Settlement protest

Protesters have created a tent village on a Palestinian area slated for settlement development as part of Israel's so-called E-1 corridor. The corridor will connect Jerusalem and the enormous Maale Adumim settlement located deep in Palestinian territory.

As Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the PLO's executive committee, was quoted in the New York Times (Jan. 11) about the demonstration:

This initiative is a highly creative and legitimate nonviolent tool to protect our land from Israeli colonial plans. We have the right to live anywhere in our state, and we call upon the international community to support such initiatives.

(As a side note, were I Palestinian I would be eager to see Ashrawi or someone like her as president of Palestine. It's none of my business, of course, but I've had that thought for a good number of years now. Come to think of it, I'd like to see someone like her in the White House.)

In 1967, the Israeli minister of labor, Yigal Allon, created a stratagem - the Allon Plan - whereby Israel would assume control of the eastern half of the West Bank and broadly connect Jerusalem (all of it) to the Jordanian border (see map). What would remain of the Palestinian West Bank would be two disconnected cantons that would then be handed over to Jordan. The plan was never accepted or rejected within the Israeli government; but one need only look at a current map (included in the BBC article below) to see that this plan has slowly been taking shape over the last 40 years.

Grand total, there are roughly 500,000 Israeli settlers living in the West Bank: 200,000 in East Jerusalem and 300,000 in the rest of the territory. This is all in contravention of international law. Furthermore, Israel's "security" wall that runs through the West Bank effects over 10 percent of the territory and interrupts the lives of 500,000 West Bankers. It cannot be overemphasized that Israel built the wall on the Palestinian side of the border. Well inside. In which case, Israel's leadership from 2002, when the wall's construction began, to the present have merely done Allon one better.

The agenda here scarcely requires elucidation. When a Palestinian state eventually comes into being, Israel wants to ensure that it is diminished, denuded, demoralized. There is no probing historical analysis required to see this; just a quick look at these maps is more than sufficient.

In that same New York Times article, I found the casual nature of the following sentence interesting: "Israel wants to create contiguity between East Jerusalem, which it has annexed, and the large urban settlement of Maale Adumim that lies beyond E1...." Changing the names helps us to see how otherwise alarming notions have become conventional regarding Palestine-Israel. Instead, imagine the Times reported that "Iran wants to create contiguity between Baghdad, which it has annexed, and the large urban settlement it has built in eastern Iraq." My guess is that this sentence would be reported with less nonchalance.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-20985105