Sun Oct 10, 2010 5:49PM
Interview with Khaled Amayreh, Palestinian journalist and Jamal Joum'ah, activist and member of Stop the Wall Campaign
alestinians in their olive farms
It is clear that the settlement issue is the key player in the so-called direct negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis.
The new round of talks was stalled after Tel Aviv refused to extend its partial settlement freeze that ended in September. The Palestinian Authority repeatedly threatened to leave the US-sponsored talks, if Israel resumed settlement construction.
Palestinians believe that the expansion of the Jewish settlements on their occupied lands will make the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip impossible.
Israel's settlement construction in the occupied Palestinian territories is deemed to be illegal as it violates UN Security Council Resolutions 446, 452, and 465.
The following is the transcript of an interview with two senior Palestinian political analysts, Khaled Amayreh, a Palestinian journalist and Jamal Joum'ah, an activist and member of Stop the Wall Campaign.
Press TV: What brings all this escalation of violence by the Israeli settlers against the Palestinians at this time, the burning of the mosques as we have seen earlier in this program?
Khaled Amayreh: Well these settlers would like to complete what the Palestinian gangs started in 1948 when Israel was created in Palestine. They are trying to narrow the Palestinian horizons. And they are trying to effect more ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and certainly in the East Jerusalem by losing low level terror. They hope that by terrorizing the Palestinians and targeting their symbols such as mosques and the olive trees, the Palestinians would contemplate of leaving their homeland. That is the essence of what is happening.
Press TV: But this is destroying the image of Israel before the International Community and increasing the pressure by the International Community on Israel. Am I right?
Jamal Joum'ah: I think yes. But, the Israel does not care about its image because they are sure that the American Administration and the European Union that are on the fully backing Israel on its policies and on what they are doing in Palestine. But, if I want to add something, one thing to what Mr. Amayreh has been saying is that what the Israeli settlers are doing now is that they are complimenting their government's position. They are playing the game of dividing the rules.
So the government is the one who is like issuing building the housing units and the settlements and permitting the settlements to be built in the West Bank. And what the settlers are doing now with this escalation is just like to back up the government's position. So Netanyahu went to the world and told them look I cannot work with this issue, this issue is very difficult. And the Palestinians and the world should accept that this poor people should stay in this land and should continue to build the settlements. So, it is a Zionist plan that has been witnessed the same that was going on now and it is the same that was going on in 1948. Now they are exceeding their steps because it seems that the international atmosphere is supporting and enabling them to do that. According to the image, here Israel is going on into something fundamental and it goes into their colonial plan that is going into the West Bank.
Since 2002, I would say Israel's incursions and invading Palestinian areas and the whole political game has been changed. So Israel started since then to oppose things on the ground clearly by building the wall. We are totally telling the world there is no more the so-called green line.
Press TV: There has been increasing pressure set that is coming from the US which mediates the so-called peace negotiations between the two sides. And this drove Mr. Netanyahu to announce a 10-month freeze of the expansion of the settlements.
Amayreh: No, I would like to say that the Israeli government on one hand and the Israeli settlers on the other hand are two sides of the same coin. There is so much acquiescence, coordination and collusion between the Israeli government and the settlers. This is a settler government par excellence as to so-called American pressure this is ingenious and half-hearted. And even the Israeli government does not take it serious. The Israeli government is suffering from the arrogance of power. And this arrogance of power is what blinds the Israeli government and Zionism from seeing reality. The Israelis are diverting the attention from their Nazi-like crimes in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank by inventing an imaginary threat called Islamism. The people who are trying to take over the world, including the superpowers are Zionists not Muslims. Muslims are being persecuted all over the world, in Palestine, in Lebanon, everywhere Muslims are persecuted. The only people who are taking over the US and Europe, they do that by lying and by mendacity, are the Zionist Jews.
Press TV: Can you describe what sort of violence between the Israeli settlers and the Palestinians erupt over the picking of olives?
Joum'ah: You know we are running a campaign for olive harvesting since 2005. We are witnessing every year 195 locations that they are really dangerous and the settlers are attacking the Palestinians and robbing their olives. Some of the things that they were doing were going in groups and pick the olives from Palestinians and steal it and take it. Others would wait for the Palestinians finishing their pickings and they just attack them and force them to drop the olives by the force of the gun.
There are some other horrible stories. Soldiers themselves have been waiting in checkpoints for farmers after they have pressed their oil and they spoil the oil in the streets in front of the eyes of these farmers that have been waiting for it for the whole year. Their lives depend on these oils. They depend on few containers of olive oil. They pour it on the ground telling them that we do not know whether you are hiding a bomb inside this. Cutting trees is another story. They go at nights and the next day the farmers go and see their trees have been cut.
Amayreh: Actually, they have been cutting 143 trees in the West Bank.
Press TV: We are speaking here also about the confiscation of the lands.
Joum'ah: Attacking them, beating them. Many people have been killed in the West Bank.
Press TV: During the clashes?
Joum'ah: Not even during the clashes. The farmers go to their lands and they are beaten. This has been done systematically during the year. They try to push the Palestinians as far as they can to their villages away from their lands and don't use the lands and they can year after year keep expanding their settlements and confiscate more of the Palestinian lands.
Amayreh: The only legitimacy that these settlements have is the legitimacy of the fait accompli. It is the legitimacy of the brute power. This is the same ideology that appeared in Europe more than 65 years ago.
Press TV: Mr. Joum'ah, do you believe that Israel has enough jurisdictions to confiscate lands?
Joum'ah: Of course not, we are choosing the bad laws that have gathered from different eras, from Jordanian, from the British and from the Ottomans. They select them to implement them on the Palestinians to take their lands. The state land where Jordan has been from 1967 they consider it as dead land. So that's why they started with military checkpoints or watching points and it turns step by step into a colony. So, no illegitimacy is simple. By the international law, the West Bank and Gaza Strip is an occupied area. And Israel is not allowed in any way to change the status of the land or move. It is even crime by the international law to the Palestinian territories…
HSH/PKH
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