ISRAEL’S Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Uri Ariel speaking in Moscow, where he travelled with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Wednesday, has said that Israel must go ahead with its plan to annex more than half of the occupied West Bank after evicting ten of thousands of Palestinians from the area.
He said: ‘We have to aspire to the annexation of Area C. These are areas where there are no Arabs at all. We would remove a few thousand, who do not constitute a significant numerical factor.’ Area C comprises over 60 per cent of the occupied West Bank. Measuring about 330,000 hectares, the territory is totally run by the Israeli military even though it is home to nearly 300,000 Palestinians, according to the United Nations.
Ariel has also spoken about annexing the occupied West Bank as a whole. ‘If someone asks about Areas A and B, then their time will come. When, we will see. For now, let’s agree on Area C.’ He is proposing nothing less than a new Naqba driving hundreds of thousands more Palestinians out of their homes after 68 years of occupation and into new refugee camps!
Virtually all of the Israeli settler population of the West Bank of more than 350,000 is based in Area C, living in 125 settlements and about 100 outposts. The Zionist regime is now ratcheting up all of the tensions that have been exploding in the last year, with youth resisting the occupiers with a Third Intifada that uses knives not guns.
Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed or seriously injured and thousands have been detained already. Israel on Thursday revoked 83,000 Ramadan travel and entry permits for Palestinian families from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to visit relatives and holy sites in Jerusalem and Israel during the month of Ramadan.
The decision came after two Palestinian fighters opened fire in the Sarona Market food and retail centre on Wednesday evening. They fired the first shots of the Third Intifada killing four Israelis and wounding 16 others. Israel also revoked work permits for 204 relatives of the two fighters, who were identified as Khaled and Mohammad Makhamreh from the town of Yatta, south of Hebron.
The Hamas movement said the Tel Aviv shooting was the first ‘good omen’ for Palestinians and the first ‘surprise’ for the ‘enemy’ during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which began on Tuesday. The Fatah movement, which is the leading party in the Palestinian Authority, said in a statement that the Tel Aviv shooting was an ‘individual and natural response’ to Israeli state violence.
‘Israel must realise the consequences of its persistence to push violence, house demolition policies, forced displacement of Palestinians, raids by Israeli settlers to the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, and the cold-blooded killing of Palestinians at checkpoints,’ Fatah media committee head Munir al-Jaghoub said.
Al-Jaghoub added that the Israeli refusal to abide by international agreements regarding its illegal settlement policy turned the situation in the occupied Palestinian territory into a desperate reality far from Palestinians’ hopes and dreams of freedom and independence.
Meanwhile, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) said that the shooting represented a ‘paradigm shift’ in the Intifada, which it also called a ‘natural response’ to the high number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces.
The PFLP said that the site of the shooting, being close to the Israeli Ministry of Defence, sent a strong message of challenge to the newly appointed Minister of Defence Avigdor Lieberman, and stood as a confirmation that armed resistance was the best way to reclaim Palestinians’ rights.
Following the attack, Israeli forces raided the Makhamrehs’ hometown of Yatta in the early hours on Thursday, detaining an unspecified number of people. Palestine is now on the brink of an armed insurrection against the Zionist occupation of the country that is supported by the US and the UK governments.
Workers and trade unions in the West must support the struggle of the Palestinian masses and must warn their own governments at home that unless they stop arming and supporting the Zionist occupation they will be overthrown by the mass movement of the working class.
