Israel has approved some 4,000 new settlement units as part of a massive settlement project spanning across occupied East Jerusalem and into West Jerusalem, Israeli media reported.
Jerusalem’s planning and construction committee approved the project earlier this week, paving the way for 4,416 housing new units in the city.
According to local reports, units will be built in the East Jerusalem neighborhoods of Shuafat and Beit Hanina, 464 in the Gilo settlement which is built on the lands of the Beit Jala town in Bethlehem, and 480 units in the West Jerusalem neighborhoods of Kiryat Yuval and Kiryat Menachem.
“This is happy news for me and young couples in the city of Jerusalem,” Jerusalem’s mayor Moshe Lion said.
“We will increase housing units and bring back the youth to their home. This is the beginning, and soon Jerusalem’s sky will be filled with cranes.”
The settlement project will also reportedly see the expansion of the occupied West Bank industrial zone of Atarot, located in the central district of Ramallah.
The news comes just two weeks after reports that dozens of Israeli ministers and senior lawmakers from Netanyahu’s Likud and other right-wing parties signed a petition to promote a settlement plan that would settle 2 million Jews in the occupied West Bank.
According to the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS), among the people who signed the declaration were Israel’s ministers for justice, education, transportation, tourism, environmental protection and Jerusalem affairs, public security, culture, communications, immigration, and social equality.
The movement’s declaration reads: “I hereby commit to be loyal to the land of Israel, not to cede one inch of our inheritance from our forefathers. I hereby commit to act to realize the settlement plan for the settlement of 2 million Jews in Judea and Samaria…as well as to encourage and lead the redemption of all the lands throughout Judea and Samaria. I commit to act to cancel the declaration of two states for two peoples and replace it with the stately declaration: ‘The land of Israel: One country for one people.’ ”
JNS quoted the so-called Nahala movement in a statement, saying the signing of the petition ahead of the elections “constitutes an ideological and ethical loyalty test for the various contenders.”
There are an estimated 622,000 Israeli settlers living in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem in settlements that are considered illegal under international law.
Many of the settlements are built on privately owned Palestinian lands, with investigations finding that nearly all West Bank land deals for the settlements are forged.
Israeli settlers often move to the occupied territory for political and religious reasons, with many regarding themselves as inhabiting a land that is rightfully theirs — and staking their claim to that land through violence against Palestinians and their property.
Apart from the blatant illegality of it all, one question springs to mind: Where are these ‘2 million Jews’ going to come from? That’s nearly a third of the entire Jewish population of Israel, and about 4 times the number of Jews who live in the ‘settlements’. Are they anticipating mass immigration or something equally daft?
When can we expect to see the Borders of this ,”‘The land of Israel: One country for one people.’ ””.
And what are they going to do about those who are not part of the “One People”.
Btw , who is going to build all these illegal squats.
Are they going to allow Hordes of Arab Terrorists to enter Israel and drive all the Jews into the sea.Or alternatively bring in workers from the Phillipines/Turkey or Africa who will be witnesses to the crimes that occur on an hourly basis.
Israel is becoming more of a cluster f–k by the minute.
Tic tic.
Zionism is out of control
The Jewish community always insisted it could manage
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/24/alain-finkielkraut-winds-of-antisemitism-in-europe-gilets-jaune
It is undeniable, however, that over the past three months the movement has grown to take in wider grievances and, hardened by ultra-left and extreme-right agitators, now rails against the “elite”, the powerful, bankers and the media often with conspiracy theories that echo the antisemitic tropes about a powerful global Jewish cabal.
Finkielkraut, who has previously expressed support for the protests, does not believe that he was attacked by “ordinary” gilets jaunes, but he has not been reassured by the political response.
“The future looks dark for two reasons,” he said. “Immigration continues to spread and the more it does, the more assimilation becomes difficult. Plus the school system has collapsed in France and does not play its role in integration. Then we have an extremely worrying convergence of the extreme left and intellectuals.”
Finkielkraut says he is particularly concerned about Britain’s Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has the support of Mélenchon. Last year, the French politician was described by CRIF, the umbrella group of French Jewish communities, as “a danger to democracy”.
“Jeremy Corbyn is at the doors of power. If he gets into 10 Downing Street it will be the first time in post-Hitler Europe that a great nation would be led by a leader who quite clearly has antisemitic tendencies,” Finkielkraut said. “And that for me is a very great worry.”
And Israel is hosting the Eurovision Song Contest this year
A wonderful focus of polarisation
@soitiz
2014 Gaza war, 546 Palestinian children murdered by the occupation. There was no space left in the morgues for the child martyrs, so there was no option but to place their bodies in ice-cream freezers
#BoycottEurovision2019 #Eurovision2019
Every time the scumbags blatantly steal lands for their illegal homes, the Palestinians must feel someone reached in and snatched their hearts away. What a sad situation.
I guess AIPAC, rich American zionists, and all the zionist loving members of Congress, who keep aiding, and supporting, the criminals in Israel, must be proud. So what doe Bari Weiss, Dershowitz, and Brett Stephens, say about this crime? Will they blame the victims for this too?
They should stop pretending that Israel does not deserve some rockets and stones sent it’s way.
They should stop pretending to have memory lapses, when they ignore the fully valid reasons the Palestinians have to resist and protest – the occupation, land theft, and killing of civilians.
They should stop pretending that the BDS movement have no reasons to boycott the criminal nation, but acknowledge Israel deserves to be boycotted, and treated like a pariah nation.
How are the Palestinians supposed to protest the wrong done to them? Peaceful protests do not seem to work either, since we have seen snipers being used to kill unarmed kids on a daily basis, and those killed included medical staff and journalists. That okay with America? Apparently Yes.
Daniel Landes has something to say:
“I Told Meir Kahane: You and Louis Farrakhan Both Raise Money the Same Way – by Attacking Jews …
The embrace of the Kahanist Otzma Yehudit (“Jewish Power”) by the venerable Habayit Hayehudi party is not a staggering move, as some suppose.
Once the flagship of religious Zionism, Habayit Hayehudi now stands for a pernicious nationalism; its particularism has become paranoia, its self-regard is now unmitigated self-righteousness, its love for others has turned into a hatred of the other.
Kahanism’s spirit already permeates the camp; the political deal signed between the two parties has simply formalized their symbiotic relationship.
Habayit Hayehudit descended from the defunct religious Zionist Party, or Mafdal. It had two founding objectives: to maintain government-funded Orthodox schooling, and to keep control of the Chief Rabbinate which, in Israel, decides who’s a Jew.
Once both raison d’etres were met, religious Zionism began to decline. But then, especially after 1967, religious Zionism seized upon the elevation of one piece of its Jewish inheritance: particularism – to the exclusion of the other (the goyim).
That particularism was present from the start, in the writings of the movement’s key master thinker, (Rav Abraham Isaac Kook, 1865-1935), whose moral, universalist teachings were soon eclipsed by another prominent strand of his thinking: the sanctification, even deification, of the Land and the People.
His legacy, as advanced by religious Zionism, is a hypermessianic ideology which claims legitimacy by appearing as a classic manifestation of Zionist activism: its divine endorsement is evident, in religious Zionism’s own eyes, by the successful “flowering” of Jewish national redemption in which it participates – the territories captured and settled, the primacy of the Jewish people established.
Habayit Hayehudit is thus the latest example of how a radical, if not extremist, religious movement becomes institutionalized.
Witness the casual racism of Israeli yeshivat hesder students with hatred of Arabs as a norm.
Witness how, in this camp, the Shabbat prayer for the State of Israel, seen as the ultimate evidence of an ongoing redemptive process, vies (and often surpasses) in duration and intensity with the musaf kedushah – the Holiness Prayer, the elevated moment in classic Jewish worship.
Witness the wide embrace of the “Jewish first” declaration of the Nation State Law, without any concern for its impact on “the [non-Jewish] minority,” who are left bereft of a stake in the identity and progress of the country.
At the center of all this is the lack of an articulated Orthodox theology of tolerance, justice, and yashrut(integrity and decency) regarding our place “within the nations” and the place of “the nations within us.”
The relationship of the far-right Otzma Yehudit with Habayit Hayehudiis dialectical. Kahanism, its supremacism and racism, was always the bad sibling, but it was never fully rejected by religious Zionism.
“Yes,” religious Zionists claim, “they went too far, they’re embarrassing, and they are not controllable; but it’s good to have them – you need someone tough and crazy in a fight. After all, we don’t really want Arabs in Hebron, do we?” …
Two weeks later, Kahane was assassinated in New York at his own rally because he refused a police request to put up an electronic gate, believing it would prevent his own armed thugs from entering. That story offers a critical lesson: when you give up on moral gatekeeping, on red lines, you can never know who comes through the gate.
Make no mistake, the Kahanists are the ones now in control in Habayit Hayehudi and in religious Zionism. More moderate leaders, in nature and practice, will now try to ease their discomfort by pointing to some alleged moderation by the students of Meir Kahane. Or they’ll say that we need them for the fight.
But the truth is that extremists tend to the extreme. And Orthodoxy’s dominant strategy these days follows that line.
Habayit Hayehudi, you will be consumed by the Kahanists. Soon, they’ll be declaring that you’re actually “leftists” when you put up even weak moral opposition to one of their murderous plans that constitute a suicide of Jewish values.
The Kahanists, their accomplices and their contaminating influence will only be stopped by religious Zionist leaders declaring their absolute moral condemnation; by a weighty loss of votes; and the pulling of Diaspora money for all the institutions that offer support for these parties.
Any equivocation paves the way for the complete moral destruction of religious Zionism.”
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-i-told-meir-kahane-you-and-louis-farrakhan-both-raise-money-by-attacking-jews-1.6963403
All Zionism is a rather wicked ideology as practiced and evidenced, imho. And I see nothing at all ‘venerable’ about Habayit Hayehudi. Landes points to the status quo and I agree with him that nothing much will change by opening the doors of the Knesset to more racist supremacists.