MAINSTREAM SETTLERS: GIULIO MEOTTI
by Giulio Meotti (Israelnationalnews.com)
“Most of Israeli public knows that territorial continuity, military strength, along with a deeply rooted legitimacy that doesn’t come from a UN resolution but from an ancient identity and history, is everything for Israel.”
The Knesset, Israel’s parliament, approved the controversial law against those who boycott Israel and the settlements in Judea and Samaria. It’s the most contested measure approved by Netanyahu’s government to protect the legitimacy of Israel and the Jewish settlements beyond the famous “Green Line”, where more than five hundred thousand Jews now live.
The settlement enterprise is every year more part of the Israeli mainstream (the national consensus). Never were there, as today there are, MPs and ministers who live in the “colonies”.
They don’t come only from the National Union. Even the Speaker of the Knesset, Reuvlen Rivlin, a candidate for the presidency, just spoke against “the division of the land” and has made many visits to the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.
Shaul Mofaz, the former Chief of Staff and Defense Minister, an important MK from the centrist party Kadima, lives in the “settlement” of Elkana in Shomron (Samaria).
Zeev Elkin (Likud), the author of the law which punishes the boycotters, lives in a trailer in Kfar Etzion, a most important “settlement” in Gush Etzion in Binyamin, a part of Judea.
Othniel Schneller, another MK from Kadima, lives in the Shomron (Samaria) Jewish community of Ma’ale Mikhmas.
The minister of Hasbara (pr), Yuli Edelstein, lives in the “settlement” of Neve Daniel, Gush Etzion, in Binyamin.
Many members of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu party, like David Rotem and Alex Miller, live in the Judea and Samaria cities of Efrat and Ariel.
Many children and relatives of MK’s and ministers live in Judea and Samaria. The nephew of the Minister of Culture, Limor Livnat (Likud), was living in the Shomron (Samaria) community of Elon Moreh before being killed at the tomb of Joseph, one of the holiest sites for Judaism.
Demographically the settlements are growing at twice than the national level (3.8 children per family against 1.7). Many internationally known personalities are linked or live in the settlements. Ephraim Zuroff, the heir of Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter, lives in the “colony” of Efrat.
The Nobel Prize Laureate, Robert Aumann, is a supporter of the settlement enterprise and an active figure in the “Professors for a Strong Israel”.
Mofaz’s neighbours in Elkana are two famous intellectuals: Yad Vashem’s chief historian, Dan Michman, and the Bar Ilan University’s specialist on Hebrew literature, Hillel Weiss.
Recently Haaretz newspaper asked: “Has the Israeli army become an army of settlers?”. Six out of seven colonels from the Golani Brigade are religious nationalists. Once it was kibbutzim that produced the nation’s combat elite. Now it is the religious Zionist community that raises its sons to sacrifice.
Recent studies showed that 40 percent of the army officers are linked to the ideology of the sanctity of the land. In the early nineties that figure stood at 2 percent. Half of the new cadets belong to the same ideology. And half of the soldiers unfortunately killed in the Cast Lead operation in Gaza were religious nationalists.
The new deputy chief of staff, Yair Naveh, is the first ever to wear a kippah. Even half of Netanyahu’s staff is religious and last week the government approved the inclusion of a rabbi in each army’s regiment.
Recently, former Supreme Court Justice Zvi Tal shocked the public saying that in case of evacuation of the “settlements” (as happened in Gaza in 2005), he would refuse to execute the order.
Avigdor Lieberman, the minister of Foreign Affairs, lives in Nokdim, a settlement that lies far beyond the 1949 armistice borders that the international community is pushing to set for the Palestinian state. In 2001, during the Second Intifada, the army went to knock at Lieberman’s home in the middle of the night to take him away. There was a terrorist plan to penetrate the colony and kill him.
Israel is the only country in the world in which the foreign minister lived in a caravan, with the electricity supplied by a generator and with his children sent to school in a bulletproof bus.
With regard to the famous question, “Disengagement or Zionism?”, it seems that the Israeli public answered with the fabricated global emblem of Israel’s colonialism: Zionism.
Most of Israeli public knows that territorial continuity, military strength, along with a deeply rooted legitimacy that doesn’t come from a UN resolution but from an ancient identity and history, is everything for Israel.
Three Israeli pillars on which were built two houses in a small area of the Jewish Samarian town of Eli, called Hayovel. Handmade houses of two war heroes: Eliraz Peretz and Roi Klein.
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