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.
