Expansionism, Settlements and Religious Myths:

Ben-Gurion said, “We have set up a dynamic state, bent upon creation and reform, building and expansion.” Expansionism is at the heart of an apartheid state, which Israel has practiced since day one. In order to justify its aggression and annexation, like South Africa, Israel also draws motivation from the Bible. The settler state of Israel is depicted as a fulfillment of God’s promise to the Jewish people (Genesis 15:18). Forgotten there is the mere fact that the Ashkenazi Jews (the so-called thirteenth tribe) who form a majority of world Jewry today and govern the state of Israel have no blood connection with the “seed” of Abraham, while Arabs – the children of Ishmael – are a better claimant to that promise.

As an expansionist entity, Israel has never, in its past 60 years, defined its border. It was as if the Zionist leaders were applying the Biblical verse to the letter: “Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, that I have given unto you, as I said unto Moses.” (Joshua 1:3) As has been duly recognized by experts like Roger Garaudy, this is the conception of Eretz (Greater) Israel, the permanent objective of political Zionism. Moshe Dayan declared in July 1968, “During the last hundred years our people have been in a process of building up the country and the nation, of expansion, of getting additional Jews and additional settlements in order to expand the borders here. Let no Jew say that the process has ended. Let no Jew say that are near the end of the road.” In 1972, Golda Meir, replied to a question on territorial needs for Israel’s security, “There must be changes in the border. We want changes in borders, on all our borders, for security’s sake.”

This notion of Israeli expansionism (Eretz Israel) has never left the Zionist leaders – from Ben-Gurion to today’s Netanyahu. Gen. (Reserve) Shlomo Gazit who was the President of the Ben-Gurion University explained this concept in 1982, “The first objective is to ensure that historic Eretz Israel is not partitioned again … The second objective is to ensure that historic Eretz Israel will remain entirely under Jewish control and, moreover, that it will remain a basically Jewish state. The third objective is a full solution to the problem of Arabs of historic Eretz Israel … The solution for them must be found outside historic Eretz Israel.” Nor should we be surprised to hear the same solution repeated some 27 years later from the same university campus by Netanyahu in his June 14, 2009 speech.

Settlements and outposts are means to solidify expansion. In 1948 there were 2,810 Jews that lived in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza. After annexation of these territories, including the Golan Heights in 1967, the Jewish population grew to 10,608 in 1972. By 1993, Israel had constructed more than 145 settlements where some 196,000 Jews were settled by confiscating Arab land. Half of the settlers lived in ten settlements around EastJerusalem. By the end of the year 2000, Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza numbered 225,000. More than 2,500 houses and 52 settlement outposts were constructed just between September 2000 and January 2003. In January 2009, Israeli political activist group Peace Now stated that settlement construction rose by 60 percent from 2007 to 2008. According to Knesset Member Yaakov Katz, head of the National Union party, currently, there are some 650,000 settlers in the Occupied Territories of which some 300,000 live around East Jerusalem. As noted by the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din, a classified Israeli Government database, recorded that many West Bank Israeli settlements were built on land privately owned by Palestinian citizens without compensation. Through the enactment of the 1950 Absentee Property Law, Israel has given a legal basis for continued expropriation of land in East Jerusalem (annexed in 1967) owned by Palestinians who live elsewhere (usually in the West Bank) without compensation. The Palestinians owners cannot "transfer, sell or lease any real estate property".

As a settler state, situated in a semi-arid area, Israel has built most of its settlements over Palestinian aquifers so that it can have full control of its consumption for economic development, and meeting water needs of the settler Jews. After the occupation of the Golan Heights, West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip in 1967, Israel began taking control of all water resources. According to Palestinian researcher Abu Kishek, as noted in the IMEMC news report (January 8, 2007), Israel controls 80 percent of Palestinian water resources threatening Arab water security. Since 1949, water has assumed top priority for Israel, which worked to gain control of the groundwater and surface water in the Jordan River basin, threatening the most fertile agricultural area. Israel has dug 500 water devices along the boundary of the West Bank, while along the northern edge of the Gaza Strip Israeli pumps operate 18 hours per day.

The Israeli government denies permits to Palestinians to dig new wells on their own land while inside Israeli settlements water drilling continues. The Israeli aim is to drive the Palestinians out of their territory, so water is used as an effective weapon of war against indigenous Palestinians. Once a well is dry and with no new permits to drill a new one, they are left with no option but to move away.

Settlements are built on less than three percent of the area of the WestBank. However, due to the extensive network of settler roads and restrictions on Palestinians accessing their own land, Israeli settlements dominate more than 40 percent of the West Bank. As former President Carter has observed from his trips to Israel, there is a zone with a radius of about four hundred meters around each settlement within which Palestinians cannot enter. In addition, there are other large areas that would have been taken or earmarked to be used exclusively by Israel, roadways that connect the settlements to one another and to Jerusalem, and “life arteries” that provide the settlers with water, sewage, electricity, and communications. These range in width from 500 to 4000 meters, and Palestinians cannot use or cross many of these connecting links. This honeycomb of settlements and their interconnecting conduits effectively divide the West Bank into at least two noncontiguous areas and multiply fragments, often uninhabitable or even unreachable, and control of the Jordan River valley denies Palestinians any direct access eastward into Jordan. About 100 military checkpoints completely surround the OccupiedPalestinian Territories and block routes going into or between Palestinian communities, combined with an uncountable number of other roads that are permanently closed with larger concrete cubes or mounds of earth and rocks.

These settlements are, in essence, responsible for bantustanization of the Palestinian territories. President Carter observed, “There has been a determined and remarkably effective effort to isolate settlers from Palestinians, so that a Jewish family can commute from Jerusalem to their highly subsidized home deep in the West Bank on roads from which others are excluded, without ever coming in contact with any facet of Arab life.” According to Dr. Farsakh, “By institutionalizing the societal separation and territorial integration that Israel created between 1967 and 1993, the Oslo process has prepared for the bantustanization of the WBGS (West Bank and Gaza Strip), transforming the Palestinian territories into fragmented population reserves, neither sustainable economically nor sovereign politically.”

The UN Security Council Resolution 465, unanimously adopted in 1980, made it clear that “Israel’s policy and practices of settling parts of its population and new immigrants” in the Occupied Territories constitutes “a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East”. The Security Council called upon Israel to “dismantle the existing settlements and in particular to cease, on an urgent basis, the establishment, construction or planning of settlements in the Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem”. The World Court and European Union have deemed both the official settlements and the outposts to be illegal under international laws, including the Geneva Conventions, which set out the basis for international humanitarian law. In September 2006, Olmert authorized construction bids for another 690 homes in the occupied West Bank. A total of 9,000 further housing units have been approved in East Jerusalem, and approximately 2,600 new housing units are being built east of the original Green Line, comprising 55% of all settlement construction activity. The current government of Netanyahu is committed to building more settlements.

As to the reality of settlements in the West Bank, former President Carter observes, “It is obvious that the Palestinians will be left with no territory to establish a viable state, but completely enclosed within the barrier and the occupied Jordan River valley. The Palestinians will have a future impossible for them or any responsible portion of the international community to accept, and as Israel’s permanent status will be increasingly troubled and uncertain as deprived people fight oppression and the relative number of Jewish citizens decreases demographically (compared to Arabs) both within Israel and Palestine.”

(To be continued ...)