as it is an open-air prison.  Israel controls all access to Gaza, by land, sea and air.  Israeli forces destroyed the airport, and last year bombed Gaza’s power plants, so they control the electricity flow to Gaza as well.  There is a stranglehold on the Gaza economy, as Israel controls all imports and exports, and have prevented almost all importing and exporting since Hamas won elections last year.  Israeli forces routinely invade Gaza, and have killed over 300 Palestinians these since last year.

Dayan and Rosenbum hold attitudes typical of the 500,000 Israeli settlers – most of whom are immigrants – that live on militarily-seized Palestinian land in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

They fear that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will give up some of the 300 settlements built illegally on Palestinian land, in exchange for a peace deal with the Palestinians during a peace talk in Annapolis next week.

Judy Simon, another settler living in Beit El settlement, after moving there from Chicago in the 1990s, said that living there "feels like you are walking inside the Bible. We faithfully follow God's vow here. Annapolis cannot succeed because this is Jewish land."

Ironically, Beit El is known to Palestinians in the West Bank as the final stop for all their documents: passports, driving licenses, birth certificates, marriage certificates.  Beit El is the site of a major Israeli military installation, and each of the military bases in the different parts of the West Bank report to Beit El – a torturously slow and often impossible process for the processing of documents.

But to Dayan and other Israeli settlers, it is God’s promised land to them.  This gives the settlers a tremendous sense of entitlement, and the stranglehold their presence there places on every aspect of Palestinian life could not matter less to them.

“The only viable solution is to leave security fully in the hands of the Israelis from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River.   Jews have a historical and religious right to be here," said Dayan. "This is the heart of the Jewish homeland ... To uproot Jews from here would break the backbone of Jewish society and end the country's reason for being."  Ironically, it is the 500,000 Jews who have moved in to Beit El and other settlements within the last 40 years who have uprooted close to a million Palestinians who have lived on the land continuously for hundreds, and even thousands of years in some cases.  Those Palestinians are now refugees, joining the refugees who were forced out of what is now Israel when the state was created in 1948, in overcrowded, restless refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza.

ramallah | israeli settlement | news report saed at imemc dot org