Societies get the leaders they deserve, right? Here is an astoundingly slick ad by Naftali Bennett, the rising radical-right star of Israel’s Jewish Home party, laying out his “stability initiative” to annex most of the West Bank, and thereby “do what Zionism has always done”– take land with as few non-Jews as possible on it.
Notice that Bennett is afraid of the BDS movement (at 1:30), which is painting the West Bank as an apartheid situation, and repeatedly describes Palestinians as a “demographic” threat to the Jewish state. The admission that Israel sucks up Palestinian water is at :35 or so:
Secondly water reserves in Judea and Samaria provide 50 % of the drinking water in Israel
Is this stability– to steal people’s land and water and then fence them off? Is it right?
Haaretz has landed on Bennett’s misrepresentation of Palestinian numbers in Area C. Bennett says that 48,000 Palestinians live there so that when the area is annexed, these non-Jewish citizens will make up only a fraction of the Israeli population, but Haaretz says it’s far more (excuse me while I take a bath).
To stave off accusations of apartheid, Bennett proposes giving Israeli citizenship to nearly 50,000 Palestinians living in the annexed territories. That would supposedly expand Israel’s borders at a negligible demographic cost.
But is Bennett correct in saying that only 50,000 Arabs live in Area C?… In fact, a significant portion of Bennett’s plan, as outlined in “The Israel Stability Initiative: A Practical Program for Managing the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” is based on a table that was copied – in its entirety – from the Bimkom report, titled “The Prohibited Zone.”
But the name that Bennett applies to this table does not reflect the data it contains. The table includes only those Palestinian villages whose entire built-up area falls inside Area C. But there are some 200 villages that are partly in Area C and partly in Areas A or B of the West Bank. When the Oslo Accords were signed, the Palestinian cities of the West Bank were within Area B, but since then some of them have expanded into Area C. Including the population in these areas would add around 100,000 people to the 47,360 cited in Bennett’s table.
“But is Bennett correct in saying that only 50,000 Arabs live in Area C?… ”
It depends how many are ethnically cleansed, doesn’t it ?
Water in Palestine
Facts.
West Bank Water Usage
Of the water available from West Bank aquifers, Israel uses 73%, West Bank Palestinians use 17%, and illegal Jewish settlers use 10%.
While 10-14% of Palestine’s GDP is agricultural, 90% of them must rely on rain-fed farming methods. Israel’s agriculture is only 3% of their GDP, but Israel irrigates more than 50% of its land.
Three million West Bank Palestinians use only 250 million cubic meters per year (83 cubic meters per Palestinian per year) while six million Israelis enjoy the use of 1,954 million cubic meters (333 cubic meters per Israeli per year), which means that each Israeli consumes as much water as four Palestinians.
Israeli settlers are allocated 1,450 cubic meters of water per person per year.
Israel consumes the vast majority of the water from the Jordan River despite only 3% of the river falling within its pre-1967 borders. Israel now diverts one quarter of its total water consumption through its National Water Carrier from the Jordan River, whereas Palestinians have no access to it whatsoever due to Israeli closures.
International Law
Under international law it is illegal for Israel to expropriate the water of the Occupied Palestinian Territories for use by its own citizens, and doubly illegal to expropriate it for use by illegal Israeli settlers [2].
Also under international law, Israel owes Palestinians reparations for past and continuing use of water resources. This should include interest due to loss of earnings from farming.
Israeli Actions
Israel does not allow new wells to be drilled by Palestinians and has confiscated many wells for Israeli use. Israel sets quotas on how much water can be drawn by Palestinians from existing wells.
Israeli settlers have no restrictions on water use.
When supplies of water are low in the summer months, the Israeli water company Mekorot closes the valves which supply Palestinian towns and villages so as not to affect Israeli supplies. This means that illegal Israeli settlers can have their swimming pools topped up and lawns watered while Palestinians living next to them, on whose land the settlements are situated, do not have enough water for drinking and cooking.
Israel often sells the water it steals from the West Bank back to the Palestinians at inflated prices.
During the war of 1967, 140 Palestinian wells in the Jordan Valley were destroyed to divert water through Israel’s National Water Carrier. Palestinians were allowed to dig only 13 wells between 1967 and 1996, less than the number of wells which dried up during the same period due to Israel’s refusal to deepen or rehabilitate existing wells.
The Gaza strip relies predominately on wells that are being increasingly infiltrated by salty sea water because Israel is over-pumping the groundwater. UN scientists estimate that Gaza will have no drinkable water within fifteen years.
* In addition illegal settlers control all 56 natural water springs in the WB.
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/cur_sit/water.html
Water Genocide
http://untreaty.un.org/cod/icc/statute/romefra.htm
Article 6
Genocide
For the purpose of this Statute, “genocide” means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Article 7
Crimes against humanity
1. For the purpose of this Statute, “crime against humanity” means any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack:
(k) Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.
2. For the purpose of paragraph 1:
(b) “Extermination” includes the intentional infliction of *conditions of life*, inter alia the deprivation of access to food and medicine, calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population;
Someone give me a good reason why we should not apply the same cure to Israel we applied to the Nazis.
If Palestinians are a demographic threat to Israel, are Jews a demographic threat to the United States and Europe?
Which groups around the world get to play the ethnic nationalist and “demographic threat” game, according to Jewish Israelis and Jewish pro-Israel activists — Jews only?
Haven’t Jewish nationalists (Zionists) lost the intellectual and moral authority to object to the expression of ethnic nationalism by all other ethnic groups? Have they thought through the full implications of their politics?
How are David Duke, Kevin MacDonald and Pat Buchanan any more objectionable than Benjamin Netanyahu, Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennett?
What are the objections, if any, to this line of argument?
White nationalists in Europe have done the political math: they see in Zionism a superb opportunity to reopen the door to the expression of white nationalism in Europe — and they have already found quite a few Jewish Zionist allies who would be quite happy to force all European Jews to move to Eretz Yisrael.
Finally, we know the difference between Zionists and liberal Zionists.
Roger Cohen in the NYT wants no Right of Return for Israel, and Bennett denies it for the whole West Bank too. https://mondoweiss.mystagingwebsite.com/2013/01/liberal-columnist-misrepresents.html
“Here is an astoundingly slick ad by Naftali Bennett, the rising radical-right star of Israel’s Jewish Home party, laying out his ‘stability initiative’ to annex most of the West Bank, and thereby ‘do what Zionism has always done’– take land with as few non-Jews as possible on it.”
Absolutely inhuman these people are. Absolutely despicable and without any redeeming feature.