Palestinian homes being bulldozed at record rate
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Given Israel’s track record, the latest UN report detailing the “alarming” rate at which the Likud government has stepped up its demolition of Palestinian homes should come as no surprise.
As Robert Piper, the UN coordinator for Palestinian territories, wrote, the number of Palestinian homes destroyed by Israel in the first nine weeks of the current year has overtaken the total figure for last year.
Those homes and structures, including a school, were built by international donors, and as a Norwegian official involved with the project said “tens of millions of dollars of donor assistance” were at risk of being bulldozed.
The eventual aim of these demolitions is to deny the Palestinians the right to a state of their own on their land.
Against this background, the US State Department’s reaction last week was commendable. Reacting to the spike in demolition activity, the department spokesman said such acts call “into question the Israeli government’s commitment to [the] two-state solution”.
The truth is that, in utter disregard of denunciations by the UN and global opinion, Israel has continued its lebensraum (“living room”) policy by ejecting Palestinians from their ancestral homes and building more and more settlements, which the International Court of Justice has already declared illegal.
Israel has annexed the Golan Heights, which belong to Syria, while its much-publicised “disengagement” from the Gaza Strip is a hoax. It continues to control Gaza’s air, land and sea exits.
As for the West Bank, which it calls Judea and Samaria, it aims at changing the territory’s Arab-Islamic character by razing Palestinian homes and by nibbling at Arab territory. The number of Jewish settlers on the West Bank now stands at 800,000.
Will American Vice President Joe Biden’s coming visit to Israel make a dent in the Likud government’s hardline policy?
Notable is the fact that this is an American election year. Which means that none of the hopefuls in the race for the White House will say a word that could annoy America’s powerful Israel lobby.
