Extremist settlers rapidly seizing West Bank land | Hacker News Reader

Extremist settlers rapidly seizing West Bank land

bbc.com

43 pointsverginer15 comments

> A former commander of the Israeli army in the West Bank, Avi Mizrahi, says most settlers are law-abiding Israeli citizens, but he does admit the existence of outposts makes violence more likely. “Whenever you put outposts illegally in the area, it brings tensions with the Palestinians… living in the same area,” he says.

What a curious comment. People living in "illegal outposts" are "law-abiding citizens"?

This attitude is a big chunk at the root of the entire conflict.

Well they're just people living their lives. A person is not illegal or a criminal just because of where they choose to live, surely.

If they’re participating in illegal activity, isn’t that the definition of a criminal?

Let us continue this conversation after I set up my trailer in your back garden, and me and ten of my friends decide to just live our lives there.

Aside from the fact that it's explicitly illegal under law, even in abstract general terms your comment makes no sense.

"most settlers". Settlements can be legal according to Israeli law.

In that context it doesn't make much sense to me to be talking about all settlers, but rather about the specific settlers the article is about. But that bit is not a direct quote, and something may have been lost in translation in the first place, so hard to be sure what was intended.

Also most of the world (including the US) considers all settlements (and therefore, settlers) to be illegal, so there's that.

I once believed a two state solution would be inevitable. Decades later and I have come to accept that the West Bank will be incorporated into Israel. If you see the maps over time the West Bank has been split into multiple small pockets of refugee sections. Without external pressures nothing will change and the politics on the issue have become toxic in the US.

Hopefully I’m wrong. But tides have shifted in the opposite direction.

Why stop at West Bank? Looks like there's only one state remaining at this point.

I once believed it too, living through the news of the Oslo accords, seeing Yasser Arafat and Rabin shaking hands, it looked hopeful in the late 90s even with Rabin's assassination.

Then came the Camp David Summit, and Ariel Sharon going to Temple Mount... Finally what shattered that belief in me was watching "Checkpoint" by Yoav Shamir back around 2003-2004. The West Bank was already shattered in small pockets, the IDF was very aggressive against them, all of the hope I had carried was absolutely shattered when I saw how life in the West Bank really was for Palestinians.

It's an absolute shame what the extremists on both sides created, I don't see another figure like Rabin and Arafat existing in their nations for the next few decades, the cycle of violence got so much worse...

> But the BBC World Service has seen documents showing that organisations with close ties to the Israeli government have provided money and land used to establish new illegal outposts.

This part I don't understand. How do these organisations "provide" this land? Do they buy it?

Now look at the map, where West Bank Palestinian settlements are. Tulkarm. Qualqilya. Abu Dis. Bayt Awa. Obviously Palestinians are doing this too, and have been doing it for far longer than Israeli settlers have done it.

Palestinians live on and usually over the green line, in areas where they can't even provide basic necessities (like water) and leave huge areas where they COULD live entirely empty.

Let's be honest here: the only thing Palestinians are doing there is not living, they're trying to conquer, and at least partially succeeding.

Tulkarm. Qualqilya. Abu Dis. Bayt Awa.

There's no comparison whatsoever between these ancient (and continuously inhabited) municipalities and the modern Israeli settlements. (The first 3 anyway. Beit 'Awwa was settled in antiquity, then abandoned, then re-settled again the 19th century, with some 7,000 inhabitants by 1948).

Obviously Palestinians are doing this too, and have been doing it for far longer than Israeli settlers have done it.

Doing "this" as in what the settlers are doing, no. Nothing even remotely like it.

Palestinians live in areas where they can't even provide basic necessities (like water)

Right, because of a long-term strategy of the Israeli government to deny them such.

and leave huge areas where they COULD live entirely empty.

If so that's their problem, not yours.

Let's be honest here: the only thing Palestinians are doing there is not living, they're trying to conquer, and at least partially succeeding.

They're not conquering anything. It was already theirs to begin with.

This post is easily one of the most bizarre attempted analogies I've ever seen on HN.

Genocide is always motivated by simple things like theft.

They, accidentally, a land-empire, but is only land-empire the world actually cares about because..

Both sides breed like rabbits in a territory that they believe God wants them to occupy. In biblical times, the winners killed the men and sold the women and children of the losers into slavery. Why anyone thinks this will turn out differently despite high minded laws escapes me

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