Reuters reports: There’s no real freeze on settlers; Israel plans to add 10,000 in the next few months.
"This is neither a freeze nor a suspension," [Likud minister Benny Begin was quoted as saying]. "Construction in Judea and Samaria will continue in the next 10 months," he said, using the Biblical term for the West Bank.
And here is the great Gideon Levy on the lawless settlers, and on the lawless state. The piece seems to be pointing to the one-state solution. Another interpretation: The US might have stepped in to stop this, as it stopped Jim Crow; but it didn’t, and look what we have now, apartheid.
Gush Dan [Tel Aviv] remained indifferent to what was going on just a short trip to the east in Hevel Binyamin [on the West Bank]- the pictures of the settlers forcibly blocking the law enforcers, and the council heads tearing up the orders, didn’t rouse them from their deep, multi-year coma.
On June 11, 1963, Alabama governor George Wallace stood outside Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama and physically prevented two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, from entering. Wallace, who coined the phrase "Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever," was trying to block implementation of the law banning racial segregation in his state. Only the presence of the deputy U.S. attorney general and National Guard troops kept the governor from taking the law into his own hands. Wallace was compelled to step aside and let the black students into the class. The rest is history – the American history of upholding the law.
Around here, no attorney general or state prosecutor has thought to personally stand up to the rebellious council leaders, as in Alabama, and our national guard troops are still apologizing to the settlers. Anyone upset by their behavior ought to direct his anger at the state, not at them. The state that permitted, funded, secured, invested in, paved and built, turned a blind eye and kept silent in the face of all the violations of the law that accompanied this enterprise from day one…. We didn’t know that this is what grew there, in the land of lawlessness, which is an inseparable part of the State of Israel.
