Ignored by the West’s Jewish Supremacist-controlled media and governments, the Zionist theft of Palestinian land through the Israeli-government backed illegal settlement program is reaching a final solution to the Palestinian “problem.”
According to Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad, the number of Jews who have been settled by Israel in Palestinian lands has now exceed 600,000.
Interviewed by the Turkish World Bulletin news service, Fayyad said Israel was planning to break West Bank off from East Jerusalem and that more than half a million Jews had already been settled illegally in West Bank which was supposed to be under the control of Palestinian authorities.
With the housing it is planning to build in E-1 settlement region, Israel will completely cut the connection between West Bank and East Jerusalem, he said.
If Israel does not give up on its decision, Palestine will use all of its rights under international laws including an appeal to International Criminal Court, said Fayyad.
Discussing the effect of the Israeli occupation and the effect which the Zionist stranglehold has on what comes in and out of the Palestinian territory, Fayyad said that they needed $300 million every month to keep the Palestinian economy alive. “We have to send £130 million to Gaza every month.”
At the main checkpoint to enter Bethlehem there is a large sign placed on the Separation Wall by Israel’s ministry of tourism which says “Peace be with you”. An appropriate symbol for Israel’s colonial strangling of the “little town”, this propaganda for pilgrims is a crude microcosm of Israel’s habit of talking “co-existence” while pursuing apartheid.
The town of Bethlehem serves as a case in point. Over decades of Israeli military rule, more and more land around the city has been annexed, expropriated and colonised, with 19 illegal settlements now in the governorate.
Eighty percent of an estimated 22 square kilometre of land confiscated from the north of the Bethlehem region was annexed to the Jerusalem municipality in order to expand settlements.
Beit Sahour, home of the Shepherds’ Fields (where it is said the angels announced the birth of Jesus) has been hit hard by Israel’s colonial regime, losing 17 percent of its land to the expansion of Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries.
Israel’s “Separation Wall” loops around 10 percent of the Bethlehem region’s land, and the UN estimates that only 13 percent of the governorate is available for Palestinian use.
In and around the city, there are over 30 physical barriers to Palestinian freedom of movement imposed by the Israeli military. Bethlehem has been isolated and fragmented in a way that would devastate any town or community the world over.
Palestinians from Bethlehem must apply for permits to enter occupied (and illegally annexed) East Jerusalem, while the Israeli citizens living in the neighbouring Jewish settlements come and go as they please.
The two cities are increasingly disconnected, with plans for Israeli colonies like Givat Hamatos intended to “complete the ring that will cut off East Jerusalem completely from the southern West Bank”.
Palestinian tour guides have not been able to enter Israel since 2000, while Israeli tour operators shape itineraries in a way that favours hotels in Jerusalem and means visitors simply dash in and out of Bethlehem. The current unemployment rate stands at around 21 percent, the highest of any West Bank region.
Keen to distract from the impact of years of Israeli colonial control, Israel’s defenders try to make out that the city’s Christian Palestinians are the target of a “jihad” by their Muslim neighbours – and that “persecution” is the reason for the Christian population’s shrinking numbers.
Yet surveys consistently bear out the logical conclusion that the main emigration “push” factors are economic, political and rooted in Israeli occupation. A 2006 poll of Bethlehem residents found that 78 percent of Christian respondents cited “Israeli aggression and occupation” as “the main cause of emigration”.
