In his speech to Congress just now, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that 650,000 Israelis live east of the Green Line, in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. This is an inflation of the usual figure of settlers, 500,000, and maybe he knows? 650,000 would represent about 10 percent of Israel's population.
Netanyahu's statement my be a claim, but it is also an indication of a belief that the Israeli right shares with one-staters-- it is impossible to remove Jewish settlements, and so this is one polity.
Maen Rashid Areikat, the PLO representative, said on CNN that Netanyahu had also understated the number of Palestinians living in Israel, from 1.3 million to 1 million. And so, by numbers, the Prime Minister performs a kind of cleansing.
i heard the 650,000 figure about 3 months ago from a settler politician. can’t remember which one.
Not impossible to remove the (I say) 550,000 or (he says) 650,000 settlers, just requires a lot of international effort, will power, stomach, kidney (“Sir Philip Sidney and others of his kidney”).
The point is, that Bibi FLAUNTS his law-breaking, says to the international community (including the USA, which is profoundly inattentive), “Israel has broken the I/L of belligerent occupation, you have undertaken to “ensure respect” “in all circumstances” for the Fourth Geneva Convention, which makes settlements illegal, and what are you going to do about it, now its got so enormously out of had? Nyaa, Nyaa.” (I quote him, in effect.)
It was also the first time I ever heard anyone characterize the large settlement enclaves in the central area of the West Bank as part of “Greater Tel Aviv.”
Really disturbing and depressing to see the grovelling reception of Netanyahu — and the multiple standing ovations for statements that contradicted established US policy. The immediate occupation we have to end is that of the US Congress by Israel and its Lobby. . .
So it is one state after all. Countdown for a another ethnic cleansing is ticking.
>> And so, by numbers, the Prime Minister performs a kind of cleansing.
I’m sure he’s only doing it because it’s “currently necessary”. :-)
That smug, satisfied look on his face isn’t helping me much.
Oh Bibi…
Is there a Shylock stereotype AIPAC doesn’t want to reinforce?
When I think of the character Shylock I think of the “Merchant of Venice” film starring Al Pacino. Al Pacino’s Shylock to me summed up the the current situation of the “Jewish State” and Zionism. (His Brooklyn accent didn’t work for me however.) Shylock has demanded a trial because ships that he lent money for sunk. The owner of those ships couldn’t pay back the loan. Apparently the ship owner signed an agreement to have his arm removed (is this proverbial pound of flesh?) in the case that he could not pay. Shylock gives a speech at this trial. If he had kept his speech to the humiliations that the Jews suffered in Venice (the ghetto, when they could come and go from the ghetto, etc.) and that this should stop he would have gained much. If he could have said he could not take another being’s arm and asked the court to find another more humane means of restitution, then he would have elevated the situation. Instead Shylock demands the arm in a demented expression. This is how I see the expression of just about any Israeli Prime Minister, of the Jewish State, of Zionism in the United States. And this with greater consequence than one man’s arm, one crazy banker, and one ghetto of Jews. The court is this Venice is stacked against Shylock making his behavior all the more stupid. In Israel’s case so far the court is stacked in its favor. So far Israel can demand more than the flesh of one arm from Palestinians. And in both cases (Shylock, Israel) are not insisting of a negotiated solution for just concerns. There is a demented view and program accepting that the world is hopelessly unjust and that Jews must get their pound of flesh where ever it can before it may be taken from us again. Surely a great many Jews to not agree with this. (Otherwise why Mondoweiss?) May the day come soon when Jews and everyone in the world realize that this not unusual human behavior of Shylock being among all peoples, becomes more conscious, more understood, and accepted as an example of “not” how to behave in the world.
He is as good as saying that the one state solution is coming. It may take a long time, there will be a lot of dispossession, death and destruction (mainly of Palestinians) but the demographics in the end will be overwhelming. The question to be settled is how long can Israel hold out as an apartheid state where millions of people have no rights?
“Netanyahu had also understated the number of Palestinians living in Israel, from 1.3 million to 1 million. And so, by numbers, the Prime Minister performs a kind of cleansing.”
It’s no different to enron’s or Lehman Bros. off balance sheet accounting. The numbers never lie in the end.
There is a strategy in this. When the threat looms of application of international law or of bad press or of Israel looking bad, then understate the numbers (as The New York Times, NPR, CNN, etc., routinely do). When appealing to “facts on the ground” as a ‘justification’ for theft of Palestinian land, then overstate the numbers.
If the war criminal Netanyahu is going to systematically overstate the numbers (or maybe he is being accurate), then it must be part of a strategy of pseudo-justification for permanent land seizures.
The concomitant understatement of the number of Palestinians in Israel fits with this. The rhetorical ethnic cleansing will proceed the real ethnic cleansing.
One question: Now that the lead war criminal has granted permission to the Americans, will The Times and NPR and their fellow pathological liars follow suit and use the New Numbers?
It was possible to move 750,000 Palestinians. Why not 650,000 settlers?
(And do they need to be moved?)
RE: “Netanyahu said that 650,000 [as opposed to 500,000] Israelis live east of the Green Line..[and]..Areikat…said…Netanyahu had also understated the number of Palestinians living in Israel, from 1.3 million to 1 million.” – Weiss
MY COMMENT: Perhaps this is an example of what therapists refer to as “magical thinking”.
P.S. VERY MAGICAL: Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et La Bête), 1946, NR, 93 minutes (Streaming until 5/26/11)
Lost in the woods, a hapless merchant is captured and held prisoner in the castle of a beastlike man (Jean Marais), who vows to kill the merchant unless he’s replaced by one of his daughters. The lovely Belle (Josette Day) gives herself up to save her father. But before long, she finds the beauty hiding inside her grotesque captor in this lyrical masterpiece, the most celebrated film of the French director and poet Jean Cocteau.
Director: Jean Cocteau
Language: French (ENGLISH SUBTITLES)
This movie is: Cerebral, Dark, Imaginative, Romantic Availability: Streaming and DVD (Streaming until 5/26/11)
NETFLIX LISTING – link to movies.netflix.com
YouTube (9 parts) – link to youtube.com
what utter scabrous cowards the mainstream media touts are,I have not read or heard anyone ask the obvious questions-it’s ok for people interested in justice for the Palestinians to know what Netanyahu means by “profound demographic changes” but how about informing the great mass of slightly interested and badly misinformed people that ALL 650,000-lets use his figure-colonists in their over 130 illegal colonies have no right to be there and that it is a war crime and a crime against humanity.Another valid question is: having been given more than half of Palestine stolen 23% more in 1948 and illegally occupying the rest for 44 years what DO you think the native population is entitled to?
I can sort of answer that Robert767 ~ or rather Wikileaks US Embassy Cables lets me tell you what Netanyahu thinks Palestinians are entitled to, as he describes it in April 2009. This is more qualitative than quantitative, but here goes:
Netanyahu said his government is reviewing Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians. There is a consensus in the government and among 80% of the Israeli public that the Palestinians should be able to govern themselves. The only limits on Palestinian sovereignty would be elements that affect Israel’s security. A Palestinian state must be demilitarized, without control over its air space and electro-magnetic field, and without the power to enter into treaties or control its borders. Netanyahu concluded that he and opposition leader Tzipi Livni “only disagree about the name,” i.e. the two-state solution.
Hey do those conditions sound familiar? Limited sovereignty, Israel control of airspace and borders. Yes, Netanyahu’s fantasy Palestinian state would see Israel imposing the same control it currently exercises over Gaza, over the West Bank also. And this is what Palestinians are supposed to return to negotiations for???
Netanyahu doesn’t mention siege conditions but with Israel controlling the borders and airspace of the Palestinian “state” Israel can impose whatever conditions it likes in the name of security, just like it does now in Gaza.