IT IS well known that the desire of the Zionist ruling class in Israel to expand the area under its rule is unquenchable, and that it has a special obsession with establishing facts on the ground as a prelude to a land-grabbing agreement, after arguing that these facts on the ground are too large to question or uproot, and they must be accepted.
Thus we have seen the frantic settlement building and the eviction of long-term residents and families that have lived for generations in occupied Jerusalem and in the occupied West Bank.
Hundreds of thousands of armed settlers now live in these areas, and the Zionist leadership has built a ‘Separation Wall’ as Israel’s new frontier.
This has all been done ahead of negotiations billed as a ‘final solution’ to the Palestinian problem, i.e. the problem being that the Palestinian people, who have been driven out of their lands or occupied, refuse to go away and insist that they have the right to a state and the right to return to their homes.
Just to rub salt into the wounds of the ‘final solution’, ahead of the negotiations that Obama is desperately organising, Israel is planning a train line linking central Israel to settlements deep in the West Bank.
The line is planned to run from the suburbs of Tel Aviv to the northern West Bank – part of the occupied territories that the Palestinian people insist is part of their state.
Israeli Transport Ministry spokesman Ilan Leizerovich has said the new train line is currently only in the planning stage, along with other train lines including some in the West Bank, and that there are no plans to actually begin work.
That is what they said about all of the settlements!
The Israeli daily Maariv has however reported that Israel Railways has budgeted $820,000 to plan the line.
The project was quickly denounced by a spokesman for the Palestinian government in the West Bank.
‘This shows not only Israel’s short-term illegal activities in terms of settlement expansion, but its long-term planning and execution of colonial projects that aim at nothing less than ending the two-state solution,’ Husam Zomlot said.
The Israeli leaders have become even more arrogant now that they see how desperate Obama is to get them to the talks with the Palestinians.
Obama has offered the Zionists $20bn in cash, and a squadron of the latest F35 jet fighters if they will agree to suspend settlement building in the West Bank for three months.
As well, the US regime has given Israel absolute guarantees about its security, including that the US will veto any Palestinian right to return with a plan to send Palestinian refugees into a further emigration to Canada, Australia and the US.
Israel is already treating the West Bank as its own, to do with as it will.
On Friday, Palestinian security forces were told to withdraw from the Nablus area while the Israeli army engaged in ‘security activity’ in the eastern sector of Nablus.
Israeli occupation forces have razed a Palestinian mosque and more than ten other structures in Khirbet Yazain in the northern Jordan Valley.
At the opposite end of the West Bank, Israeli occupation troops destroyed a building which was home to 18 people in the southern town of Yatta.
Israel has already decided that it will annex East Jerusalem and a large section of the West Bank, as well as legally establishing that Israel is a Jewish state.
This is not a matter that can be settled by rigged peace talks. It can only be resolved through the victory of the Palestinian revolution and the defeat of imperialism in the Middle East.
