The girls, aged 14 to 16, have come for settler training to learn how to occupy Palestinian land — breaking international law. “God promised us this land and told us if you don’t take it, bad people will try and take it and you will have a war,” says Emuna Billa, 19, one of the camp supervisors. “Why do we have a war in Gaza? Because we don’t take Gaza.”
Their guru is Daniella Weiss, a 79-year-old grandmother in a long skirt and patterned headscarf. Founder of the Nachala or Homeland movement, she has been setting up illegal settlements for 49 years and was recently put under international sanctions. “You will be the new emissaries,” she tells the 50 or so girls at the camp. “I call it redeeming, not settling and this is our duty.”
She unfurls a map of Israel and the Palestinian territories dotted with vivid pink house symbols to represent existing and proposed Jewish settlements. Not only are these all across the West Bank, but also in Gaza. Already 674 people have signed up for beachside plots there, she tells me, and “many more want to join”. When someone asks her about settling Lebanon she smiles and says, “Yes, there too”.
Sure the settlers violence has to be stopped. Israel used to be much better at this. The voluntary disengagement from Gaza demonstrated that it’s able to do it. They dragged settlers from their houses. The current extremists in government Smotrich and Gvir are the problem. They will be out next election.
Yes, during the Nakba around 700,000 Palestinians fled. It was a war and people flee during wars from fighting and danger. If you compare this to other wars from that era it was minor. Have you ever considered what would have happened to the Jews if the Arabs had won Israel’s war of independence? It certainly would have been worse than moving 50 km inside the same country. Did the Zionists seize the opportunity to change the demographics in their favor? Yes.
Irgun and Lehi were always a tiny minority of the Jewish militias. The Haganah always stressed defensive operations before the war started. If you want to go back to the Mandatory days, please also mention the Hebron massacre and Arab revolt among others. Hamas has been the major political party among Palestinians since Fatah became more moderate. The approval ratings for Hamas are very high as you can see on PCPSR polls. Irgun/Lehi we’re fringe like PIJ maybe.
A huge part of the land assigned to Israel in the UN partition plan was the Negev desert. So yes, the Jews got more land, but also the worse land: mosquito plagued swamps and empty desert.
Instead of accepting a Jewish state as a neighbor, the Arabs chose war, which they then lost. The 1949 armistice line (green line, aka 1967 borders) was explicitly not a recognized border because the Arabs didn’t want to accept Israel’s existence. This pattern of not being able to compromise or even negotiate and wage war then repeated over and over. As a reference see the three Noes from Khartoum: no peace, no recognition, no negotiation.
Palestinian political leadership has been terrible since the grand mufti Al-Husseini, who was Hitler’s buddy. His legacy of antisemitism can still be seen in Abu Mazen, who wrote his thesis on holocaust denial. Palestinians are now at 100 years of bad political decisions and are still on a trajectory to make it worse. Their cause might be just, but they suck at execution. Every chance at peace is discarded because of unrealistic goals and inability to let the past go.