ON Wednesday, the United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres slammed Israel for ‘driving a stake through the heart’ of a two-state solution between Palestinians and the Zionist State.
A statement from Guterres, read out during a meeting of the UN Security Council stated that by using administrative and legal measures Israel was embarking on changing the geography of the occupied West Bank through big land seizures in strategic areas accompanied by legal changes to planning, land management and governance.
Guterres noted that Israel had legalised five Israeli outposts in the West Bank and ramped up the illegal occupation of Palestinian land by Zionist settlers.
The extent of the Zionist colonisers ‘land grab’ of Palestinian land was laid out by the head of the Palestinian Colonisation and Wall Resistance Commission, Moayad Shaaban, at a press conference on Thursday.
Shaaban said that since the start of this year the Israeli occupation authorities had seized an estimated 40,000 dunums of privately owned Palestinian land. Dunums are the measurement of land used widely throughout the Middle East with one dunum the equivalent of 1,000 square metres.
Shaaban reported that 24,000 dunums of seized land was declared ‘state land’ in what is the biggest land seizure in over 30 years by the Israeli regime under the pretext that it was state land that Israel could seize.
Land that is privately owned by Palestinians in the West bank can be declared by the Israeli government as ‘state land’ and seized to be used for the establishment and expansion of illegal Israeli settlements under the pretext that land seizure is necessary for ‘security and development’ of the Israeli state.
15,000 dunums of designated nature reserves were targeted and seized, while in the same period Israeli authorities gave the green light for an intensification of demolition of Palestinian property in areas designed as both under Palestinian administration as well as those areas designated as under complete Israeli military rule.
Zionist settlers were encouraged by the Israeli authorities to carry out forced displacement of Palestinians using extreme violence and protected by Israeli military.
Twenty-eight Bedouin communities have been forcibly displaced, while settlers have carried out over 1,300 attacks and 23 fires in villages and towns in the occupied West Bank.
The Israeli regime has made no secret of its campaign to kill every Palestinian or drive them out of their land through a campaign of genocide in Gaza and the seizure of their land in the West Bank.
On June 28th, the Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, himself a former settler, was quoted as saying in response to EU countries recognising the state of Palestine: ‘I will bring one million settlers. One settlement for every country that recognised Palestine as a state in the last month. This is their punishment.’
In his statement Shaaban stressed that all these measures to drive Palestinians out, seize and occupy their land through terror no longer means that this represents just a threat to the ‘two-state’ solution but have completely destroyed it.
The myth that a two-state solution offers a future is confined to the useless calls by leaders of the western imperialist nations to cover up the fact that it is their support that enables the Zionist regime to carry on a genocidal war of extermination against Palestinians.
Without the support of its imperialist masters, the Israeli state would collapse in days.
Even with all the bombs and money donated by the US and its allies, Israel has completely failed to crush the resistance of the Palestinian people and Israel is facing a social and political crisis with thousands demonstrating on the streets of its cities calling for an end to the war and for prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be removed.
Now is the time for the working class across the US, UK and Europe to step up and put an end to genocide and support the Palestinian revolution by bringing down their capitalist governments that are complicit in genocide, replacing them with workers governments that will arm the Palestinian revolution to establish the one state of Palestine from the river to the sea where everyone regardless of race or religion can live in peace.
