The pro-settler Israel National News reports: In yet another success for Samaria’s advocacy initiatives, a group of European parliamentarians agreed to take a 36-hour trip to the area this week. The European Union generally views Samaria (Shomron) [the Israeli occupied West Bank] as Arab land and condemns Israeli construction in the area.
The parliamentarians came as guests of Samaria Regional Council head Gershon Mesika.
They began their tour with a trip to the Barkan industrial zone. Many were surprised to see that Israeli Jews and Palestinian Authority Arabs were employed side-by-side in the factories.
Regional Council staff noted that boycotts of Israeli businesses in Judea and Samaria, including a threatened EU boycott, would primarily hurt industrial zones such as Barkan which provide a major source of employment for PA residents.
The tour then continued to a nearby lookout point from which the visitors could see the Tel Aviv region and Israel’s coastline. “We are in the heart of the land of the Bible and the center of Jewish heritage,” said Yossi Dagan. “From here we can see the ‘narrow waist’ of the State of Israel. Tel Aviv, the coastline and the Ben Gurion Airport are below us.”
“The State of Israel is the dam protecting Europe from fundamentalist Islam,” he added. “As you see with your own eyes, without Samaria the State of Israel is unlikely to survive.”
High point: “As you see with your own eyes, without Samaria the State of Israel is unlikely to survive.” All my efforts are to persuade EU and the still (but less) reluctant USA to see to it that FOR THE DURATION OF THE OCCUPATION there will be no settlers, no settlements (housing, factories, universities, all), qand no walls in the occupied territories. THEY ARE ILLEGAL AND SHOULD BE REMOVED.
As to Israel surviving, it has had 65 years to make peace and has never wanted to. It’s survival is on its own head, not the Arabs’.
I recommend that Israelis take VERY SERIOUSLY their own claim to insist on living within Palestine in a country called Israel which will be and continue to be preponderantly Jewish in population. The only way to do that without contuing to violate international law and human rights norms is for the state to retract onto a much smaller territory, maybe 5 times the size of New York CIty, so that the Palestinian right of return (PRoR) when exercised will not unduly multi-ethnicize its population. This will also allow the Palestinians a much more comfortable sized space for their new (and smaller when vieewed from 1945) Palestine.
If Israel wants to be a ghetto with high proportion of Jews, it must be small or else it must forever be without peace. So far, it has made the second choice as if permanently. the USA is beginning tio “get it” and not to like it.
Wonderful Pabelmont.
More power to your arm, and roll on the day, when the world wakes up and accepts that blatant zio-doublethink does not justify the existence of any state/society anywhere, which depends on racially motivated murder and dispossesion, in order to exist.
With such a zealously “protective” friend as Israel, Europe doesn’t need enemies.
Interesting how things change…
1920 – a homeland respecting the rights of the people already there (400,000 with 20,000 Jews)
1945 – a Socialist kibbutzim paradise
1960 – a land without people for a people without land (G. Meir) renaming all the old Palestinian places…
…and so on…including Israeli encouragement of Hamas to divide Palestinians politically.
Now…a bastion against Salafism.
I sleep more soundly at night knowing that our US Congress swears loyalty, even above the Constitution, to support these stalwarts who hold back the tide.
We need to support expansion into Judea and Samaria and ignore the complaints of the malingerers. Israel is not an apartheid, bigoted state. They are our friends. We just have to realize it.